What I Hope to Share!
This scholar, therapist, author, professor, activist open-hearted Boy-from-the-Bronx has a lot to share with people of all walks of life, gay, straight, and all the variations in between, and all the colors that comprise the human family.
My aim here is to retrieve precious, secret knowledge locked away in the Ivory Tower and the privacy of the Therapy Consulting Room, and distribute to inquiring minds. A Robinhood of psychological wisdom, so to speak.
After nearly thirty years of creating four major queer-affirmative cultural and psychological organizations—and founding the nation’s first LGBT Specialization in Clinical Psychology in 2005 at Antioch University and Colors LGBTQ Youth Counseling Center ten years ago—I have taught thousands of students and worked with hundreds of clients in therapy.
Thank heavens I am making greater time to cherish time more, and then to consider how to take what I have learned since my days as an artist and activist and make the hard-earned lessons accessible to a greater public who may or may not be aware of ground-breaking concepts about body, mind, and spirit.
The founder of modern talk therapy, Dr. Sigmund Freud, for example, advanced the revolutionary hypothesis that the “love” instinct is countered by the “death” drive in all psyches. How can we look at global politics and not see how the roots of destruction—and hope—lie within?
The late African American feminist-healer bell hooks has much to teach us about opening the heart, grieving our lessons, and rescue our planet and human family from pain and sorrow.
The “Call to Action” of my work Is Simple and Urgent: From the Ivory Tower to the Streets
Some of the Questions I Will Try to Answer Include:
- What is therapy and how can it heal personally and politically?
- What is LGBTQ-Affirmative Therapy?
- What are the books I am reading that offer healing?
- What are my clients teaching me about how humans evolve?
- Why is it important to better understand how the brain works?
- Why do I have so many crystals?
- What is the role of "eroticism" in self-care and spirituality?
- What am I learning in completing my third book, Education of the Heart?
- How can we talk about race, gender, and sexuality in new ways?
- What is the role of “working out” in being fully human?
I will be populating these pages with articles on literature, psychotherapy, clinical supervision, and politics. I will also talk about what it's like to be writing my third book, "Education of the Heart." I will also discuss what it's like to work out with my personal trainer and will share with you the books I am reading, the people I am meeting. All this will take place through a therapeutic Native Bronx Boy lens, which I believe is what is needed for us all to survive some of the challenging times ahead.
Eventually, these blogs will tie in with Tik Tok, Twitter and Instagram posts and then some longer and more thorough shares via my new You Tube channel.
But for starters let me say that I'm reading:
Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act UP New York, 1987-1993;. Paul Ortiz’s An African American and Latinx History of the United States; Joel Whitebook’s Freud: An Intellectual Biography; Margarita’s Alcantara’s Chakra Healing and bell hooks All About Love.
I might advance a therapist’s analysis on Inventing Anna (don't judge me, or judge if you must!).
I find I am really enjoying Esther Perel's blog: https://www.estherperel.com/blog/eroticism-self-care-plan.
Let's see where this takes us!
-Douglas Sadownick