All About Nothing With Ruth Cohn

Next week is the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US, never a favorite of mine. For an anorexic kid, it was a true nightmare. I always thought of it as “the great American eating holiday.” There was no escaping all that food, that I did not even like. Now it is more an ideological distaste as it celebrates a fictitious harmony of colonial and Indigenous people breaking bread together, hardly the history as I understand it. However, I am all about any celebration of gratitude, and I am certainly grateful to have food, certainly not to be taken for granted in these times.A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune to meet Trish McOrmond through a webinar I gave. Trish, a sociologist, trauma informed coach, mother and very wise woman, is of the Wahkotowin Cree Nation, Edmonton, Canada. She generously enlightened me about their Native attachment and parenting model, which unlike the dyadic one I am most familiar with, involves the collective. I was both humbled and fascinated.We are privileged to welcome Trish today as our special guest. She mentioned that she taught her children to express themselves freely, and say it all provided it is true, kind and necessary.Let’s all celebrate gratitude, whatever we might call it!

In today’s video we feature special guest Stephanie Simms. I met Stephanie in Oxford in 2024, when she was on a panel where she described an experience of racial trauma. Her story moved me deeply and we made one of those instant connections. Stephanie is a veteran of 20 years in the US Air Force, where plenty of racial and gender related trauma occurs, and later had a stint in the US space program, NASA. Stephanie, like me, has a story about the complex and the invaluable experience of forgiveness. As it happens, we welcome her just before the US observes Veterans Day. Stephanie can be found at beyondsolace.com

Like many children of trauma and neglect, I searched for heroes and idealized others, someone to look up to and identify with. I was and to some extent still am, a hero worshipper of sorts. Certainly not as I was. As a young activist who always loved music, musical icons with social justice messages were high on my list. It is always a terrible blow to find out a hero, may in fact have feet of clay. You have seen and heard in my blogs before, at least once, the powerful music of Buffy Saint Marie, icon of the Indigenous People of the North American continent. It was with great dismay that I discovered that perhaps this (to me) great musician, was not who she appeared to be.That little journey is the subject of this week’s video.

This week's episode was recorded in Oxford, where I was attending and speaking at the Transform Trauma 2025 Conference.In this episode, I reflect on a movie I watched on the plane. I describe to you the powerful discovery of a group of men in a truly bleak environment, that enabled a burst of joy and connection among them.It is a worthy practice for survivors of trauma and neglect, who may not often experience either. Thank you for tolerating my jet lagged face, and the less than glamorous setting. Next time we will be back to "normal."Have a good week!

This week we have a very special guest. We are honored and privileged to welcome Mike Niconchuk.I met Mike at the Boston Trauma Conference. I was so moved by his talks there that I invited him for an interview. Mike is a researcher, activist, author, hero and all around amazing human being.I say hero because Mike works on the front lines, where raw trauma is happening live around him. Mike is also of a different generation than I. And his story about intergenerational transmission hails back to a different part of the world than mine. But I am also interested in all our commonalities.Mike is also a founding member of the Salama Project, for those who may be as inspired as I am by him, and would like to know more or help:https://salamaproject.com/

Everyone is talking about it, and it seems to be everywhere. I figure it is time for me to say at least a few words about AI. I admit I feel very mixed about it, but then that is true about so many relationships, people and things in this complicated world. My giving it a chance to show its merits is admittedly quite new. And my apprehensions about mechanization and de-personalization are quite old! It does appear to be here to stay, and it certainly is proliferating where I live. The book I mention in the podcast is: Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (2025) by Vauhini Vara. I didn’t love the book, but it is written from a writer’s standpoint and was thought provoking. I am madly preparing for the Transform Trauma Oxford 2025 Conference that is rapidly approaching. Hope to see you there!

I was about five when they came out with color TV’s. We did not have one, and continued to huddle around the grainy old black and white for a long time. But I remember our dentist, who was a family friend, would sometimes have us over for dinner with his family on a Sunday evening. All I remember about those visits, is gathering around their spectacular color TV to watch Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color.I was enthralled by the intro’s. Vivid kaleidoscopic swirls of primary color, like a moving Jackson Pollack painting. I always loved color. This week’s video explores how the neglect brain gets stuck in black and white. And what that has to do with the “three P’s”, helplessness and hopelessness. With the help of neuroscience we connect these dots.

In this episode we pay a brief visit to the big topic of regulation and its many meanings and manifestations, from "over-reacting" to getting somehow stuck in trauma states, and feeling baffled by seemingly senseless or erratic relationship patterns. So very much of it begins with early neglect. And although it may elicit shame and confusion, or great fatigue, it is not a "character flaw" or a "pathology," but one of the many unfortunate impacts of early neglect trauma. And it may take a lifetime to get as regulated as we would like. I know I am still trying! As I mention in the podcast, many thanks to those of you who put your comments on the YouTube page. It is helpful to hear from you what "works" best, even if there is variation in what people want. It is helpful to hear them all. One person wrote about being interested in how to find the World Book Club. It is a very cool resource and concept, as well as an international community of readers. Look up BBC.com World Book Club, and you can find it.

Today video is a bit of a patchwork, bits and pieces of ideas I am sure I will develop, disarray of coming home from vacation, and trying to get organized to get back in the saddle. Hawaii is glorious. It is good to be home! Although it is freezing here in San Francisco, USA.Apologies for the chaos of videos! Last week you got none, but this week you get two. Yes, trying to get organized. The plan is resuming in August, the blog on alternate weeks. Thanks as ever for your interest!

Mind and BodyAloha everyone from glorious Kona, Hawaii, where I have the privilege to be this week. This video was made with a (real!) spectacular ocean view, not your Zoom perfect fake one!Being on vacation clears the head at least to some extent from the overcrowding of the “usual” thoughts and even coming back to a place I have been at least 50 times, I notice different things: a different flower or bird, a new and exotic food…and I think more freely and further outside of the workday “box.”Travel and jet lag has never seemed strenuous, nor has dramatic change of time zones… until now. This old body is not the same as it always was. Travel also invites the traveler to see many different bodies both en route to and at the destination. Here in Hawaii, partly due to weather, and partly due to culture, one sees a lot of skin, much of it tattooed, and of unabashedly all shapes and sizes. There does not seem to be the kind of body shame, “fat”-phobia or obsessive thinness. Well perhaps in Waikiki of “Surfin’ Safari” fame, (for those of us who are old enough,) where I have never been.In this brief video, I ponder about disability, weight, aging and the ways I find myself feeling different and thinking about different things. Age obviously is inevitable and is in fact a privilege! Perhaps we can enter into it informed, even prepared. But as with many other things, it is process, and there is no precise recipe.Let’s break taboo, speak openly about how rapidly we march through life. Body changes and identity, like neurons, continue to advance through the lifetime. In this week’s video, we take a rudimentary look at body, culture and attitude.

In this episode of All About Nothing, we welcome special guest Mariah Rooney. When there is trauma, neglect, violence and differentness, often family is lost one way or another. With Mariah we discuss families lost and found, new models created, and a wide world outside the box of what sorts of attachments are possible. Thanks for joining us!

While we are all inundated with grief, horror, shock and injustice, I thought we might look for a ray of light. Here in San Francisco, I awoke to a rainbow spectrumed search light across the sky in honor of Pride weekend. It was a wonderful way to start my day.The child of neglect, will readily default to a stance of “nothing matters.” It is a natural way to feel in a lonely world of disconnection. And a feeling we are up against as we strive to be more connected and to heal. This week’s video is about the benefit of little shots of positive into the “field,” into the world. Even small things we can do to shine a bit of light. And often it is easy!This one is a little shorter than usual. But next week you will get a long one! Meanwhile, keep it positive!

It is summer here in the US and a time of many comings and goings. Vacations, summer camps, and young adults graduating and launching for the lucky (I won't talk about all the involuntary departures...)It is often a time of trauma activations for survivors of trauma and neglect. Loss is the core of neglect trauma, so real or imagined, or even what are in real time short interludes of absence, can stimulate the survival terror of rejection, abandonment, or the desolation of "simple" absence. But I also have a message of hope, about a little guy who seemed to be truly gone, but through intention, care and loving, and knowledgeable action, found its way back.It's Pride Weekend here in San Francisco. Happy Pride to all!

In this episode, we have a special treat. Akillah Wali, who I met at the Boston Trauma Conference, will join us, and bring humor and fun to what is most often painful and difficult work.Hope you will enjoy it, while also growing your hippocampus!

I shamefully realized after recording the video, that it is summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but not everywhere! My one-person psychology at work: the whole world is me! Oy vey. In the Southern Hemisphere it will be getting colder and darker, but nonetheless, a good time to curl up with a good book. In this episode, I recommend three recent to me, really good reads, that broaden our focus on trauma and neglect to encompass more reminders, and are also relevant to recovery, as well as inspiration. Attachment and loss are important parts of each, that they are truly ubiquitous human experiences, whether or not they are the focus, as is the perennial question of what matters? I recommend them all. Happy reading (or listening if you prefer, all three are available in audio,) whether it be summer or winter in your part of the world.

Do you ever despair when once again revisited by old ghosts? When parts of you that you thought you had worked through long ago, rear up again, as powerfully as ever?Although I hate and avoid the word "triggering," it can in fact feel like being shot again, by an age old "enemy."Does it make you wonder "what is wrong with me?" Or, is all this therapy "not working?"Well, even those of us who have worked on our trauma for years and decades (or what seems like millennia!) have these episodes.This video was shot in my hotel room in Boston on my last day, so housekeeping would not be coming. The bed was unmade, and I wondered if I should actually film this with an unmade bed in the background. Not too professional, right? Well I decided to tell it like it is, to be real, as this video is in fact about "dirty laundry," showing the unsavory, disheveled parts to reassure you, even we old-timers have our moments!Thanks for your interest in Nothing!

In his masterwork, The Archaeology of Mind, neuroscience luminary, researcher and animal lover Jaak Panksepp wrote that a brief interlude of tickling of his lab rats, and a single bout of rat "laughter", activated a neurochemical and affective change in the little creatures, and even sprouted new neurons in their little hippocampi! And as we know, their brains are a lot like ours.In this video, we make a brief visit to the world of play, so elusive or missing in the world of neglect, and discover that there is actually even a brain region designed by nature to mediate what is in fact a vital function.And of course the redundant discovery, that if you, like me, thought you were "missing that gene”, it is not your fault. Again, something was missing.Thanks for joining us for episode 14!Hope to see you in Boston!

In this episode we discuss the neglected topic of aging: the aging body, the aging brain, sexuality as we age. Another of those seemingly taboo subjects that it seems there is no one to ask, or no one reliable, and one might be too shame or afraid to tell. Perhaps you can be slightly more aware of what to expect, and what is quite normal and expectable than I was!

In Episode 12 I invite you to join me in talking about sex, a topic so important to so many, and all too often neglected and unaddressed. On one hand we are constantly titillated and teased by it, yet most of us live with a poverty of real and reliable information. We are only scratching the surface of what I hope will become a long conversation! I invite you to become fluent and forthcoming conduits of that missing information, as well as taboo busting. We also review what constitutes "healthy" sexual relating. Can we talk?

As we see our parents age, many of us are seized with a nameless clash of often intense emotions, especially if we have traumatic memories of these parents from childhood, or mixed feelings about them at best. And especially if, as what is so often the case, our parents have their own tragic trauma stories. I have come to call this confusing and often overwhelming cacophony The Bermuda Triangle: a mish-mash feeling of shipwreck, mystery and invisible or vanishing wreckage or remains. We revisit the Bermuda Triangle in this week's video. Perhaps it will speak to you. On another note, I am unambiguously inspired and very busy getting ready for the upcoming 36th Annual Boston International Trauma Conference. I hope to see you there!