All About Nothing With Ruth Cohn
by Ruth Cohn
Join Ruth Cohn MFT, Author & Neglect-Informed Psychotherapy Pioneer, Certified Sex Therapist, Certified in Neurofeedback, EMDR, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Imago Relationship Therapy, as she offers insights and discussions on various mental health topics.
Episodes
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A Temporary Problem
Content note: This week's video does address the subject of suicide. If you or someone you know are in distress, in the US you can call 888, at any hour and there will be someone there to talk to. In other countries, locate the support services in your area. It is amazing how powerful it can be…
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Two Ruth's, featuring Ruth Lanius
This week I am delighted to present as our guest someone whom I have long held in the highest regard - everyone who has ever heard me teach before is already familiar with her, my long time friend, colleague, and esteemed teacher, world renowned neuroscientist Ruth Lanius. She will talk to us…
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Tragic Loss, featuring Sebern Fisher
Adrienne Rich famously declared that for a daughter, the loss of the mother, and for a mother, the loss of the daughter is the “essential female tragedy.” We would now widen the tightly gendered language to be far more inclusive and diverse. However, and whomever we are describing, the attachment...
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Nothing to Lose
Although this would ordinarily be my week for a blog, I must admit I am completely consumed with getting ready for Oxford which is sneaking up fast! So I decided I would talk to you instead. Thus this video. Serendipitously I received an email from a woman across the world, who is struggling with...
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Different Strokes featuring Joshua Rodriguez
As champion of the invisible, I am always looking to raise awareness about individuals and groups who are unseen, ignored, excluded, misunderstood or worse. Where I live in San Francisco, USA, there is a relatively high level of diversity, but even here some minorities including sexual minorities...
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Mash-up
This week's video, is kind of a "mash-up," an informal mix of news and update, a bit of apology for being irregular and unreliable with my posts, and a bit of a preview of coming attractions. Hoping all are managing the abounding "instabilities" around us all: heat, fires, war, an increasingly...
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Stretching in Relationship, featuring De West
When I first studied Imago Relationship Therapy, now almost 30 years ago, its brilliant founder, Harville Hendrix, taught me many new ways of thinking about things. He steered us away from the idea of “compromise,” where it seemed no one would be satisfied in a lasting or resilient way. Rather…
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Updating Files
As I return from the flurry of conferences of the last three months, I am dizzy with all the change in myself. It takes a while to locate myself, and see an up to date version in the mirror. After so many years of being invisible and on the outside of everything (or at least that was my…
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Martyr's Day
May means many things to many people. In California, USA, it is Cheese Month! Here in the US and some other countries, it brings Mother's Day. For those with histories of trauma and neglect, Mother's Day may be a day of bittersweet or even only bitter memories. My husband an I are not parents and...
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The Gift of Existence
Giving and receiving are delicate matters for survivors of neglect trauma. Many, if not most, are much more comfortable on the giving side of the equation - up to a point. Equation is an apt word here, because often, there is some sort of conscious or unconscious calculus of what the gift is...
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Be Safe This Time
In this week’s video we make a short foray into one aspect of repair that is elusive and potentially harmful. When I say short, I mean that we could discuss it for many hours, and it spills into a subject that is very powerful and dear to my heart, the delicate task of forgiveness, which I have a...
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Featuring special guest Prentis Hemphill
This week I am delighted to welcome special guest Prentis Hemphill. I have seen Prentis, perhaps from afar for a number of years. They seemed to embody so many of the values I hold most dear: healing, social justice, somatics, non-binary gender and sexualities, and "walking the walk." Of course…
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Three Cheers! featuring Janina Fisher
This week’s video is a triple celebration, we celebrate International Women’s Month and a universe of precious women; we celebrate Janina Fisher, an exemplary woman (and I can celebrate twenty years of knowing and then friendship with her); and another celebration for Janina’s book launch:...
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The AI Bypass
A few years ago, I read a then new novel called Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. I have found Ishiguro’s work interesting and provocative. Although I have never been fond of science fiction or fantasy, something about how he incorporates other worlds with existential themes, has been...
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A Secret World?
At the core of neglect trauma is loss. Even loss of what was perhaps never there in the first place, but should have been. This week we will talk about two topics that rarely get spoken of: one's intimate sexual life, and aging. We will touch on both of these often secret or uncertain worlds…
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Hope Will Not Be Cancelled
Hope Will Not Be Cancelled Healing from trauma and neglect can feel endless, and in a way it really is. Not infrequently, and even after all these years, I am humbly reminded: “Oh there it is again.” The experience of time standing still, emptiness, is a signature of the neglect experience. In a...
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All About Hope
The winter holiday season can be a time of joy and celebration for some, and for those with histories of trauma and neglect, it may very well be a time of particular pain and loneliness. Where I live there is a (to me) overblown culture of consumerism and consumption, with great emphasis put on...
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Where's the Spark?
Amidst the buzz about sex that seems to always be around, for many of us, your clients may be wondering about their own lackluster sex lives, their partners having "lost interest," or accusing them of losing interest. They may be wondering "what is wrong with me?" Or what is wrong with my…
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A Feeling in the Air
It is a challenging time of year for those with neglect and incident trauma histories. The winter holidays of any denomination may be fraught with family memories of all kinds...disappointment, feeling outcast or different, or more traumatic episodes. In the US it is a time of great commotion,...
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True, Kind, Necessary
Next week is the Thanksgiving holiday here in the US, never a favorite of mine. For an anorexic kid, it was a true nightmare. I always thought of it as “the great American eating holiday.” There was no escaping all that food, that I did not even like. Now it is more an ideological distaste as it...
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Stephanie Simms
In today’s video we feature special guest Stephanie Simms. I met Stephanie in Oxford in 2024, when she was on a panel where she described an experience of racial trauma. Her story moved me deeply and we made one of those instant connections. Stephanie is a veteran of 20 years in the US Air Force,...
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Myths and Legends
Like many children of trauma and neglect, I searched for heroes and idealized others, someone to look up to and identify with. I was and to some extent still am, a hero worshipper of sorts. Certainly not as I was. As a young activist who always loved music, musical icons with social justice...
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Up, Up and Away
This week's episode was recorded in Oxford, where I was attending and speaking at the Transform Trauma 2025 Conference. In this episode, I reflect on a movie I watched on the plane. I describe to you the powerful discovery of a group of men in a truly bleak environment, that enabled a burst of…
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We Are the World, We Are the Generations
This week we have a very special guest. We are honored and privileged to welcome Mike Niconchuk. I met Mike at the Boston Trauma Conference. I was so moved by his talks there that I invited him for an interview. Mike is a researcher, activist, author, hero and all around amazing human being. I…
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Ghosts and Helpmates
Everyone is talking about it, and it seems to be everywhere. I figure it is time for me to say at least a few words about AI. I admit I feel very mixed about it, but then that is true about so many relationships, people and things in this complicated world. My giving it a chance to show its…
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Living Color
I was about five when they came out with color TV’s. We did not have one, and continued to huddle around the grainy old black and white for a long time. But I remember our dentist, who was a family friend, would sometimes have us over for dinner with his family on a Sunday evening. All I remember...
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Regulation
In this episode we pay a brief visit to the big topic of regulation and its many meanings and manifestations, from "over-reacting" to getting somehow stuck in trauma states, and feeling baffled by seemingly senseless or erratic relationship patterns. So very much of it begins with early neglect....
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Odds & Ends
Today video is a bit of a patchwork, bits and pieces of ideas I am sure I will develop, disarray of coming home from vacation, and trying to get organized to get back in the saddle. Hawaii is glorious. It is good to be home! Although it is freezing here in San Francisco, USA. Apologies for the...
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Mind & Body
Mind and Body Aloha everyone from glorious Kona, Hawaii, where I have the privilege to be this week. This video was made with a (real!) spectacular ocean view, not your Zoom perfect fake one! Being on vacation clears the head at least to some extent from the overcrowding of the “usual” thoughts…
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Relationship Art With Mariah Rooney
In this episode of All About Nothing, we welcome special guest Mariah Rooney. When there is trauma, neglect, violence and differentness, often family is lost one way or another. With Mariah we discuss families lost and found, new models created, and a wide world outside the box of what sorts of...
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Episode 19
While we are all inundated with grief, horror, shock and injustice, I thought we might look for a ray of light. Here in San Francisco, I awoke to a rainbow spectrumed search light across the sky in honor of Pride weekend. It was a wonderful way to start my day. The child of neglect, will readily...
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Coming Back
It is summer here in the US and a time of many comings and goings. Vacations, summer camps, and young adults graduating and launching for the lucky (I won't talk about all the involuntary departures...) It is often a time of trauma activations for survivors of trauma and neglect. Loss is the core...
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Nothing To Play With, with special guest Akillah Wali
In this episode, we have a special treat. Akillah Wali, who I met at the Boston Trauma Conference, will join us, and bring humor and fun to what is most often painful and difficult work. Hope you will enjoy it, while also growing your hippocampus!
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World of Books
I shamefully realized after recording the video, that it is summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but not everywhere! My one-person psychology at work: the whole world is me! Oy vey. In the Southern Hemisphere it will be getting colder and darker, but nonetheless, a good time to curl up with a good...
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Boston Hotel
Do you ever despair when once again revisited by old ghosts? When parts of you that you thought you had worked through long ago, rear up again, as powerfully as ever? Although I hate and avoid the word "triggering," it can in fact feel like being shot again, by an age old "enemy." Does it make…
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Can We Play?
In his masterwork, The Archaeology of Mind, neuroscience luminary, researcher and animal lover Jaak Panksepp wrote that a brief interlude of tickling of his lab rats, and a single bout of rat "laughter", activated a neurochemical and affective change in the little creatures, and even sprouted new...
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Coming of Age
In this episode we discuss the neglected topic of aging: the aging body, the aging brain, sexuality as we age. Another of those seemingly taboo subjects that it seems there is no one to ask, or no one reliable, and one might be too shame or afraid to tell. Perhaps you can be slightly more aware…
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Let's Talk About Sex
In Episode 12 I invite you to join me in talking about sex, a topic so important to so many, and all too often neglected and unaddressed. On one hand we are constantly titillated and teased by it, yet most of us live with a poverty of real and reliable information. We are only scratching the...
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The Bermuda Triangle
As we see our parents age, many of us are seized with a nameless clash of often intense emotions, especially if we have traumatic memories of these parents from childhood, or mixed feelings about them at best. And especially if, as what is so often the case, our parents have their own tragic…
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Celebrate Women's Month
In this episode we diverge a bit from the more somber topics of trauma and neglect, to celebrate International Women's Month and specifically women's sexual health, with an emphasis on women's sexual pleasure! Enjoy!
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Episode 9
Andy Marra, a Korean American trans adoptee told the moving story of searching for and traveling to Korea to meet her biological mother. Uncertain about how she will be received, and terrified about the complicated decision to come out to her mother, who thought she had given up a male child, she...
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Nothing Matters Goes Global
Recently, I was introduced to a new-to-me clinical term: "Climate Anxiety." It is a mix of overwhelm, fear, anxiety, and hopeless despair about what is, at least for most of us, the undeniably dire state of our planet – riddled with almost daily frightening news of fires, floods, earthquakes, and...
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Social Support
Today we explore the crucial subject of interpersonal need, and the immeasurable value of social support. It is perhaps the most salient and profound of missing experiences in neglect trauma, and one of the most difficult and wonderful aspects of recovery to learn and heal. I have of course been...
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Plenty of Nothing
Before I started studying trauma and neglect, I associated the word regulation with rules and laws. Now it means so much more. And this word may be confusing because at least to me, it has two related but quite distinct meanings: One meaning corresponds to arousal, or nervous system activation,...
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Episode 5
This episode of All About Nothing is a visit into a chapter of my past. We touch on the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and how my internalization of my father's trauma became a drive to prove my "worthiness" through martyrdom; a look at the island of Cuba as an icon of self-reliance,...
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One Person Psychology
What do you get when you cross a person hyper-focused on the feelings, needs and reactions of the other, with a person completely isolated and alone and in their own solitary world? "A one-person psychology." In this episode we explore this often misunderstood characteristic of many a survivor of...
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Thanksgiving
Welcome to episode 3 of All About Nothing, our bi-weekly podcast series. Today, amidst storms of feeling on the heels of the recent US presidential election, we anticipate the upcoming national holiday of Thanksgiving, by visiting the complex world of giving, receiving, and gratitude, all fraught...
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The 3 P's
When I began studying neglect and looking for patterns to recognize it, one of the first that jumped out at me, is what I came to call “the Three P’s of Neglect.” They are: passivity, procrastination and paralysis. The three P's became a “dead giveaway” in recognizing a child of neglect. The…
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Forgiveness
In this episode we will explore the complex subject of forgiveness, inspired by the Yom Kippur holiday and also by the many feelings stirred in me by tragic testimonials from both sides that I heard seemingly endlessly on October 7th. So much unbearable trauma. How do people move on? My…
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About this show
Join Ruth Cohn MFT, Author & Neglect-Informed Psychotherapy Pioneer, Certified Sex Therapist, Certified in Neurofeedback, EMDR, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy and Imago Relationship Therapy, as she offers insights and discussions on various mental health topics.
Hosted by
Ruth Cohn