Good evening, everybody. Welcome to the show. We've got a great show plan for you.

I'm going to talk tonight about relational shifts, changes, and transitions.

Really apropos to what's going on in the world right now.

You know, again, these topics come from our DMs and also just things I'm seeing out in the world

and also in my clinical practice with patients. And there's a lot of transitions happening.

And relationally, that is, you know, grief and loss around the death or passing of individuals.

And, you know, that's born out of COVID and mass shootings.

And then there's even the symbolic perceived ones where people are talking about the loss of rights,

whether it's LGBTQIA rights, right?

You know, when we talk about don't say gay laws and teachers in different states,

I'm talking to you, Florida,

who have to take down rainbows,

which historically is a symbol of, you know,

queerness.

They're being asked to remove photos of them and same-sexed partners

and not allowed to even talk about who they are in the world.

We're not able to talk about the gayness of historical figures. I mean, that's violence,

but there's grief and loss in that. And violence, but we're looking more at grief and loss of

safety, confidence in identity, sense of self. I mean, without even getting too deeply into that

concept, think about how much that is an erosion of a sense of self and how much it's a

recreation of trauma where to be gay or queer or trans in our culture still is traumatic because we have in a homophobic,

transphobic culture.

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