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Traci Ruble, MFT, San Francisco, CA (2026)

05/18/2026

I was in three different group spaces over the past two weeks and I kept noticing 𝘢𝘮 𝘐 𝘵𝘰𝘰 𝘮𝘶𝘤𝘩? plaguing me.

Groups are wild like that. If you haven't ever done group work, I recommend. It cleans out the psychological pipes for sure.

Today, in one of my long-term consultation groups (two years together, real trust), our consultant Rebecca Wong did something brilliant on this exact topic. She asked us to name out loud all the ways we monitor and hold back in group spaces. Then she had us turn those protection mechanisms into playful characters. A tree. A profanity phrase in another language. A cartoon character. A gesture.

"Out yourself every time you catch yourself doing that in our group with your playful thing."

OMG, we erupted in laughter.

And today's consultation with these badass, wise-as-hell therapists was way richer because nobody was holding back.

In the other training groups the last two weeks, I kept watching brilliant women say sorry before speaking. Every. Single. Time.

Here's what I think is happening:
Women in particular, but many of us often 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗳𝘂𝘀𝗲 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗮𝗯𝗶𝗹𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁. (read that twice. I now have a post it on my desk as a reminder.)

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗾𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗽𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗼 𝗜 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗯𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘀, 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗜 𝗯𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲𝗱 𝗶𝗳 𝗜 𝘀𝗮𝘆 𝗶𝘁?

I am not suggesting caring relational attunement is bad. It is wonderful. But if attunement to other people replaces or erases 𝘂𝘀, it is a problem.

I think empowerment means learning to stay boldly connected to yourself while staying connected to others.

Which is harder than it sounds, especially ESPECIALLY in groups. It takes nervous system skills and tracking the prediction errors your system is likely to make about group spaces, dealing with any attachment injuries you might have, and containing boundaries so you can be differentiated and connected in a group space.

𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗱𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗶𝗻 𝗴𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗽 𝘀𝗽𝗮𝗰𝗲𝘀, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 "𝗜'𝗺 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗼𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝘆𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳" 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗼𝗼𝗸 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲?

05/04/2026

"Hard-won rank is almost always the most defended." Words that came out of my own little mouth on this YouTube sermon I gave for 30 minutes. A couple of colleagues and former clients have egged me on to make these in the last few weeks, so I have made two now. Definitely helps me get clear when I speak things out loud.

I was up till 2am reading Arnie Mindell's conflict phases book and confronting myself about how much I like to restore harmony before the important stuff gets said. Process Work has been working this out of me for several years now.

So, watching credentialed therapists publicly going after other types of therapists, coaches, tarot readers, trauma healers, and unlicensed practitioners and calling it consumer protection had me reading Mindell, trying to sort out what was happening inside me and in our field.

We are definately moving into a bigger stage of conflict and I suspect it is because the Wellness Industrial Complex is getting some jet fuel from AI. But I have learned to say to myself "Traci go into the conflict with skill rather than avoiding or acting out. So that is what I am sensing here. We therapists got some stuff worth looking at and could probably make our work so much better and serve more people if we can hang in there in this conflict.

Mindell's framework from 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗳𝗹𝗶𝗰𝘁: 𝗣𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗲𝘀, 𝗙𝗼𝗿𝘂𝗺𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗦𝗼𝗹𝘂𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 and 𝗦𝗶𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝗶𝗿𝗲 maps conflict as a process, a series of phases, not some screwed-up style of communication that needs immediate calming down.

🌙 Just phases, like moon cycles. Every phase is necessary. Phase two is the one we therapists keep trying to skip or lack some skills inside of. And the people with the most rank in the room are almost always the ones most invested in skipping it, by the way.

I named my own blind spots in this video, including some things about my own rank and what I've been defending without knowing it.

30-minute YouTube sermon. Worth it if this is your kind of thing. Or click over and read the show notes in the description and you will get a decent summary.

📽️ Video link here: https://youtu.be/Hg3lUA_moBQ?si=PRWpz6zjL5xzoJy-

Thanks for talking with me about these ideas, friends.

04/30/2026

Okay, real talk: WAIP? I am avoiding futzing with a CRM database for volunteer work. These two weeks of thinking I have been having about this question is way more fun. So I gave myself permission to post, and then I have to do this icky database work for two hours. LOL Then a walk as a reward. Yay!

Here is my wrestling question that I would so love your magical brain thinking with me on:
"What is the difference between policing behavior and holding someone accountable?"

Other aspects I ponder atm related to the question:
1. Power and rank of the people in the interaction
2. What is happening in the nervous systems of the people in the interaction
3. What the context is (obviously, if a kid could get hit by a car from speeding in that intersection, policing may be really important).
4. Why do we police people inside our own group so harshly? Therapist on therapist, climate activists on climate activists, etc.

When my kids were toddlers, I learned this parenting thing: if you want a four-year-old to stop throwing blueberries on the floor, you can't just bark commands at them. You have to be relational first. Then name what you need.

I tested this. My youngest used to kick me in the shins when he was mad. Hurt like hell. I'd grab his leg and say: I'm going to help your body not hurt me. You're allowed to be mad. We just need to find another way to get your mads out without you hurting mommy.

It worked over time, and he has a pretty awesome relationship with his anger today. And I've noticed it works in most human systems.

Lately, I've been watching therapists police other therapists online, and every time I see it, I feel this specific kind of loneliness. I am someone sensitive to a void of relationality. I even see people who run relating projects relate this way (all impact, no relating).

I'm not saying policing is always wrong or that we always have the bandwidth to be relational. Sometimes you have to get firm.

But I am curious: how do you think about this distinction? And what are your values when someone is doing something that is not ok for you or isn't values aligned or is just plain dangerous?

04/29/2026

After my post yesterday on "why am I posting" and a comment I left on Rachel Wood's thread about more people turning to AI for connection, I found myself swimming in a question that drove me a little nuts: what is influence, and why are we so damn addicted to it? And more specifically, what has therapy's influence done to human connection and loneliness?

So I made a video. Unscripted, Invisalign out so no weird saliva lisp, and no research pulled in to sanction if my thinking is valid. Here is thlink: click or type it in: bit.ly/TherapyInfluence

Here's what I play with out loud: psychotherapy may have done something we haven't fully reckoned with.

We've built a culture that reserves its depth, vulnerability, and philosophical reflection for a therapist's office sometimes, and surveys its own behavior against a new set of commandments: good communication, emotional literacy, empathy (the psychological commandments, if you will).

Not so different from the Ten Commandments, when you think about it. Just secular.

And I wonder if that's part of what's making us lonelier. Self-surveillance. Self-editing. Saving our vulnerability for the blessed few.

My original hope for therapy was always that it would make people healed enough to be their weird, full, odd selves. Not flattened. Not palatable. Not American cheese.

The video is 14 minutes. No agenda, just thinking out loud. Think with me? I have more to say but just want to start thinking with you therapists, in particular.

04/28/2026

A few months ago I started doing a gut check about my social media uses. Before I post anything, I've started asking myself: WAIP. Why am I posting?

A few psychotherapist influencers have gotten in trouble lately for not pausing before posting.

I have been helped out by a pause and an inquiry around lots of things in my work and life.

So I ask myself questions before posting or commenting on stuff on social media these days:
Is it the part that wants to be seen as smart? The part that's a little bit pi**ed off about something? The part that wants to matter? The part that genuinely has something to offer? The part that feels she needs to save the world?
Sometimes it's all of them at once.

I do lots of somatic resourcing and parts work with these voices. Feeling them in my body with a big smile and a "Hello there, you need some care boo?"

I just added on Schema Therapy to my lovely STAIR Trauma Training so I played with my homework a bit and made this deck about the different schemas that could drive how/why we post. A lot of our posting behavior maps directly onto many core schemas.

Schemas are core emotional patterns that we often developed at a really young age. Totally wise and human but often we keep using them long past their expiration date.

I'm not saying only post from the pure place. I'm not a big purity person in general. But I am a choice and agency person and a little pause and a little inquiry helps me post from my values rather than old schemas. It is a fun growthful excercise to engage in while posting on social media. I dig it and have changed how I post. I'd rather be values-aligned than algorithm-aligned.

Swipe through and see if any of these land.

04/20/2026

I've been in a lot of spaces this week where people are taking up really big, painful topics in the world: violence, environment and AI in particular. Some are so beautifully relational, and some are shouty and non-relational.

And I keep seeing the same thing: the old operating system running underneath. Urgency. Progress. Reputation. Me vs You. Trauma. Policing.

Oh gosh, I feel the pull to act this way too.

But grief slows us down so we can be quickly effective, rather than move urgently from coercive ineffectiveness.

Grief helps us get honest with ourselves about what is ours to do. I know it sounds weird, but I am a little bit in love with the power of radical acceptance mixed with grief about our reality right now to resource us so we can birth a new next.

We need so much grief tending right now in community.

Who is doing this work well that you love? Tag em.

04/15/2026

This morning I felt an ache in the center of my chest as I reflected on endings: projects, relationships, groups, seasons. I could feel my mind jumping to analyze what I was feeling. I have a long history of not allowing a feeling until I understand why I am having it (that is an old nervous system regulation strategy lots of people use). And, in actuality, thinking can help us down-regulate emotions but...
..psychologically, we can use thinking as a defense mechanism to fix or solve our feelings in a way that is not helpful. Lots of folks are using AI this way.

Here is the big scoop: down-regulating and getting over the feeling isn't always the goal. Sometimes a feeling needs to be felt. Yes, of course, there are good reasons to think first: when the nervous system is too activated, and you need to titrate, or now isn’t a good time. Thinking can be a helper there. The trouble is more and more folks are using thinking to exit feeling (which is also exiting being an alive human) because many humans lack the skills to feel.

In STAIR, we practice the skills to first differentiate from the feeling. Notice where it lives in the body or an image or shape that represents it. No story or narrative. Stay with the sensation or image without becoming it. And let the feeling know you are there with it. “I am here with you. You aren’t alone.” And wait and notice (no analyzing).

Sometimes the feeling gets intense so you add regulation by opening your eyes: look around the room, push your feet into the floor, and let the feeling stay active while you witness calmly.

So often, what lives under our feelings is grief. Not self-pity grief, but completion grief. The grief of yeah, this is reality. This loss happened. This goodbye happened. This care was not offered. This inclusion was not offered. This thing I can't stop is happening. You stay reverently with the feeling, differentiated and witnessing, as a first step to contact your human experience. No diagnosing here.

I'm curious: when feelings arise, do you move toward them, or do you reach for something to explain them away?

03/24/2026

A colleague was presenting a case last night in my consult group. We noticed how, when therapists slip into a helper role with a client, we negatively impact the client's work. We're doing a lot of practice on this in my STAIR training with Juliane Taylor Shore right now, the helper or "fix it" moves that look like care but don't help.

According to my NARM training, many people who are drawn to helping professions learned early to hyper-attune to others as a way to stay safe in relationships. We got really good at orienting outward, but our orienting inward was underdeveloped.

Some memes call this "self-abandonment." Sure, ok. I like to think of it more as self-protection. We protect ourselves by focusing first on the world around us and fixing it, rather than attending to ourselves. To work with it requires some boundary skills (note: not the kind taught in pop psychology books).

The first is a psychological boundary: the practice of knowing that you have your own mind and that someone else has theirs. You can listen, be moved, be influenced, and still come back to: wait, is this mine, is it about me, and is it true? It's a discernment practice that lets you stay with your own mind instead of mind-melding with the other person's and reacting to get some space. It oddly allows for more connection.

The second is a containing boundary, which is less about the mind and more about feeling. It is about not letting a feeling run you and spill out on the other. For many without a containing boundary, they need to change people or the outside world to feel okay inside themselves. It's a fab recipe for burnout. The containing boundary is developed through a practiced gesture linked with your values and relational intention, repeated until it becomes a habit. It calms you and helps you choose how you respond to reality.

Here's why I think this matters beyond the therapy room.

I think community is built or broken at the level of how we relate to each other, and we can't relate if we don't have these boundary skills.

Psychological boundary. Containing boundary. Small practices bith big ripples to community building.

01/30/2026

Something I notice again and again in my couples work is how quickly people rush to accountability or reaction after conflict.

And I am making sense of this neurobiologically - rather than just teaching couples skills.

When there is a rupture via a tone shift misreading your partner's feelings, the nervous system often goes straight into threat physiology.

Heart rate rises.
Muscles tighten.
Attention narrows to all the bad stuff and all the good is forgotten.
The brain shifts toward protection via judging and blaming stories.

From that state, the courtroom litigation vibes begin.

Who is right.
Who is wrong.
Who owes whom.
Who needs to fix this first.

Winning, blaming, withdrawing, over-explaining, or delivering empty apologies become stand-ins for moving that threatened nervous system back into safety.

This is not people being jerks or being manipulative.
These are threatened nervous systems still in protective mode.

Most of us never learned how threat gets activated and what the mind does under threat.
So we reach for whatever strategy helped us survive earlier in life (the blaming, withdrawing, empty apologies, dominating etc etc etc).

Real repair starts when the body has been helped out of threat.

It slows physiology first.
It centers reconnection rather than verdicts.
It helps two nervous systems find each other again before the accounting begins.

From there, accountability becomes possible without collapse or performance.

Apologies land because they are carried by emotional presence.

If conflict keeps looping even after someone says sorry, it isn't because there is a jerk over there.

It is usually about a threat state.

Shift the state first.
Then repair can actually happen.

01/26/2026

Something happened this morning. I received some personal news, and my chest tightened, my jaw clenched, and my thoughts moved quickly into a clear and convincing story about what had happened and what it meant. In my body, that story felt true. (And it made me really think deeply about what is happening to my friends and colleagues in Minneapolis right now.)

My nervous system was under threat this morning.

When the nervous system is under threat the body takes over. So urgency replaces curiosity and certainty replaces complexity. This is not a failure of character or intelligence. It is how the nervous system is designed to work. Under threat, the brain prioritizes speed, protection, and coherence over nuance. That design keeps us alive. The problem is not the response itself. The problem is trying to draw conclusions or solve complex relational or systemic issues while we are still inside it.

This has also been shaping how I think about power, rank, and responsibility. Rank always produces nervous system threat. It can come from role, identity, expertise, access, or certainty (not just identity stuff). Because of that, responsibility follows impact, not intention.

One word of caution, and this is something I have to watch closely in myself. When we only identify as lower rank, we can miss the ways we still hold power. Unacknowledged power is one of the fastest ways to create threat in others and harm in a system.

When people enter communities with the institutional power to detain, control, or use deadly force people’s nervous systems are going to have less capacity. Law enforcement actions can quickly escalate threat and make people very very unsafe.

It is helpful to have awareness of our power and rank and its impact on nervous system capacity. Unawareness of rank increases reactivity and danger.

Using power wisely is about dignity, timing, and creating the conditions where nervous systems can stay online long enough for real understanding and change.

This is what it means to be "trauma-informed" or "nervous system-informed".

01/23/2026

I am getting ready to start STAIR Level 3 this spring, and I want to share something honestly.

I am actively practicing this work on myself as I learn it, and it has been wildly impactful after 27 years of personal therapy and 22 years practicing as a therapist.

Over the last couple of days I was working with something called status threat in my body. In plain language, status threat is what happens in the body when we feel dismissed, morally mischaracterized, or less legitimate in relational dynamics with folks with higher status, think degrees, identities, class, and so on.

Alongside that, I was also working with grief about injustice in the world, fear related to abuses of power, and the loneliness or attachment threat that can arise when it feels like we are carrying these things by ourselves. When any sort of limbic threat is high, many of us move into fixing, analyzing, or attacking as a way to regain control.

What STAIR is helping me move out of control into self-trust and integrated resilience (which is what STAIR stands for btw). This week, I practiced orienting to where I actually was in space and time, differentiating and labeling different feelings without soothing or solving, coming into relational presence with what is, and allowing my nervous system to finish a stress response that had been stuck in my body.

I am nerdy. I love psychological theory. I love thinking. And in both my clinical work and my own life, nothing has created more lasting change in my nervous system than experiential work.

STAIR is a method grounded in neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, and decades of trauma research. At its core, it is about meeting reality as it is and coming into power through contact with yourself, rather than power over.

If this resonates, you are not alone. Me too. And if you are a clinician or coach who feels drawn to this kind of work, it is not too late to join STAIR Levels 1, 2, or 3. I am sharing this simply because it feels profoundly helpful at a time when our nerves are frayed by the world. https://www.julianetaylorshore.com/stair-method

So much love everyone.

Traci Ruble, MFT

05/18/2026

05/04/2026

04/30/2026

04/29/2026

04/28/2026

04/20/2026

04/15/2026

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