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 to simply have someone else there on the other end of the line.

I remember once hearing an interview with a sportscaster who had a late night sports radio call-in show. A woman called him, not knowing who he was. She was in crisis and thought she had reached a crisis line. The man stayed on the phone with her, on the air, for two hours, until he was able to get someone there to help her. She lived many years after that.

The interviewer asked the sportscaster how he knew what to do. He replied he did not really know, but when he was young he grandfather had died in a similar crisis. The experience was healing for him as well.

In AA, "It is a permanent "solution" to a temporary problem."

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 about her most recent research exploring sensory systems, so very relevant to neglect and every kind of trauma. She is also a prolific author of hundreds of papers and three great books. The work she is now studying is called SMART, Sensory Motor Affect Regulation Training. I am eager to try it myself!

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 researchers agree, that the primary other is the infant’s first love, and the loss or absence of that other is profoundly tragic and indeed traumatic.

That is a theme running through Sebern Fisher’s new memoir, The Hidden Book of First Things, written from the standpoint of therapist, patient/client, mother, profoundly traumatized, dramatically healed and enthusiastic practitioner and recipient of powerfully effective neurofeedback.

Sebern is our guest in this week’s episode, where we discuss neglect, which she prefers to call absence; the book; Neurofeedback, and many other subjects including recollections of our relationship which goes back to 2009.