Fresh-faced & feeling a bit better, ready to keep my trauma knowledge fresh and cutting edge. Today and tomorrow I’m tuning into the #TraumaticStress conference through @harvardmed. Time to live tweet!? It’s been ages! This morning we are starting with a session about trauma, suicidality, and self destructive behaviors. Unsurprisingly, understanding a patient’s affective experience & *their* sense of loss/harm is paramount rather than making assumptions based on our own experiences.

One of the tricky parts of doing accountability work around partner violence is that usually you’re navigating a lot of compounding and overlapping trauma reactions & maladaptive patterns from many directions, sometimes even including your own! It can get real messy real fast. The more I do this the more I see how crucial it is to establish safety and collaboration, to take time and space to not rush through. Just as in a phase oriented treatment of trauma, phase one is establishing safety, so too is that critical in accountability work for this stuff.

I absolutely hate telling people my caseload is full, but it's important that I don't overload my schedule—both for my clients' sake as well as mine! Modeling good boundaries is important, too. Still, doesn't make it fun esp. when I know how hard it is to find a good therapist :/ AND THIS IS WHY KNOWING WHERE TO REFER IS ALSO SO IMPORTANT. Knowing we can share the work, that we are not islands, is critical to the sustainability of a network and its parts. And at the same time we hold the complexity of actual scarcity especially along $ & ID-based axes.

{thread} Time to livetweet my reading #ScrewConsent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice by Joseph Fischel. I’d already started so I’ll go back and yank some highlights. Follow along and let’s chat about it! If you’ve read it or haven’t, I’d love for y’all to weigh in. #AidaReads I’m excited that this book aims to be accessible and compelling but doesn’t cut out fancy pants terminology all the way out. Also it gives a lot of good acknowledgements across the board so it’s not just a circle jerk of the usual suspects or pretending “I did this solo!”

{thread} #PSA OF THE DAY: Being an ally to people of color and people with disabilities (or any marginalized group) when you're a sexuality professional means saying things like this when you're invited to speak on a panel, as part of an event series, to keynote for Sex Weeks: "Looked over the list and it sounds like you have quite a variety of topics there. Congrats! One thing I wanted to make a quick plug for was working to ensure that some of these are led by people of color. Do you by any chance know if, beyond me, you have events like that?