Authors Reflections

Scanning the book list for a doctoral class several years ago, I noted the title, The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy, by Louis Cozolino, PhD. I felt intimated—it sounded intense, dense. Then I opened the book. Lou’s ability to impart scientific data within a user-friendly framework wooed me. As a reader, I have a tendency to develop a vision of the author responsible for the text. From Lou’s voice—his presence on the page— I sensed he was serious, focused, and highly intelligent with a technical vocabulary easily accessed but not necessarily his first choice. I read with a sincere interest in the content, a desire to learn and understand the concepts, and to get a feel for their application in a therapeutic setting.

At the same time I studied psychology and then, pregnant with our second child, trained and began my employment as a relationship counsellor, working with couples, who like us, were on the front lines in the trenches of early parenthood. Over the years, I took history after history of their relationship journey - hundreds of them - finding that we all had the same twists and turns: things change, in life and in love, after two become three, and that these changes inevitably have effects on a couple’s relationship. What I was also learning, both personally and professionally, was that how a couple manages the changes determines the future of their relationship. I remember thinking someone should write a book about all this stuff. I didn’t think it would be me.

Stanley wrote his landmark text, Emotional Anatomy: The Structure of Experience, to map the geometry of somatic experience in 1985. As founder and director of the Center for Energetic Studies in Berkeley, California (1971-today), Stanley developed his therapeutic and educational approach, trademarked as Formative Psychology, based on his methodology and conceptual framework for the life of the body. He has spent the past 50 plus years creating, teaching, researching, writing, presenting. He shared that it was time to bring his seminal text to life in a virtual way.

When her father was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer in 1994, Helayne Waldman knew it was lethal. She researched ways to support his health and did the best she could considering she was a layperson, not a practicing nutritionist. A single mom at the time, Waldman worked as a trainer in field-readiness and marketing for a database firm. Her father died in four months, planting a seed that Waldman later nurtured into a healing profession for people living with and dying from cancer.