Articles + Essays
To write professionally is a privilege and a responsibility. It is through our professional writing and reading that we, as human relations professionals, come to both express and challenge ourselves and to create opportunities to learn from one another. Our clients, groups, students, and supervisees entrust us with their well-being. We owe it to them to constantly call into question how we have been trained, how we have come to think, and how we work. Our professional literature is a prime vehicle for this questioning. We learn best in community, not within theoretically determined silos of thought and practice. For this page I have selected journal articles, book chapters, interviews, personal essays, and book reviews available for download that I hope will capture and convey my learning and thinking over the course of my efforts as an author and teacher. Thoughtful writing, disciplined reading, and ongoing consultation form the basis of the best protections we have to offer those who entrust their own learning and development to us.
Twenty years ago, a small group of colleagues from differing perspectives began a seminar series called “Keeping Our Work Alive” that meets in my office here in Pittsburgh. It is an interdisciplinary gathering of 25 therapists and group leaders who meet six times a year with psychotherapists, psychoanalysts, and researchers whose work we consider to be at the cutting edge. We seek out those who are likely to upset our modes of preferred theory and practice, which I believe is essential for creative learning and responsible practice. It is my hope that you will find the spirit of “Keeping Our Work Alive” present and moving through my papers available here.
“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to. Make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, revelling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.” bell hooks, 2003