All About Nothing With Ruth Cohn

Content note: This week's video does address the subject of suicide. If you or someone you know are in distress, in the US you can call 888, at any hour and there will be someone there to talk to. In other countries, locate the support services in your area.It is amazing how powerful it can be to simply have someone else there on the other end of the line.I remember once hearing an interview with a sportscaster who had a late night sports radio call-in show. A woman called him, not knowing who he was. She was in crisis and thought she had reached a crisis line. The man stayed on the phone with her, on the air, for two hours, until he was able to get someone there to help her. She lived many years after that.The interviewer asked the sportscaster how he knew what to do. He replied he did not really know, but when he was young he grandfather had died in a similar crisis. The experience was healing for him as well.In AA, "It is a permanent "solution" to a temporary problem."

This week I am delighted to present as our guest someone whom I have long held in the highest regard - everyone who has ever heard me teach before is already familiar with her, my long time friend, colleague, and esteemed teacher, world renowned neuroscientist Ruth Lanius.She will talk to us about her most recent research exploring sensory systems, so very relevant to neglect and every kind of trauma. She is also a prolific author of hundreds of papers and three great books. The work she is now studying is called SMART, Sensory Motor Affect Regulation Training. I am eager to try it myself!

Adrienne Rich famously declared that for a daughter, the loss of the mother, and for a mother, the loss of the daughter is the “essential female tragedy.” We would now widen the tightly gendered language to be far more inclusive and diverse. However, and whomever we are describing, the attachment researchers agree, that the primary other is the infant’s first love, and the loss or absence of that other is profoundly tragic and indeed traumatic.That is a theme running through Sebern Fisher’s new memoir, The Hidden Book of First Things, written from the standpoint of therapist, patient/client, mother, profoundly traumatized, dramatically healed and enthusiastic practitioner and recipient of powerfully effective neurofeedback.Sebern is our guest in this week’s episode, where we discuss neglect, which she prefers to call absence; the book; Neurofeedback, and many other subjects including recollections of our relationship which goes back to 2009.

Although this would ordinarily be my week for a blog, I must admit I am completely consumed with getting ready for Oxford which is sneaking up fast! So I decided I would talk to you instead. Thus this video. Serendipitously I received an email from a woman across the world, who is struggling with her present day relationships with family and requested that I record some videos on that subject. As it happens, I have a whole book in my head on the topic. So I made this video about that. A complicated subject, it is not all good news, but mostly, as far as I am concerned! In case you were wondering, I do enjoy getting you emails! And I read them all!

As champion of the invisible, I am always looking to raise awareness about individuals and groups who are unseen, ignored, excluded, misunderstood or worse. Where I live in San Francisco, USA, there is a relatively high level of diversity, but even here some minorities including sexual minorities continue to be marginalized.Since I have lived here, when food shopping at my favorite store down on Folsom Street, one weekend of the year, it is crowded with black leather and bare cheeks: the Folsom Street Fair, the annual celebration of Kink and BDSM (Bondage-Discipline Dominance and Submission.) It brings about 400,000 people to town, a not-trivial minority. Yet recently when I learned the term GSRD (Gender, Sexuality and Relationship Divergent) as a replacement for the not inclusive enough “alphabet soup” of LGBTQI+, it was brought to my attention that there is no letter in the soup representing kink. When first becoming a sex therapist in 1999 I began to learn about Kink, which is the larger umbrella term for BDSM, and it became clear to me how little I knew and understood about it, and how I had always viewed it through a trauma lens. I am still trying to understand it but continue to learn.At a recent conference in New York, where I spoke about neglect, a man came and introduced himself to me. He resembled the men I see on Folsom Street, except for the cheeks of course. I could see it in his face when he told me how much hearing about neglect spoke to him. He is Joshua Rodriguez. I am delighted to present Joshua as our guest for today.What Joshua speaks about may sound foreign to many of us, as some BDSM practices have to me. Some people’s idea of pleasure I continue to work hard to understand. We are not recommending anything here.“Don’t try this at home!”I continue to be devoted to the Six Principles of Sexual Health. Please join us in practicing inclusivity!The Six Principles of Sexual Health (courtesy of Doug Braun-Harvey):1. Consent 2. Non-exploitation 3. Honesty 4. Shared Values 5. Protection from sexually transmitted infections 6. Pleasure