social support

Talking to Your Non-Black Parents about Anti-Black Racism

Calling Them In: Talking to Your Non-Black Parents about Anti-Black Racism

I wasn’t looking forward to Father’s Day this year. While I missed my father and planned to see him, I knew we would have to take additional precautions– wearing masks for the duration of our time together, meeting outdoors, and maintaining six feet of distance. This makes it hard to connect, especially with my children present. And given that I had been thinking about the…
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The Lifelong Commitment to Being An Ally

Start Where You Are: The Lifelong Commitment to Being An Ally

I will be the first to admit that I have had to do some hard work recently, and that until the past couple of weeks, I was not always actively thinking about or challenging my own privilege. While I considered myself a feminist and an ally, there was a lot that was happening in our country and that happened in our history, that I didn’t…
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Life in the Time of a Pandemic

Life in the Time of a Pandemic: How to Stay Sane while Keeping Safe

Until the past few days, I was feeling both very detached about the news continuing to overwhelm my inbox, and simultaneously feeling afraid. Over the past 48 hours, my response has began to change, as there seems to have been a national realization of the seriousness of the situation. Is it possible to at once avoid checking out or panicking? How can we meet this…
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To Touch and Be Touched: Physical Connection and Mental Health

When you think of troublemaking middle schoolers, you might picture them doing things like smoking or talking back to adults. When I was in the 6thgrade, while those things were happening too, we often got in trouble for– wait for it – excessive hugging. That’s right, our school administrators had to reprimand us for being late to class because we were busy giving each other…
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Preparing For Hard Conversations

When Your Emotions Are “Too Hot”: Preparing For Hard Conversations

Sometimes things come up in our relationships that we have to confront. This can be really heavy and scary, especially since most of us don’t enjoy conflict. Oftentimes, we either avoid it, perhaps indefinitely (like ghosting someone over text message) or, since we’re frightened of it, we try to get it over with as quickly as possible (like putting a wall up immediately, saying something…
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Celebrating Our Wins

Ending the Year with Confetti: Celebrating Our Wins

I like to plan things and solve problems. These are great for a resume, but sometimes these attributes are surprisingly unhelpful. For example: recently, our team at Take Root Therapy put together holiday care packages for homeless folks in our neighborhood. Though the process of gathering supplies for care packages should be relatively simple, it became complicated in my mind very quickly. I didn’t want…
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No, You’re Weird: What if We Embrace Our Weirdness? An Exploration on Being Different

Feel weird? Out of place? Different? Well, you’re not alone. So many of us feel like we don’t belong, or like we’re outsiders looking in on a world where others seamlessly fit in. Does this sound familiar? Perhaps you’re at an event or a party and you look around and think, “I don’t belong here.” Or you’re meeting a group of people for the first…
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Reaching Out

The Power of Reaching Out: Showing Up for Others

With the recent sudden and shocking suicides of Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade, there is a lot of talk around the power of reaching out to others and how it relates to mental health. These examples are extreme, as there’s nothing more grave than suicide, but I’ve noticed on television and in print the larger conversation around these two tragic deaths often conclude with advice…
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