Unless you live in a cave, you already know that the LGBTQ+ community is under fire by far- right groups working on a state -by -state level to enact discriminatory laws. But you may not realize how bad it is or what the issues are.

As someone who has been an activist and therapist in the LGBTQ+ community for over forty years, and whose practice has focused on trans, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming kids and young people for the last fifteen, the last two years have been a nightmare. It reminds me of the anti-gay backlash of the late 1970’s. And both then and now, the state of Florida has been the place where the backlash started!

Dr. Michele Hutchinson, a physician at the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Gender Spectrum Clinic, testified before the state Senate in March that there were “multiple kids in our emergency room because of an attempted suicide, just in the last week,”and that “since then, I have had one of my own patients attempt suicide.” The Institute for Personal Growth, the agency I led until 2019 and which is New Jersey’s largest provider of affirmative mental health care to transgender youth, reports more suicide attempts among patients, by an exponential factor, in 2021 than ever before- most by transgender adolescents and youth.

In 2004 I lost my daughter Jesse four days before her tenth birthday. For reasons of sheer survival, I went back into counseling right after Jesse died, after a hiatus of a number of years, with New York -based therapist Bruce Wood. Among his many skills, Bruce has a great deal of experience with post-traumatic stress, which I guarantee you ensues upon the loss of a child. My own process of stumbling back to semi-normalcy (one forever has a piece of themselves missing after a loss like this) has helped my practice and informed my beliefs about psychological theory in ways I’m just beginning to understand.

Lately I’ve been excited by this book I’m reading, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. And then last week I had an experience that highlights one particular aspect of ‘the power of negative thinking.’