For my entire life, I have been an environmentalist. As a child eager to save the whales and pick up litter from the park, as a teen lobbying for the end of garbage incineration and boycotting aerosol hairsprays, as a young adult awed by the EarthFirst! rallies I attended to save the precious old growth…… Continue Reading
Community After Disaster, a Therapist’s Musings
Here in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties, the entire community experienced prolonged and extensive hyper-arousal – days on end of watching and wondering where the fires would burn next, and far too many sleepless nights. According to the literature on disasters, what follows is a brief honeymoon period, characterized by community cohesion and gratitude. Sonoma…… Continue Reading
Infant-Family Mental Health Specialist Endorsement
I am pleased to announce that I have been endorsed by the State of California as an Infant-Family Mental Health Specialist. Click on the link below to see the press release! ECMH specialist… Continue Reading
Peekaboo
Ed Tronick’s Mutual Regulation Model describes the “dynamic organization of the behavioral communicative system” between a child and adult, “which regulates behavior moment by moment and shapes development over time” (Tronick p56). From this perspective, Dani’s development is shaped by an increasing capacity to comprehend my actions and intentions in any given moment, and to…… Continue Reading
Language Magic Part 2: Eight Months Old
Watching children learn to talk has always been one of my greatest joys. It is a passion that has implicitly informed my professional path since I took a job in a toddler daycare fresh out of college. While there I could bear daily witness to the explosion in vocabulary that accompanies the second and third…… Continue Reading
The Meaning of Crawling
During my midwifery training, we considered a baby’s 9-month birthday to be the end of a “second gestation”, a time of major transition in the mother-child relationship. Pregnancy and birth were valuable metaphors to normalize the intensity of change many mothers experience around this time. As a baby begins to move outwards into the world,…… Continue Reading
A Story of Dani: Making Meaning Together
The human brain, born so immature, is shaped by the environment in which it develops. Our earliest experiences matter. Yet it is not the actual experiences that define our unfolding sense of self; it is the meaning that we make of them (Hornstein). If we were securely attached as children, by adulthood we have developed…… Continue Reading
Thoughts on Attachment Parenting
As a follow up to my previous article, I want to add my voice to the great internet Attachment Parenting debate. Attachment Parenting (AP) is a parenting style popularized in the 1990s by Dr. William Sears. I was drawn to AP long before I became a mother, for much the same reasons it has taken…… Continue Reading
Attachment in America
Note: “attachment” in this article refers to attachment theory, not the Attachment Parenting style. By four months old, “the baby begins to tell people apart and lets them know who she prefers. With those closest to her… patterns of mutual interaction meet her need for intimacy. She is falling in love. Strong emotional ties form…… Continue Reading
Mindful Parenting
I have been blessed with a flourishing mindfulness practice for many years. As a therapist providing mindfulness-based treatment, I was constantly reminded of how to access mindful presence, and prompted to walk my talk by doing so. It has served me well. Though mindfulness is explicitly not about seeking a certain state of mind, its…… Continue Reading