5 golden years

my thoughts

  • clinical aspects of addictive families

    [This is for those interested in the psychological underpinnings of families living with addiction; focusing on abusive relationships, and on etiology and treatments, drawing on my personal and professional experiences as a family therapist, along with current research.] “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”(Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy)…

  • addictive family effects

    Mother was terrified of alcoholism and regularly regaled us with its evils. We often heard about her friends who became alcoholics after cooking with wine. What is more plausible is the story of her father, after WWI, in a drunken stupor, almost died, saw hell, quickly reformed and became a “hell fire and brimstone” circuit…

  • dissociating

    Where do I start? Throughout my childhood I was just surviving, not attempting to make sense of what Mother was doing or why was she doing it. With all of the physical and verbal abuse, I quickly learned to distance myself, dissociate, although I was not able to label it as such until as an…

  • hoarding: a psychological perspective

    First, let me say, I found it very sad and pathetic; her whole life, Mother stressed over getting organized, but accepted no help, nor self-reflecting as to the causes. Several years before my moving to care for Mother, I attended a week-end seminar to gain more understanding, finding hoarding is one of the most difficult…

  • something’s wrong

    In the words of my sister, “Growing up I knew something was wrong, I didn’t know what, but I got out of there as soon as I could.” She was smart and went away to college. Me, not so much. Going through Mother’s pathological hoarding (details in another blog), I found family photos from our…