As an analytically oriented practitioner, I tend to look for symbolism and meaning in everything. I always want to know why. Why what? Why anything, why everything! In that vein, I tend to view analytic thinking as a sort of a prism, refracting the light differently, in beautiful color, from each angle. Or I conceptualize it as an onion - one layer and another always lurking beneath as I peel and explore. I love turning every new idea over in my mind, exploring one facet and then another in a quest to understand as much as I can. And I think like most of us, analytic or not, I seek answers and solutions to whatever is troubling me and for whomever I am helping at this moment in time. As a social worker, I tend to spend a lot of my time in this way - I try to help as naturally as I breathe air.

I find symbolism in the timing and place and name of this conference, mostly without having to think about it. "Life Beyond Trauma" - how fateful for me, having spent the last seven years discovering my genuine self, finally obtaining my long-delayed education, all the while struggling to get past the pain and anger of my own trauma which was wrapped up in what felt like a much-shortchanged childhood. I now find myself past the sadness, fear, and anger. I am propelled through and past these painful feelings and into a newly alive sense of anticipation, excitement, eagerness. This feels, so much, like the first year of my very own Life Beyond Trauma. What a blessing to finally be leaving it all (trauma, anger, sadness, a heavy heart) behind. Symbolically, the conference starts the day after my birthday. It will be both the start of a new year for me and a significant "birth day" for Transattachment Theory. And to be able to present at a professional conference for the first time in Dallas, Texas, the city of my birth - what fun that will be.

As I blog in the coming weeks, I want to propose some ideas and perhaps new ways of thinking for each of us to consider as we move toward conference time. These new ways of conceptualizing trauma will prepare us all to think about transattachment and how it can either help or impede the individual trying to address trauma while working in a therapeutic relationship.

For this week, I propose we ponder on this: What does it mean to feel "empty at the core?" What logically might cause this emptiness? How many ways can we attempt to fill it, unsuccessfully of course - food, relationships, substance abuse, shopping ... ? Of course we know, either by watching or having lived it ourselves, that this foundational emptiness cannot be filled with sweets or drugs or things or even a potential life partner. Most people don't have this emptiness, a longing that is known so intimately. In these individuals who do know this longing, what is missing?