My Story Thus Far
Truthfully, I’m a bit old fashioned, in that I love old wooden boats, songs from the American Songbook, classical music, and Shakespeare. I like to think, especially with other people as thinking partners.
I’m a teacher at heart. I taught singing for 30 years. I taught Theories and Practices of Psychotherapy for seven years at Antioch University, and two years in the Human Services Program at Western Washington University. My teaching style is informal and dialogic. I want students to engage, ask questions, and take risks.
I’m also more than a tad contrarian. If the emperor has no clothes, I’m tempted to say so, which sometimes gets me in hot water.
Upbringing
I was raised in upstate New York, the son of two wildly different and immature parents. My father was a scientist and engineer, highly successful in his chosen endeavors. He was intensely rational and narcissistic, with considerable deficits in the realm of emotional intelligence. My mother was equally brilliant, depressive, spiritual, poetic, and .… alcoholic. If my father was the head, she was the heart. Sure enough, he died of a stroke and she of a heart attack. One could almost believe in karma.
As their child, I have struggled to integrate those two ways of being and knowing — the left-brained, analytic, rational way and the right-brained, synthesizing, emotional/intuitive way. By the ripe old age of 70, I’ve come pretty far down that road. Yet, I have “miles to go before I sleep” as Robert Frost would say - at least I hope so.
Abodes
Until recently I lived in a round house that I built together with one other guy. He was the one who knew what he was doing. My bedroom had tatami mats on the floor, and sliding shoji screen for walls.
I currently live in Gloucester, MA, having moved from Seattle in 2018. In Seattle my private psychotherapy office was my 48 foot, 1929 wooden powerboat, nestled in its slip on Lake Union. I did a lot of the upkeep myself. Sanding and varnishing can be very therapeutic, and an antidote to our contemporary, utilitarian society.
What I’m interested in, and care about
The earth is getting hotter faster and faster; politics is getting nastier; too many of us are becoming vengeful and stupid. Too many leaders are becoming authoritarian, and too many citizens let them. We must, as MLK Jr. said, learn to live together as brothers and sisters, or we will die together as fools.
We seem to have reached a crisis of knowing. How do we know what we need to know? That’s what keeps me up at night. Here are some things I’m drawn to:
Listening and talking with one another - dialogue, non-violent communication, etc.
Learning about trauma - Understanding dissociation, and violence
Engaging restorative practices - in the law, in schools, in families
Utilizing spiritual practices - both Eastern and Western
Looking at theater as transportive and tranformative
Experiencing the Other as both subject and object - an I and a me.
Learning about three ways of knowing: 1st Person, 2nd Person and 3rd Person.