To rely on Carl Jung a bit, the shadows are where our unwanted or feared emotions go. We deny them and use them to project onto others whom we demonize.

The points you raise in your piece are helpful and for some of us starting points to make changes and speak our own truth. Thanks.

I'm glad you are writing about this. One kind of constructive envy--if felt and not acted out--is the envy of children. I am in menopause, let's say and my daughter is 20 years old. She is gorgeous and seems to have the world in front of her. She has had an easier and more fulfilling and less traumatic childhood than I did. I felt envious and then I felt of course, how could I not? But because I have loved and love her, my love is stronger. And because I knew my envy it did't strangle me or her.

It's not the most common or acceptable thing to admit.

Passover and the Meaning of Exodus: Making it Personal

After years and years of creating what our family and friends had come to refer to as an “alternative Seder” I’ve realized I just don’t have it in me anymore. Or perhaps it would be more fitting to say the format doesn’t fit — again for me that would be. The presence of very young grandchildren in our lives may just have tilted my world just enough for me to realize some other reasons that it’s time for a change.

For over 40 years we did our version of an alternative…

Forgive us our Sins: Guantanamo and our Aversion to Remorse

“To dehumanize another human being is…a process and a programming. It takes energy and reinforcement to deny what is self-evident in another member of one’s own species.” P. 141

p.142 “A caste system relies on dehumanization to lock the marginalized outside of the norms of humanity so that any action taken against them is seen as reasonable.”

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

Isabel Wilkerson, Random House, 2020

According to the Moral Injury Project at Syracuse University, moral injury is “the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when…

After Part 1 of “Allen v Farrow,” as a Therapist I felt Ashamed

I was one of many, practically raised on Woody Allen. I was a New Yorker but he was New York. He lived and loved the city. I was Jewish and there he was to expose and at times to glorify the crazy family settings that were familiar to me. But more some of his films were brilliant, glorious and layered and smart. “Annie Hall” was the classic but then there was “Hannah and her Sisters”, so very rich and fabulous. …

After Part 1 of “Allen v Farrow,” as a Therapist I felt Ashamed

I was one of many, practically raised on Woody Allen. I was a New Yorker but he was New York. He lived and loved the city. I was Jewish and there he was to expose and at times to glorify the crazy family settings that were familiar to me. But more some of his films were brilliant, glorious and layered and smart. “Annie Hall” was the classic but then there was “Hannah and her Sisters”, so very rich and fabulous. …

The use of the word “hopping” (no not the Easter bunny just yet) for me conjures up the term used for tourist buses for which you buy a ticket to see different tourist destinations in a given city, and then can hop on or off where you like. It has the connotation of fluidity, changeability and in this case also change of mood. And while often this does have the appeal of being able to go on and off at will, right now the direction that I would choose would be off.

I was one of the people not only…

A Valentine for Toddlers

To begin with, toddlers cry and rage and despair, and they often stamp their feet. They want what they want and what they feel they need. They drive us to change our minds and “give in” or they drive us to stamp our own feet and insist it is our way or the highway. And of course, we have good reasons: they need to learn to be polite and now, without signs of shyness, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. We all have our standards which to some people some of the time…