Reflections from the ongoing work of practice, leadership, and attention.
These essays reflect an ongoing practice of attention—exploring grief, leadership, belonging, and what it means to live into a new story, personally and collectively.
Listening to Survivors of Commercial Sexual Exploitation
I attended the Summit on Crime Survivors because I knew commercial sexual exploitation was an area I did not understand well enough. What stayed with me most deeply were the voices of survivors, and the question of what responsibility listening creates when listening alone is not enough.
Summit on Crime Survivors: Commercial Sexual Exploitation
January 29, 2026 – Seattle City Hall
This week I attended the second annual Summit on Crime Survivors, focused specifically on Commercial Sexual Exploitation. I went because I knew this was an area I did not understand well enough, particularly as it relates to our region. I wanted to learn, to listen, and to better orient myself to a reality that is often discussed abstractly, if at all.
The morning included remarks from organizers, elected officials, judges, advocates, and service providers. There was discussion of efforts to support victims and to mitigate harm upstream. A recurring theme was the lack of stable resources—especially for prevention. Funding for services is often reimbursement-based and uncertain, which makes long-term planning difficult and proactive work nearly impossible. This pattern is familiar across the nonprofit and government world: we regularly affirm the value of prevention, yet struggle to fund it because its success is, by definition, difficult to prove.
Just last week, I spoke with the executive director of a homeless shelter who shared a variation on a story he hears often: “If I had just had $500 to fix my car, I’d be fine right now. Instead, I lost my job, my car, and now I’m here.” Money to keep shelters open or to provide food is easier to secure than money to fix the car before everything collapses. Different issue, same structural problem. We fund crisis response far more readily than early intervention.
What stayed with me most deeply, however, were the voices of survivors.
While there was a formal survivors’ panel of three women, the room itself was filled with survivors. Many of the people I spoke with casually—standing in line for coffee, chatting between sessions—were survivors. Their presence, their attentiveness to one another, and their quiet leadership were striking. One woman noticed I had taken a seat in the back of the room and immediately invited me to join her table. She was a survivor. She was kind, grounded, and extraordinarily aware of others. Throughout the day, she made space for people, checked in on them, and helped orient those who seemed overwhelmed. Without any formal role, she became a kind of unofficial host. Watching her care for others was deeply moving.
Another survivor I met while waiting in line for lunch—I’ll call her “T”—shared a sense of real discouragement. She had prepared extensively to testify before a legislative committee in Olympia on these very issues. She was scheduled to testify remotely near the end of the session, but as earlier speakers went over their allotted time, she was ultimately cut and never given the opportunity to speak. Preparing to publicly share a deeply personal story is not a small thing, and having that opportunity disappear carries its own harm.
When I mentioned that I had recently met one-on-one with the state legislator who chairs that committee, her entire demeanor changed. She lit up. There was surprise, relief, and something like hope all at once. She immediately recognized his name and role, and I could feel how much it mattered to her that someone in that position was paying attention. I shared that he had raised this issue himself in our conversation—that it clearly mattered to him, that he and his staff were actively researching approaches from other countries, and that this work was not peripheral for him.
It didn’t undo the fact that she had been silenced that day. But it did seem to lift something. There was a sense that her preparation hadn’t been wasted, that her voice belonged in that space even if it hadn’t been heard yet. The timing of that exchange—having spoken with him just weeks before, having this be the very issue he raised unprompted, and then standing in that lunch line with her—felt quietly profound. I felt genuinely honored to be able to share that moment with her.
The survivors’ panel itself challenged many common assumptions. Two of the three women had been groomed or manipulated into exploitation at a very young age. It was decades later before they fully understood themselves as victims. This is the reality of coercion: being forced into something in ways that are not always immediately recognizable as force.
Another panelist, a trans woman, shared that a roommate had secretly filmed and livestreamed her for years without her knowledge—capturing not only her body, but her transition. That detail mattered. Not because it made the crime worse in some abstract hierarchy, but because it revealed how exploitation so often intersects with vulnerability, identity, and moments of becoming. Her story made clear that exploitation adapts itself to whatever intimacy or exposure it can extract.
All of these women were used—unknowingly, non-consensually, and unwillingly—for the benefit of others. Two of the panelists were over sixty years old and had only been living freely for less than a decade. They were from here. They went to school here. They saw classmates drive by while they were trapped in circumstances they didn’t understand and couldn’t escape. One woman said that given the number of times she had been beaten, threatened, sold, drugged, and placed in life-threatening situations, “it’s a miracle that I’m alive.”
What I keep returning to is the cost of telling these stories.
Survivors are repeatedly asked to recount deeply personal trauma in rooms full of professionals—caseworkers, lawyers, judges, policymakers, and concerned citizens. This is not therapeutic entertainment. It is emotionally taxing. It takes something each time. And if listening is where it ends—if stories are gathered but systems remain unchanged—then even well-intentioned attention risks becoming extractive.
Listening is essential. Human connection is essential. Empathy formed through real encounter is different from empathy formed through reports or statistics. It shapes judgment. It sharpens discernment. It changes how decisions are made.
But empathy alone does not correct structural misalignment. Systems that reliably fund reaction while struggling to fund mitigation will continue to produce harm, no matter how aware we become. Prevention is harder to measure, harder to justify, and harder to defend politically—but the cost of neglecting it is borne by real people, often for decades.
This experience did not leave me with answers. It left me with a clearer sense of responsibility: to stay attentive to where human connection should inform decision-making, to question funding structures that privilege symptoms over causes, and to remain unsettled when awareness is mistaken for action.
That unease, I think, is where the real work begins.
If this reflection has been of value, you’re welcome to support the time and care that go into this work.
Grief as Learning: A reflection on The Grieving Brain
A reflection on grief as a learning process—how the brain struggles to update after loss, and how attention, time, and care can slowly reshape our relationship to what has changed.
In the wake of a death—especially an unforeseen one—we search for answers. Why did this happen? How? What could have been different? Often the mind searches even when there are no answers to be found.
I didn't read The Grieving Brain until nearly two years after I lost my daughter. Even so, I found it deeply validating. It helped me make sense of experiences I had already lived through but didn't yet have language for. A friend recommended it after her own profound loss, and she too found it useful in navigating the disorienting territory that grief creates.
Mary-Frances O'Connor is a clinical psychologist, neuroscientist, and professor at the University of Arizona. The book reflects that background—at times academic, but consistently humane. She distinguishes grief from depression, explains why yearning is not pathology, and shows how attachment is not merely emotional but physiological. We quite literally build our lives, and our nervous systems, around the people we love.
At the heart of the book is a deceptively simple idea: the brain is a learning machine. More specifically, it's a predictive machine, constantly anticipating what will happen next based on past experience. This works remarkably well—until it doesn't.
How the Brain Maps Relationships
O'Connor explains that when we form deep attachments, our brains learn that certain people exist here, now, and close. Even when a loved one is not physically present—at work, traveling, living across the country—we still carry a stable internal map of their existence. They are part of the world our brain expects to encounter.
That map does not update instantly when someone dies.
A familiar example helps. If you always place your keys in the same spot when you come home, your hand reaches there automatically. One day, distracted, you put them in your coat pocket and hang the coat in the closet. The next morning, your hand still reaches for the old place. The brain is not broken—it's doing what it has learned to do.
Grief works the same way, only the discrepancy is far more painful.
The brain continues to predict the presence of the person who has died. Each time reality contradicts that prediction, it hurts. Not metaphorically—neurologically. O'Connor frames grief as the repeated correction of a deeply learned expectation. This is why grief can feel so disorienting, even when we consciously know what has happened. Knowledge and learning are not the same thing. Unlike depression, which flattens experience, grief is marked by yearning—the continued pull toward someone who is no longer there.
When my daughter died, I experienced this painfully and clearly. In the months before her death, she had been traveling across the country. We weren't in close proximity, and we communicated only intermittently. After she died, those surface conditions were the same: she wasn't physically with me, and we weren't texting or talking in any given moment. My brain's map had not yet caught up to the deeper truth—that she would never again be here, now, and close in the way it expected.
My conscious mind knew this immediately. My brain did not. Each time the discrepancy surfaced, it hurt.
The most important takeaway from this is simple, but not easy: the brain needs time. Time to unlearn an old map. Time to build a new one. The pain is not a failure of healing—it is the healing process itself.
O'Connor offers an image I found helpful. Imagine walking through your home in the dark, used to brushing past a table in a particular place. If the furniture is suddenly rearranged, you immediately notice the absence. You may even question whether you're in the right room. Eventually, though, you learn the new layout. The room still works. Life still works. But the learning takes time.
For me, part of that learning involved realizing that my relationship with my daughter had to change—not end, but change.
Discovering the Scripts
I knew rationally that she was gone. I knew I would never again exchange looks, jokes, or hugs, or watch her become the person she was so beautifully becoming. But I also knew I would never forget her. Which meant the relationship itself was not disappearing—it was transforming. I just didn't know what that meant yet.
I noticed that most nights, as I was falling asleep, I was running the same internal script: I love you. I miss you. I'm so sorry. Over and over. The words were sincere. They were also static. I realized that if I kept repeating the same script, my brain had no new information with which to learn. I was reinforcing longing without offering a path forward.
So I made a conscious decision to interrupt the script.
Instead of speaking only from sadness, I began to invite different forms of connection. I intentionally recalled memories. I noticed moments in the present that she would have found funny or beautiful. I tried to experience joy with her, rather than only grief for her. This did not erase the loss—but it did allow my brain to begin building a new map, one that was less constantly jarring.
This, I think, is where agency quietly enters the grieving process. Not in forcing ourselves to "move on," but in gently offering the brain new experiences to learn from.
The Role of Mindfulness
The other major lesson I took from the book—one that reinforced practices already present in my life—was the importance of mindfulness. I've meditated on and off for more than twenty years, and I believe this helped me notice the scripts I was running in the first place. Mindfulness didn't make the grief go away. It changed my relationship to it.
One of the most painful patterns in grief is the endless chain of what-ifs. What if I had done this. What if I had said that. What if, what if, what if. These thoughts arise without warning, and early on they can feel inescapable. But they don't lead anywhere except deeper pain.
Mindfulness offers a different option. Not suppression, and not avoidance, but recognition. When a thought arises, we can notice it. Feel it. And then, if we choose, not follow it. Over time, this becomes a capacity. The thoughts still come—but they no longer carry us away from the present moment every time they appear.
The goal is not to stop thinking. The goal is to avoid being endlessly dragged by thought. Meditation, as unglamorous as it may seem, is a kind of medicine. And like most medicine, it works best when practiced before we're desperate for it.
What the Book Offers
There is far more in The Grieving Brain than I've captured here, and I would recommend it to anyone—whether grieving now, supporting someone who is, or simply wanting to understand how deeply human attachment really is. The book does not promise relief. What it offers instead is orientation.
Grief is not a malfunction. It's the brain doing its best to learn a world that has been irrevocably changed. Understanding that doesn't remove the pain—but it can make the pain feel less lonely, less frightening, and less wrong.
If this reflection has been of value, you’re welcome to support the time and care that go into this work.