Essay Series
These essays began as an attempt to write honestly about the clinical encounter — about what it asks of the people in the room, and about the difficulty of remaining present when presence is genuinely costly.
They grew into something larger: an exploration of love, loss, aging, the body in time, and what it means to stay with what is difficult rather than reach too quickly for its resolution.
On the series
"Staying with" is not a passive act. It requires more than endurance — it requires the willingness to remain in contact with what is happening, rather than organizing the encounter around its relief.
These essays are written in the space between the consulting room and the page. They draw on clinical experience without being clinical writing; they address theory without being theoretical. They are, above all, an attempt to think carefully about the ordinary difficulty of being in relation — with another person, with one's own history, with the fact of time passing and things changing and some things not changing enough.
Essays in the series
A Manifesto Essay. On what it means to remain a person while practicing as a therapist — the cost, the discipline, and what it asks of a long clinical life.
On the relational gestures that carry love without naming it — the habits, the irritabilities, the presence that passes for indifference. What we miss when we listen only for the declaration.
Love arrives when it is not convenient, and stays longer than seems reasonable, and ends before we have finished needing it. On the failure of love to respect the rhythms we impose on our lives.
A series of letters written to someone who is no longer there to receive them. On what remains to be said after the conversation has ended — what grief cannot express but writing sometimes can.
On what it takes from the therapist to offer genuine presence across a working life — and on the institutional tendency to treat this cost as a private problem rather than a clinical one.
On the difficulty of distinguishing pain that needs to be witnessed from pain that needs to be changed — and on the therapist's relationship to both.
On identity as something constructed rather than discovered — the question of how much of who we are is chosen, and what the therapy relationship does to our relationship with that question.
A sequence of essays following one relationship across time — its beginning, its middle, and what it becomes when the categories of love and loss begin to blur at the edges. See note below.
A note on the Carole Cycle
The Carole essays follow a composite figure across the stages of a long love — the moment of beginning, the steady accumulation of life together, the arrival of loss, and what remains after. They are written as literary-clinical vignettes: not case studies, not fiction, but something between — the form that this kind of truth requires. The cycle is being written now. Essays will appear here as they are completed.
The essays appear irregularly — when the thinking is ready, not on a schedule. Subscribing is the simplest way to receive them. No other use is made of the list.
Other writing
Forthcoming · Full-length volume
The book that collects and extends the Staying With essays — including extended clinical sections, full pillar essays, and the complete Carole cycle. Forthcoming from press.
Online · Ongoing
A relational glossary of nineteen words — from love, desire, and longing, to ghosting, situationship, and sulking. Written in the same register as the essays: etymological, clinical, reflective.
Framework · In development
The theoretical companion to the essays — the six pillars, the clinical method, the glossary, and the annotated bibliography. Available in extended form as a practitioner document.