A little bit about me

Intergenerational trauma led me to become a mental health therapist (LCSW), my third career after working as a lawyer and then as a professor of writing and literature at St Edward’s University in Austin. In my course on memoirs of the Holocaust, my students and I learned that children of survivors inherited their parents’ unresolved trauma.

This discovery had personal significance  as my father served in World War II as a medical officer and was among the liberators of Nordhausen concentration camp, a fact I learned only after his death. Writing Gated Grief, which reveals the trauma of the liberators, enabled me to understand in a radically new way my own childhood trauma.

My students greatly valued Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. His words guide my life and my work:

“It matters not so much what has happened to us but what we do with what has happened to us.”

"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom"

As well as a therapist and writer, I am a ceramic artist and bring my clay and right brain into the room. Clay grounds us (no pun intended). The right brain, with its appreciation of metaphor and connection to the body, reveals our truths. The expressive arts such as free writing and drawing are invaluable tools to access our truths.