Phyllis Leavitt’s Blog

There’s only one solution to the immigration problem. It’s not tighter border patrol, barbed wire fences or higher walls. It’s not shipping people off to someone else’s doorstep, and it’s certainly not kidnapping children or building more cages and jails.

What are we thinking? Who have we become?

Love has, for the most part, been excommunicated from political discourse. And yet love– and the peace, safety, belonging, and cooperation it makes possible– is not a political priority today or even a consideration. In our personal lives we crave love. I have not met one person whose deepest wounds did not come from an injury to love. We spend years in painful relationships, struggle with addiction, loneliness, depression, and endless forms of failure-to-thrive, all because love was missing or lost. And we go to great lengths to regain it.

There is no better time for America to be In Therapy! People everywhere are calling for help, both the innocent children lost in school shootings and the shooters themselves. When the war in Ukraine started, there was a photo that appeared in the news that I won’t forget– a mother, father and two children lying dead in the street, shot by the Russian military as they ran to a train station.

Two of my most profound experiences as a therapist were with people who I thought at the outset were the least likely to be in therapy at all. One was a man whose wife was about to leave him because she was starving for more emotional connection, and he was desperate not to lose her. The other was a woman who had been severely abused, suffered pervasive anxiety and her heart was locked behind a wall of protection.

One of my earliest clients was 9-year-old Beth. Her mother was killed in a hit-and-run accident while returning from work one night. Beth’s father brought her to therapy because she was having recurring nightmares of the car crash and she often woke up screaming. Though the accident had happened 5 years earlier, the horror of her mother’s death was as real for Beth in her dreams as the day it happened. She became anxious at bedtime, and none of the calming rituals that she and her father had created were working.

My new car came with more safety features than I knew existed. It has a blind spot indicator that flashes and beeps to keep me from sideswiping another vehicle. The steering wheel shakes to warn me that I am drifting out of my lane while an orange coffee cup takes over my dashboard admonishing me to wake up! One day the dash lit up with Tire Pressure Low. I pulled over and looked at my tires. They all looked fine. I drove another 50 miles and when I got out again, my tires still looked okay. My husband checked the tire pressure and one tire was a bit low so he filled it. I recalibrated the system. All good. Dashboard clear.