We need play more than ever—not because life isn’t serious, but because it is. Play brings levity into moments that might otherwise lock us into defense. And our brains do not function well in protection mode.

My clients are survivors. They often have more strength than they know. And for many of them, their nervous systems are burning out. They have been conditioned to be hypervigilant, over-performers, or chronically disassociated from the signals of their bodies – because they *had* to be that way.

I have told more than one client: you actually *are* that strong, and I want you to live in a world where you do not have to be. 

Here is another truth: we, as humans, are not clusters of symptoms; we are years of variables, swaddled in our fallibility, swimming in misunderstanding, and brimming with hope. Diagnoses do not reflect any of that. They name deficits; they do not reflect resilience, grit, or survival.

We, at the deepest and most intrinsic level, are survivors.