January 2018

Dinnertime is stressful for Ruiyi Li, a married mother of two who lives in San Francisco’s Chinatown. She has to wait in line for almost an hour to use a communal kitchen in the building where her family rents a single room for $400 a month. Then there’s the problem of how to eat the meal. The family’s tight dwelling is slightly wider and longer than the size of a double bed, with no space for a table. Li, her husband, son and daughter must sit one next to the other on the edge of the lower...

The spectacle of more than 150 young women telling their stories of sexual abuse before a court, the world, and the perpetrator himself seemed straight from the movies, a cathartic ending to a dark, yearslong drama that had been all too real. It is rare, perhaps unprecedented, for so many victims to stand in court and, with the encouragement of a judge, to describe aloud for days the abuse they endured. Therapists said that the chance to testify at the sentencing hearing of Dr. Lawrence B.

“If your heart is a volcano, how shall you expect flowers to bloom?”Khalil Gibran Definition of Projection or Blame-Shifting: (n.) A term originally coined as a self-defense mechanism by Anna Freud when a person attributes their own unwanted thoughts, feelings, or motives onto another person (A. Freud, 1936). By projecting, or “blame-shifting” one’s undesirable mental/emotional notions onto another person, the individual is defended against having to be aware of and accountable to their own...

Cissy's Note: One of the things that worries me about technology is that parents might not be watching so much Sesame Street anymore. As a parent with a whole lot of ACEs, I find the gentle and warm tones of adults on Sesame Street so soothing, On especially hard days this gentle warmth can make an actual difference. When my daughter was young, we'd cuddle on the couch and watch together. The content is always so basic and clear and because it's geared towards and for kids, I never felt...

To the casual observer, the offices of the Women and HIV Program at the University of California San Francisco look like any other primary care clinic. There’s a waiting room with vinyl-covered chairs for the clinic’s patients. Staff check in patients from a non-descript desk ringed with a bank of computers. A video screen promotes the clinic’s services. But as you make your way further into a second waiting area, you might meet Pepper, one of the clinic’s volunteer therapy dogs....

Immigrant communities in the United States have always been under siege and used as scapegoats, regardless of who was in power. Post September 11th it was the Muslim community (and those mistakenly lumped in whether Persian or Arabian). Before the most recent threats against Dreamers, women and children immigrating from Central American countries fleeing violence became targets for detention and deportation. The rhetoric during Trump’s campaign and the policies under his Administration...

Across the Western world today, if you are depressed or anxious and you go to your doctor because you just can’t take it any more, you will likely be told a story. It happened to me when I was a teenager in the 1990s. You feel this way, my doctor said, because your brain isn’t working right. It isn’t producing the necessary chemicals. You need to take drugs, and they will fix your broken brain. I tried this strategy with all my heart for more than a decade. I longed for relief. The drugs...

We are hosting a screening of the documentary, Resilience , at the Landmark Theater Opera Plaza in San Francisco this Wednesday evening, Jan. 31, at 7pm. It just so happens that this is the evening after Dr. Nadine Burke Harris will be at Books Inc. at the Opera Plaza promoting and signing her book: The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity . So you may want to be at the Opera Plaza two evenings in a row. Please come an join us on Wednesday evening. Tickets for...

Drug overdoses now are the leading cause of death among Americans under 50, largely thanks to a surge in opioid use. Although heroin and fentanyl have dominated the headlines in recent years, the problem started with a flood of prescription painkillers, distributed by some of the country’s biggest corporations. At the urging of his editor, Washington Post reporter Lenny Bernstein set out to learn why millions of pills were being sent to cities and towns across the U.S. – and why distributors...

Last week, a Facebook post from a mom seeking mental health services from her OB/GYN went viral. She was educated and well informed enough to know that her symptoms were likely related to postpartum depression, but the ask for help only added to her struggle. 10 hours later, she left the ER with her infant and list of resources feeling worse. But instead of blaming the "system" that she sought help from, she has decided to embrace it by diving deeper into attempts to utilize it. Jessica...

About six months ago I started a conversation with two of my fellow ACE (Adverse Childhood Experience) Connection friends about the need for a National Platform to expose our network to the general public. As will happen, life and work can get in the way sometimes that keeps an idea from coming to fruition. Now, six months later a door has opened that may not be able to be shut again. Sexual harassment in the celebrity world was the key that opened that door. Yes, it has started a wave of...

“Human relations were laid bare and the strengths and weaknesses in relationships came sharply into focus. Thus, socially isolated women became more isolated, domestic violence increased, and the core of relationships with family, friends and spouses were exposed” – written in response to a major flood in Australia (Dobson, 1994, p. 11). Racism. Sexism. Classism. Immigration status. Violence against LGBTQ communities. These are just a few of the various forms of oppression that the...