Trauma, and grief.

Trauma is not only the terrible thing. It's what the terrible thing did to your story, so that you became, in your own telling, the kind of person things happen to. It lives in the body before it lives in words, and it does not answer to being argued with. You can't think your way out of a place you were frightened into. There's a letter about this, on paying the price for someone else.

Grief has no stages, whatever you've been told, and it doesn't get finished. It gets carried, and the carrying can change. In the old stories the one who mourns goes down to the well, not to be cured, but to draw water. There's a letter about this, on why it's harder after it's over.

Neither is simply erased. But their hold on a life can change, and the person underneath can come back into view. I work slowly with both, at the pace your body sets, not mine.

When you've stopped hearing each other.

Most couples come in with two stories, each airtight, each true, and a fight that has been going on for years underneath whatever the fight is about this week. I'm not a referee, and I'm not going to decide who's right.

I'm interested in the third thing: the pattern the two of you make together, and what each of you is protecting when you dig in. When that becomes visible, the argument usually stops being the point. Fifty minutes, both of you on the screen, and I'll want to hear from whoever talks less.

The one everybody's worried about.

A family is a story told by several people at once, and the person everyone is worried about is usually carrying something for the whole.

I work with parents, with parents and their adult children, and with families trying to find their way back to each other after something broke. Everyone gets to be a person in the room. Including the one who was sent.