Are mental health diagnoses at a young age illuminating, making way for clarity, effective medication, community, and treatment or pathologizing in a way that pigeonholes kids and keeps them stigmatized and stuck? My daughter and I talk about her “emergent borderline traits,” other diagnoses, and her healing journey on my new YouTube channel.
To learn more about our family’s story, subscribe to the channel to see future videos, and read an earlier Reel Girl post about the modality that transformed our family dynamic Kids Speak in Metaphor—Can Parents Learn How to Listen? You can also go to my site Listen2ConnectCoach.com, the About page and the Media page. To learn more about Nonviolent Communication specifically and download free Feelings and Needs lists, try the resources page.
“Patriarchy encourages women to become mothers, then abandons them.
Through isolation, overwork, lack of childcare, lack of parental leave, lack of healthcare, and through lack of real community support.”
I would add to this: lack of reproductive rights, the wage gap, and access to quality education. I could go on…
Bethany writes:
“Patriarchy sets mothers up to fail and then blames them for the suffering it created. All of this limits a mother’s capacity to show up in the ways she may have wanted to.”
So when I speak about the Mother Wound, many women get reactive and tell me:
“You’re just blaming mothers.” “You’re putting even more on women.”
And I understand why it can feel that way.
But here is where I see it differently.
When we only position mothers as passive victims of the system, we unintentionally strip them of their power.
Mothers are not ONLY victims of patriarchy. Mothers are ALSO participants within the system—and therefore have the capacity to interrupt it.
Mothers are extraordinarily powerful, precisely because they are formative.
And recognizing their formative role is not equivalent to blaming them.
It’s about responsibility in the truest sense: the ability to respond differently.
This critical nuance is the core of my work and is often misunderstood.
Not every woman is a mother. But every woman is a daughter.
And the work of healing begins there.
When a woman becomes more conscious of:
what she herself received and missed from her own mother
how she adapted to patriarchal norms in her own family
and what she now chooses to carry forward
She begins to break the cycle with her own children.
This is not about being hard on yourself or trying to be the perfect mother.
It’s about awareness, honesty, and a willingness to do what your own caregivers could not.
I’m not saying this is easy work.
The truth is, not everyone is ready for it.
But this is where change happens.”
I’ve had coaching from Bethany, and she’s been instrumental in helping me find my inner mother. I’ve also trained in Nonviolent Communication (NVC) to learn the skills to emotionally regulate and show up with presence, curiosity, and compassion for myself, my partner and my kids. Basically, figuring out how can I be resourced enough to be as healthy a mom and person as possible while living in the patriarchy that degrades my values and doesn’t support my well-being.
Nonviolent Communication, created by clinical psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, teaches that all human behavior is motivated by an attempt to meet universal human needs. Feelings are clues pointing to those needs. NVC teaches how to to express these needs honestly while staying connected to the humanity of others, which basically means not creating “enemy images,” remembering that everyone has needs and everyone’s needs matter.
So, for example, say I go into my daughter’s room and it’s a mess. Maybe I’ve asked her to clean it, and instead I see her lying in her bed, looking at her phone.
How do I feel when I walk into this scene? Probably frustrated and irritated. My underlying needs could be: order, beauty, and maybe respect or consideration.
Before learning NVC, I might have yelled at my kid, something like: “What are you doing? Get up! Clean your room!” Maybe I would’ve added a threat: “If you don’t, you’re not going out.”
I might have gotten compliance from her. She may have rolled her eyes, gotten defensive, she may have yelled back. Most likely any motivation would come from fear about a consequence or from wanting to please me, a fear of disconnection, maybe a feeling of shame and a need for acceptance. It’s doubtful she would have met or recognized any intrinsic motivation, any desire to care for her space, what she wants and how to make that happen as far as the state of her room. And without being motivated in this deep way, the whole cycle is likely to repeat: my daughter dependent on me, yelling and threatening.
Now, if I find myself in this scenario, the first thing I do is offer myself compassion for the pain of my unmet needs. My needs matter, totally separate from hers.
When I see her messy room and my daughter in her bed, I might quietly say something like “Ouch,” and put my hand on my heart.
I do whatever I need to do to regulate—maybe I leave the room and come back minutes or hours later. Timing is everything. I love the phrase: “Strike when the iron is cold.” I rarely talk to my kids now if I’m activated. After I’ve soothed myself, I turn with curiosity in my imagination, to my daughter. Rather than thinking about what she’s saying no to, I wonder: What is she saying yes to? How might she be feeling—tired, overwhelmed? What needs might be alive in her—ease, comfort, rest?
When I’m in that “NVC consciousness,” if I still want to talk to her, I go ask her if she’s in a place to talk to me. I might go back in her room, sit next to her on her bed, and gently rub her head.
“Hey honey, how are you?”
“Tired.”
“Yeah, that makes sense. You’ve been busy.”
“Yes.”
“You just feel like resting.”
“I could sleep forever.”
“I get it. Is this an OK time to talk about your room?”
She sighs. “I guess.”
“When I see the clothes on the floor, I feel kind of annoyed and anxious. I got you those clothes, and I feel sad when I don’t see them not taken care of the way I wish they were. I’m also thinking about the washing machine—when the laundry piles up like this, it makes it hard for everyone else to get a turn to use it. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, I see that.”
“I’m wondering if you have any ideas about how to take care of your clothes in a way that works for everyone in the family?”
“Yeah, I could do a load later today.”
“That would be helpful, thank you. Any other ideas?”
“While I’m doing a load, I can clean my room.”
“That would be great. Thank you for thinking about this.”
“Sure, I like it when my room is clean. I get it.”
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
My priority is connection with my kids—and my long-term goal is helping them feel safe and supported so they can learn how to emotionally regulate. Whether or not my daughter cleans her room is secondary.
Before I learned NVC, I was a “power-over” parent. I thought my job was to teach my three kids to be “good” and “successful” by obeying my wise and smart rules.
When my oldest daughter struggled with behavioral health challenges, everything changed. I realized I didn’t actually know what was best for her all the time. I realized she was a different person that me with her own feelings and needs. I know this may seem obvious, but somehow, I really thought, just like my reflex reaction to my youngest kid’s room, that I know best how and when everything in their life should be done.
When I learned NVC, I realized I’m not the ultimate authority on all things, the teller of truth, God, as patriarchy would have me believe in that there is always a power over another person or thing. With NVC, I learned how to actually listen to my kids, to meet them where they were instead of where I thought they should be.
So many of the rules and expectations I had internalized—compliance, obedience, rewards, external validation—were rooted in patriarchal values, not in fulfillment, joy, or creativity.
And just to avoid turning this into a binary: all three of my kids are actually more “successful” (I think all human are) when they are intrinsically motivated—when they are living authentically, recognizing their deeper needs, and making choices from that place.
That’s the kind of success I care about now.
To learn more about my daughter’s mental health challenges and NVC, read this post and go to Listen2ConnectCoach.com To download free NVC Feelings and Needs lists, go to https://listen2connectcoach.com/resources
In a recent interview, when actress Naomi Watts said “Tolerate my jowls,” she made clear it’s not her job to surgically alter her face so you don’t feel uncomfortable. If her face stimulates pain for you, learn how to regulate. You feelings are not her problem. Naomi Watts is #unfawning.
I’ve been posting a lot about Ingrid Clayton’s new book and how she prefers the term fawning to codependency or people-pleasing, because when we “connect to protect” it’s often not a conscious choice but a trauma response, a nervous system reaction. Psychologist Pete Walker describes fawning as “a response to threat by becoming more appealing to the threat.”
I was thinking about how when women are young— especially when they are white and a weight preferable to the patriarchy— their bodies, to some degree, can’t help but “fawn.” Their bodies fit so perfectly into the system that rewards female compliance.
I posted a Tik Tok video about how my face, as a 57 year old woman, like Naomi, is no longer fawning. Even if a woman decides to take a path different from my own or Naomi’s, her body, on some level, is going to rebel: 57 isn’t the same as 27.
So far, that shift to #unfawning, has been disorienting and confusing to some degree, all changes are like that, but it’s also been incredibly liberating. And that part of the story seems to be, too often left out. That erasure feels like more fawning.
I can’t recall ever being so clearly in a situation where my body simply, repeatedly says: “No, I won’t do it. I won’t conform to that standard, even though, I know you believe that would make your life easier and safer.”
And surprise, my life is easier and safer #unfawning. I don’t miss men catcalling me. Why was I supposed to miss that?
Even though my body is older and supposedly less strong—debatable, I no longer smoke a pack of Marlboro Reds or drink alcohol—I feel so much safer waking down the street, just being in the world feels calmer. I don’t miss the free drinks or free food that were never really free. My body knew that too.
I think maybe the scariest thing about getting older, is when you’re young and you keep getting warned in so many ways how horrible and terrifying it’s going to be. I think that fear is one of the most powerful factors to keep women control. What if getting older isn’t something to be afraid of? What if it is, in fact, joyful?
You’ve heard of the trauma responses: fight, flight, and freeze, but have you heard of fawning? I’m obsessed with the new book:Fawning by Dr. Ingrid Clayton. Every person—but really, urgently, every woman—needs to read it.
Dr. Clayton quotes psychotherapist Pete Walker defining fawning as “a response to a threat by becoming more appealing to the threat.” In her book, she writes that fawning isn’t a gendered response, anyone can fawn, which I agree with, but Walker’s definition—becoming more appealing to the threat—seems to describe exactly how women are trained to be “safe” in a patriarchy. Dr. Clayton elaborates her definition throughout the book, but here it is in a nutshell: “Fawners mirror or merge with someone else’s desires or expectations to defuse conflict rather than confront it directly.”
I’ve actually read a lot about trauma, I read Pete Walker’s books years ago, and so I’d heard of fawning. But when I readDr. Clayton’s in-depth analysis, I understood for the first time that fawning is not a conscious response, something you decide to do. Instead, your nervous system activates a fawning response. This understanding helped me be more aware and compassionate when I fawn, as opposed to getting angry at myself, or judging or shaming myself.
As a feminist, as someone who speaks out for causes she believes in, who debates Tucker Carlson on national TV, I may appear to be someone who doesn’t fawn. But now I see my endless arguing, debating, explaining, is in some ways, an attempt to win others over, to get them on my side, “to connect to protect,” as Dr. Clayton describes fawning.
That is not to say debate, arguing, explaining is wrong, it can be necessary and useful. But it’s also helpful to be aware of when and how I’m choosing to spend my precious time, energy, and brain cells.
But how I find Fawning most helpful and enlightening is in supporting me to be a cycle breaker as a mom of three daughters living in a capitalist patriarchy. The unpaid, unappreciated labor of being a mom, from endless scheduling to filling out forms to driving your kids everywhere, even just the energy and skill you need to value emotions and emotional regulation skills, in a society that doesn’t believe feelings matter, is kind of shocking. At least it was for me.
“I once saw a video on Facebook that was geared toward mothers who are feeling stressed, sleep deprived, and unappreciated. At the end it said, ‘Look into the eyes of your child and know that you matter.’ Line after line expounded upon how the mother is elevated in the eyes of the child, implying that should be enough to get you through. The entire point of the video was that a mother need only look into her children’s eyes for validation. I found it odd that it didn’t mention the support of friends, partners, or communities to help women through the tough times as mothers. It didn’t mention self-care. It didn’t help women see themselves as inherently valid and important.
At first glance, this can seem like a harmless video with the intention of honoring the ceaseless work mothers do. It was ‘liked’ by thousands of people. But I found the video disturbing for many reasons. For mothers, it perpetuates the illusion that the approval of one’s children should be compensation enough for the brutally unending, thankless, isolating work of motherhood in the modern world. And it sets up the child for bearing the emotional burden of a mother’s struggles and learning how to overfunction as an emotional caretaker. It sets up the child to feel that she “owes” her mother a version of herself to protect her from her pain…
Our culture, with its hostility toward women as expressed in diminishing access to reproductive healthcare, the wage gap, lack of ample maternity leave, and male violence against women as well as systemic barriers like institutional racism, all combine to isolate the mother and to coerce the child into carrying the burden of emotionally validating the mother in the absence of support from partners, adults, institutions, and society in general. This is a void that a child can never fill.”
Webster is describing how mothers and daughters are locked into a fawning trauma response that can continue for generations unless we forge a different path.
In some ways, when I had kids, I thought I was going to get a fan club! Part of me was surprised that healthy kids are usually not showering moms with love and gratitude.
Dr. Clayton writes: “Those of us with an overactive fawn response might unconsciously want our children to fawn. That is how we survived so it can feel like our children won’t be safe in the world without learning to appease, get quiet, and comply, all under the guise of respect. When our children don’t shapeshift for our benefit, we simply don’t have the skills to help because we haven’t learned regulation ourselves. It’s so important for parents to address their own fawning. By doing so, we take responsibility for our dysregulation and break the cycle of living in survival mode, teaching our children a different path forward.”
My New Year’s resolution for 2026 is to unfawn. Are you with me?
When my teenage daughter was in residential treatment for behavioral health challenges, she would tell her therapists about the time my husband kicked her out of his truck on the freeway.
That never happened.
The first time my husband and I heard her story, we were shocked and defensive. “How could she say something like that?” We asked the therapist. “Is she trying to hurt us?”
“Lying is a consistent problem for her,” the therapist told us. “We’ll confront her together in a family session. If she can’t be truthful, she won’t get better.”
Finally, all in one room, my husband and I demanded our daughter tell us why she made up negative stories about us. We restated what really happened: “When you yell at us, get physical in the car and threaten us, when you grab the steering wheel, or shove the car into park and your sisters are in the back seat, we cannot continue to drive. We’ll pull over and ask you to get out to calm down. We do that to keep everyone safe. We would never force you out on a freeway.”
Our daughter’s eyes glazed over, and she wouldn’t say anything or respond to us at all. My husband and I got more agitated, frustrated, and defensive. That session ended, like so many others, in radical disconnection.
Several therapists later, when we heard the same story yet again, I rolled my eyes. “I can’t go through this in another session, it’s a waste of time and money.”
“What about just listening to her?” said the therapist.
“What?” I said. “She’s lying.”
“But what was she feeling?” asked this therapist.
“What was she feeling when the thing that never happened happened?” I said, my body stiffening.
“We’re not going to enable her,” said my husband, reciting the counsel of so many experts. “She’s manipulating us.”
“Can you listen for the emotions underneath her story?” said the therapist. “Could that be the truth for her?”
I’m a writer, skilled in translating emotion into metaphor, and still hearing the therapist emphasize feelings beneath the narrative, my brain short-circuited. “You mean how would she feel if we had left her on the freeway?”
“Yes, can you picture that?”
I closed my eyes. I felt like I had to harness every brain cell in my head to even imagine my daughter abandoned on 101 North. “She would be terrified,” I said. “Totally alone.” When I spoke those words, I felt them. I finally experienced the empathy for my daughter that always eluded me when I pictured her on a tree-lined street.
In our next family session, when the freeway story came up, I blinked and saw her standing on the shoulder, cars whizzing by. “That must’ve been really scary,” I said.
“Yes, it was scary,” she said. She went on to talk about how lonely and sad she was, and how much shame she felt for acting out— this from a kid who would never tell me what she was feeling. And tragically, I spent so many years begging and ordering her to open up. Not long before that session, I’d written in a letter to her:
“Time and time again, we’ve asked you to be honest with us, to be specific about what is happening for you, what problems you face and how you work through them, but what we get is lies or half truths and you taking a victim role. We are not asking you to be perfect. What we need is for you to approach our talks with honesty, openness and authenticity, to feel the words that you’re saying.”
I was asking my daughter to choose to feel, as if that were a conscious decision she could make—and then I expected her to somehow summon the courage to share those painful, vulnerable feelings with me, her angry and frustrated mother.
In her new book, Fawning, Dr. Ingrid Clayton writes: “My brother once told his teachers in elementary school that our parents made him sleep outside at night, in the freezing cold. He said he curled up in an empty hot tub with nothing but the cover for a blanket. This is NOT what was happening in our house, but even as a kid, I remember thinking, that is genius. Because that loneliness, that fear, that neglect…was.”
When my daughter found her own ingenious way to share her internal world with me, I didn’t meet her with curiosity. I yelled at her for lying.
All these years later, I sound like I’m judging myself, and that isn’t my intention. I want to share how desperately I wanted to connect with my daughter, how much she wanted to connect with me, and how we repelled each other like magnets. Too many mental health experts and treatment centers push parents to create and hold firm boundaries in order to achieve behavior change, instead of showing us how to connect with our kids. Professionals handing down wisdom from mountaintops can’t guide us when they don’t know how to listen to us or our children.
Reading about the Reiner family tragedy, I was struck by a similar moment of clarity when the parents spoke about their son Nick’s history in treatment. In 2015, Rob Reiner told a reporter: “The program works for some people but it can’t work for everybody. When Nick would tell us that it wasn’t working for him, we wouldn’t listen. We were desperate, and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.”
Michele Reiner added, “We were so influenced by these people. They would tell us he’s a liar and he’s trying to manipulate us. And we believed them.”
My husband and I didn’t have a magical, instantaneous metamorphosis the first time we heard my daughter’s feelings underneath her words. We were still scared, defensive, and confused as we all muddled our way through recovery. But what shifted dramatically that day was our orientation, our goal, our North Star. We no longer prioritized fact-checking, scanning words for accuracy, evaluating for objective truth, and deciding how much we agreed with everything said. Instead, slowly but committed, we turned towards the principles of Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and began practicing empathic listening with each other. Developed by clinical psychologist Marshall Rosenberg, NVC centers on identifying feelings and the universal human needs beneath them. Rosenberg taught that conflict arises not from those needs, but from the strategies we use to try to meet them—and that when needs are heard, compassion becomes possible.
I have no doubt my family will spend a lifetime continuing to learn how to listen to each other, but all these years later, my daughter is happy, healthy, and though forever poetic, no longer depends on metaphor to risk expressing her truth.
Just after my 16 year old and I finished a college tour, she got a text from her older sister that she’d broken up with her boyfriend. She wrote back: Is this a prank?
We didn’t believe it was true because they seemed so in love and so happy. The text was not a prank and my daughter shared more of the complicated story about why and how she’d made her decision. I’m impressed by my daughter’s insight, awareness, and health. I wish I had that level of maturity at 22. And I’m so sad! I’m sad because I liked this guy and I’ll miss him. I wanted it to work out. I wish I could fix it.
Even after all I’ve learned—connect, don’t fix is my mantra—I would still love magical powers to skip over the pain, my pain, her’s and his too. I’d like to tell him exactly what to do to make everything better. Just a little advice. I want to go where I don’t belong to meet my own needs for comfort, ease, and joy.
I’m grateful I’ve learned Compassionate Communication and know how to differentiate my needs from her own, and also to have the self-compassion skills to feel what I’m feeling. And it hurts!! This is my first experience as a mom in this situation. Please share your stories if you have any.
If you’re interested in learning more about Compassionate Communication—also called Nonviolent Communication and Heart-Centered Communication—please check out my new web site Listen2connect. In the “About” section, you’ll see the story of what happened with my daughter and me that completely changed my life and led me to become a parent coach.
You can follow my coaching/ parenting on Instagram @listen2connectcoach and Substack @listen2connect.
Here’s a cut and paste of my story:
I discovered Nonviolent Communication when my own parenting felt stuck in cycles of frustration and disconnection.
When my daughter was struggling with behavioral health challenges I often resorted to yelling, arguing, and threats. I was scared for her health and safety. I didn’t know how to regulate my own emotions and show up as the resourceful, strong, connected parent she needed.
Over the next several years, my daughter had access to all kinds of mental health treatment including wilderness therapy, residential therapy, dialectical behavioral therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, family therapy, hospital stays, psychiatry, and a seemingly endless rotation of medications.
During that time, my husband and I started to learn Nonviolent Communication. I was intrigued by NVC but the skill set seemed like such a radically different modality than what we were learning from all the mental health experts. Rather than boundaries, rules, and consequences, NVC prioritized curiosity, compassion, and presence. I wasn’t sure if I trusted NVC or believed in it. I didn’t know if it would “work.”
Then my daughter was in a devastating car accident where she broke her neck. While my husband took care of our two younger daughters in San Francisco, I went to live with her in Utah as she rehabilitated. I finally decided to take the risk to fully embrace the compassionate listening skills taught in NVC. Nothing else was having the impact on my daughter’s health and safety that I kept hoping for. I realized NVC was something I could choose to do, that it was in my power to change my behavior, rather than continually focusing on how to “fix” my child.
When I met my daughter with curiosity, everything started to change. Instead of closing herself off in her room, she started talking to me about what she was feeling and thinking. I could sense her begin to trust me and open up. NVC teaches that these kind of relational shifts can happen when your child experiences inner safety. I felt so grateful that I was getting another chance to know her, to meet her where she was. During those weeks, she decided to start studying for her GED. As she took steps to focus on what she wanted, I learned to support her on her path instead of evaluating or judging how “successful” or “safe” I thought her choices were.
After that trip, I committed to fully immersing myself in NVC. I spent the next four years training with leading NVC teachers including Oren Jay Sofer, Roxy Manning, Ranji Ariaratnam, Kathy Simon, Kathleen Macferran, Sarah Peyton, Newt Bailey, John Kinyon, and Miki Kashtan.
My daughter did her own work as well, and now she’s thriving. She’s back in San Francisco, living in her own apartment, working, going to school, truly happy and engaged in life. All of her relationships are healthy and fulfilling. She’s also medication free except for ADHD meds. I know recovery isn’t a perfect line, challenges will arise, but what’s so different now is we have skills to stay connected, grounded, and centered through any ups and downs.
As I studied and practiced NVC, not only did my relationship with my daughter change, but all of my relationships became healthier, too. While my younger daughters didn’t experience the behavioral challenges my oldest did, they benefited by getting a more empathic, connected, calm mother. Recently, my sixteen year old shared that she now understands no one can “make you feel” a certain way, how emotions rise and pass, and that she wishes more kids her age could know what she does now.
I became a parent coach because NVC had such a profound and dramatic effect on my family, I want more parents get access to these life-changing skills more quickly and easily than I did. My hope is to support other families in avoiding some of the rabbit holes we went down that cost our family enormous resources of time, money, and energy. Listening to your kids is a such a game changer and a completely teachable skill, yet not enough parents know how.
NVC doesn’t just transform relationships—it transforms leadership. As a nonprofit founder, writer, and activist, I used to struggle with disagreement. I didn’t know how to challenge someone’s views without demonizing them. Just as I couldn’t really hear my kids, I couldn’t hear people who were offended by gay marriage or opposed to reproductive rights. NVC taught me to recognize universal human needs and to respond to others with more openness, empathy, and creativity in finding effective strategies to meet those common needs.
I can’t think of a more urgently needed skill set in the world today.
I’ve missed you. The world has been insane and so have I and I’m guessing you have too.
First of all, let’s celebrate that Reel Girl began long before #Metoo and everything written here, talked about here, discussed here, became FINALLY a national, an international conversation on sexism, misogyny, and the film industry. People finally seemed to make the link between men running Pixar and Disney and the plots of the movies created “for kids” being rooted in patriarchy.
Sadly, we also of course got Donald Trump and some of the most blatant and disgusting grab-her-by-the-pussy hatred for women in America than we have seen in decades. I guess some would argue, and this would include me, the hatred for women has always been here and right now, it’s less white washed. Overturning Roe v Wade obviously goes way beyond window dressing and having Trump and his followers in power rolls back rights so deeply, recovery will take a long time for us to overcome. But we will overcome it. We will overcome it together and we are going to start here by imagining gender equality in the fantasy world, because if we don’t have our imaginations, we have nothing.
Who is with me?
Welcome back. Reviews start soon. And we’re going to begin with favorite celebrations of fantasy books with female protagonists and female casts.
Let me know what you’d like to see me review. I’m planning on starting with:
*A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab
*Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi
*The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemison
Let’s get going. We have work to do.
Please follow me on my new Tik Tok, @reelgirlblog and IG reelgirlblog
Al Franken, Louis C.K., Jeffrey Tambor, Charlie Rose, John Conyers, Bill Clinton.
For feminists, our male allies are so few and far between, when we discover they’ve exploited others, we don’t want that reality to be true. We know from personal experience all the good things those men did for us, for women in general, we witnessed it, experienced it, and those feminist acts are incongruous with the harassment, abuse, and assault stories. The cognitive dissonance is painful and traumatic on every level. A part of us keeps repeating: “He never did that to me.” But deep down (why does it have to be so deep down?) we know: just because it didn’t happen to me doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Here’s a post I wrote in 2010, not long after a professional mentor of mine, a talk radio host, went to prison for possession and distribution of child pornography. At some point, I’ll blog my ideas about a coherent, strategic way for feminists to move forward as the list of progressive men who abuse grows as we all know it will. For now, I want to share this record of my experience when my hero fell. Please feel free to share your stories in the comment section.
Missing Bernie Ward
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Mostly, I miss Bernie Ward on Sunday mornings, when I hear “Godtalk” on KGO Radio. The first time I ever met Bernie was when he was hosting that show. I’d come to San Francisco from New York, just for the weekend. My sister was having an engagement party that I traveled to California for, and I ended up never going back home. I went to Austin for a while, as a PA on a film, and after that wrapped, I got a job working for Willie Nelson on an hour length music video. (As far as I know, that particular piece of art never made it to TV or even video.) Then I came back to San Francisco. I went to KGO to see if I could get a producer job. I’d worked in New York for Alan Colmes who had, at the time, a radio talk show out of a network called Daynet that used ABC’s studios. KGO was also out of ABC then so it all felt familiar to me.
KGO told me I could be a fill in, an on-call producer, which would probably entail late nights– Ray Taliaferro’s shift. And the weekends, odd hours. That was fine with me. I was twenty-six years old. I had no problem staying up all night.
So there I was at 6AM, light just coming up, and Bernie walked into his studio. He sat down and played a recording of “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes. It was beautiful. I remember thinking: this is so weird. How did I get here at 6AM, listening to “Amazing Grace,” listening to this guy talk about Jesus?
My mother is Jewish, my father is Episcopalian. I didn’t grow up with any religion. I was fascinated listening to Bernie go on about God, argue with the church, speak about the real messages of Jesus’ teachings, this Jewish carpenter, Bernie called him.
Not long after I met Bernie, a producer spot opened for his night time show. It was the most fun job I’ve ever had, and Bernie, in spite of his reputation as angry, cranky, or mean, was great to work with. He was kind, attentive, brilliant and hilarious. We had many disagreements, right from the start on the issues he discussed on air. I began working for him around the time of the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal. Bernie basically believed Hillary Clinton’s whole right wing conspiracy theory. Not that I didn’t believe that, I did. But for me, there was more to the story. I’d voted for Clinton as a young woman in my twenties, and I hated that this new kind of president, who I believed would do great things for women, had messed around with an intern. Instead of advancing powerful women, Clinton’s presidency was perpetuating antiquated sexual stereotypes that go back to biblical times i.e. a young woman’s sexuality destroys a powerful man. I was so tired of that same old imagery and pissed off Clinton was reincarnating it again. “Imagine if Madeline Albright was considered sexy because of her brilliance, position of power and stature. Imagine that her young male interns had crushes on her. Do you see the sexism now?”
“I never thought about it that way,” Bernie said, and he put me on air for the first time. It felt great to have my ideas amplified through that microphone, wafting out over the Bay Area. Bernie essentially disagreed with me, but he was able to see my point of view and then elaborate on it. That’s a talent few people have. He encouraged me to write down my thoughts. I started publishing pieces in newspapers and magazines. Then I started getting invited on TV programs– CNN, FOX News, Good Morning America. Bernie taught me how to debate, that it was OK to interrupt, that I only needed to have three points I wanted to make and to just keep re-making those points.
Producing Bernie’s show– a liberal, no-less– I realized how many more men called up than women, eager to go on air. Also, when I invited women experts to come on the show as guests, they often refused, claiming they weren’t qualified, recommending a “better” colleague, often a male. My experience at KGO inspired me to start a non-profit that provided professional training for women including media skills.
After seven years of producing the show, I left. That’s a pretty long time to be a producer in talk radio world. I had a baby, and initially my idea was that I would take care of the baby during the day and my husband would watch her at night. But I had no clue what being a mom was really like. I was exhausted all the time. I never saw my husband. Plus, I had my writing and the non-proft to work on by that time, and I didn’t really need KGO anymore. So I quit.
A couple years later, I got a call from Bernie. He told me that federal agents had come into his home and seized his computers; he would be charged with possession and distribution of child pornography. He was sentenced to almost seven years in prison.
Since Bernie has been in prison, I think of him often, but I haven’t written him or visited him. I can’t reconcile in my head the Bernie I knew and the Bernie that was accused of so many things. I think seven years is a harsh sentence for someone who did not create any pornography. That said, I can’t see how Bernie could look at those kinds of images and not feel anything for those little kids.
I’ve never had something like that happen in my life, watch a good friend, a mentor, someone I idolized, have his whole life fall apart. I hope I can write him. I’d like to be able to visit him. But for now, I just miss the Bernie I knew.
Because I’m so sick of the public referring to sexist people, places, and things as progressive or liberal, because sexism is everywhere and women are trapped in double-bind that is hardly acknowledged, getting little or no support from our “allies,” staying stuck in a matrix that doesn’t allow us to achieve real power, I came up with this list.
Reel Girl’s Top 10 List Of “Progressive” People, Places and Things That Are Sexist:
The New York Times When this publication broke the story about Harvery Weinstein’s chronic sexual harassment and assault of women, the report was illustrated with a photo of Hillary Clinton with Weinstein. That’s right, Weinstein’s behavior is Hillary’s fault. The NYT is also the publication that kept stories going about Hillary’s emails and the “corruption” of the Clinton foundation throughout Hillary’s campaign. Aside from Hillary, I’ve blogged extensively about the many instances of sexism in the stories of the NYT, from what they choose to cover to the sources they use to cover it. My complaints have been posted in Letters to the Times. Just do a search on Reel Girl to see my posts on sexism at the Times.
PBS I’ve blogged on Reel Girl about the lack of female protagonists on PBS shows for kids including the dominance of male characters on well-loved programs like “Sesame Street,” and how the “educational station” can be more sexist than the Disney channel.
Dr. Seuss With all of Dr. Seuss’s amazing creativity, the crazy-beautiful characters he drew, the names and the entire language he came up with, his spectacular imagination failed to stretch to include gender equality. Seuss’s characters are mostly male with even his crowd illustrations rarely featuring female characters. I’ve blogged a great deal on Reel Girl about Seuss’s sexism and though my blogs have been picked up and quoted by Jezebel (a “women’s news” site) Seuss’s sexism is rarely acknowledged. Seuss is a huge influence on childhood and it’s tragic that along with learning to read, kids are learning sexism, that it’s normal for girls to go missing. Recently children’s author Mo Willems signed a letter condemning Seuss’s racism but sexism isn’t mentioned in the letter.
My “progressive” male friends on social media: The men of Hollywood aren’t coming out to condemn Harvey Weinstein in the numbers that they should be, but what about my own male friends? While men I know and love regularly post about racism, police violence and other issues dear to their hearts, they rarely post about sexism and misogyny. My own posts about sexism rarely receive likes or shares or retweets from my male friends. Until our male friends join the fight for gender equality, prioritize it, consider it important, take action to support it, and stop being passive bystanders, women won’t get as far as we need to go.
My list is just a beginning, hopefully to publicize the wide reach of sexism and misogyny into almost every aspect of our lives. Feel free to add in my comment section your items of “progressive” people, places and things that are actually sexist.
You haven’t heard from me for a while. That’s because when I went back and read the draft of my middle grade fantasy-adventure novel, I realized I’ve become a much better writer. The good news is I’m a better writer! The bad news is I’ve had to rewrite the beginning of the book. While I’ve written for my whole life, I’ve never done this genre before, and I’ve gotten pretty good at pacing. While my earlier draft was bloated, so far, I’ve shaved 50 pages off of Part One.
Whatever happens with this book, writing it has changed my life. I’ve learned so much. Now, I understand optimism is essential to creating art for me. While this lesson contradicts the stereotype of the suffering artist, I’ve run into plot hole after plot hole, and now I see that with creativity, I can find solutions to my problems. I think this process may also involve what people call “grit” or just plain resilience.
Here’s another big lesson I’ve learned that has rippled into every aspect of my life. Beware of flattery. I’m not talking about being suspicious if someone gives you a compliment, but if someone compliments you repeatedly for specific character traits, how great you are at something and how essential you are in their life, how special, how necessary, how important, how amazing you are, it’s likely you’re not being loved; you’re being used. I’ve learned that this type of flattery keeps you locked in a role that you’re performing for someone else. Flattery such as this is the enemy of growth and growth is essential to making art.
One example of how “flattery” can facilitate confinement is how women are “flattered” for being “beautiful.” We get to be on covers of magazines if we’re “pretty,” but often what’s really happening is our lives are being limited to serve others. We’re being kept small.
To write this novel, I’ve had to risk doing things I didn’t feel I was good at, to fall on my face and get up again. I hope I’m still doing that when I’m an old, old lady.
