I grew up a self-conscious bookworm in a tense, glamour-oriented household where I worried so early about my relational deficits that by 3rd grade you couldn’t get me to play Old Maid. By 5th grade, I was planning my face-saving lifeplan: “Someday I’ll write for The New York Times and no one will notice there’s something wrong with me.”

This mindset got me into The Columbia School of Journalism and turned me into a prize-winning reporter managing her own sense of invisibility crusading for the disadvantaged. I actually was offered a job at The Times when I was 25…..about the same time The Universe offered a competing option: An assignment to write an exposé of a spiritual group gave me an unexpected glimpse of feeling whole--independent of any achievement or anyone’s particular affection. When an important editor told me I had written something “incredibly mediocre,” and astonishingly, I felt no familiar diminishment, I promptly left journalism and decided to spend the rest of my life exploring ways to access and sustain the identity that made that possible.

A psychotherapist now for over 25 years, I see myself as a kind of transpersonal scout, helping people let go of external structures that no longer fit and orienting them to what it means to live a life based on their own insides. A phrase I like in this regard is “Trust in Being,” and while the phrase is probably not unique to them, I really heard it from some wonderful teachers in a group called Waking Down in Mutuality.

While I was learning psychoanalytic theory at Hahnemann Medical College, I was also studying Buddhism and secretly teaching clients to meditate. The tension between solid developmental approaches and my draw to the Mystical has been part of my journey. For years I taught Law of Attraction classes to Main Line moms, but understood enough about unconscious programming to consider The Secret as not telling the whole story. Personal growth, to me, examines the interplay between family-of-origin conditioning and one’s understanding of how The Universe operates. Many of us operate as if we are living in an Unfriendly Universe-, and my hope is that Talk To Me Like I’m Someone You Love will show you how—right in the messiness of life—to feel both discomfort and Something Friendlier in the wings.