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Traci Ruble, MFT, San Francisco, CA (2025)

11/17/2025

I have been writing up a storm. But then don't share. This is my accountability post to publish. Lol. I finish a B- draft, learned from the writing, and am like OK, no need to post it. At least I know I am writing to discover something rather than espouse something.

This quote made me happy from today's writing so sharing asap.

I so love nerdy psych theory, but my favorite part of my own analysis is to think together with someone. To relate. To sense make. Not from a diagnostic or academic or even wound place. And in that soup, wounds heal.

This is from a piece I wrote today. on Social Media and Status Seeking after engaging with some posts on LinkedIn on the addictive quality of status seeking on social media. I really wanted to take up Interpersonal Neurobiology and that even a healthy mind seeks validation. And why? But how those drives are preyed upon by algorithms.

I kinda love social media has made louder what the left brained dominance under capitalism's influence was already doing to us.
Wee.

But I have finished pieces on
1. The Neurobiology of Learned Helplessness

2. Psychadelics, Ego, and the Gifts Of Integration

3. Left Brain Dominance and Hierarchy of Humaness

4. An Analysis of Theoretical Elitism and Certainty Peddling in Psychological Theory

5. Play in Mental Health

For now, this quote hit me in the guts.

Oh, and...

You can follow my writing here: www.traciruble.com/blog

11/14/2025

I am a little obsessed with Ian McGilchrist again so pardon the obsession.

As I was reading Stephen Grosz's Love's Labor with full embodied savoring this came thought came to me.

We can't heal our with left brain only strategies. That is what hot us into the mess we are in.

11/12/2025

I was in a Christmas Shop last week here in Germany and we spotted this brown stuffed toy at the exit.

The person I was with giggled and said "What is that?"

I said "A pine cone?"

She said "Chocolate?"

She thought it looked sad. I thought it was cute and so soft.

Then we wondered, "Who would buy that? And for what purpose?"

We asked the shop owner, "What is it supposed to be?"

The shop owner shrugged and said "The tag says its a meat cake. But we aren't sure if that means meatball."

We left. A little delighted. Openly curious. And our linear minds were left in the dust. Someone thought to sell stuffed anthropomorphized meatballs at a Christmas Store. Huh. Cool.

And this experience came up in my own therapy today. Good therapy is often a conversation just like this. Not one that defines where the problem came from and how to fix it.

Good therapy opens us to a virtuous kind of curiosity and relatedness. Where we don't see what is wrong but rather, in a 3D Awe Embodied way make our own meaning. And that is the healing.

I said today "I am a little weird and don't fit in many groups easily" and I am really uninterested in trying to spend more years compensating for being a little weird or performing sameness. Next.

Sometimes, in therapy, we accept and move on. And it is a hell of a lot of fun when we do. I get worried with all this self surveillance so en vogue because of teaching psychological theory on media.

Embrace the meatball.
Be kind to yourself and others.
Next.

11/11/2025

Guess what?

I am seeing expats IN PERSON here in ... how cool is that?

11/10/2025

Nothing like wandering and listening to John Vervaeke on Meaning Crisis and Ian McGilchrist.

Right and left brain journey.

When we have a scarcity for meaning we become too fragile to deal with polycrisis.

❤️🇩🇪

11/07/2025

New Mischief Lab events being added. Sign up to get notified.

www.traciruble.com/mischief-lab

11/05/2025

I am being VERY VERY disciplined about making play/joy/awe/wonder a daily practice.

Yes, mindfulness, breathwork, exercise too.

But I have been getting droopy. Reading about "moral injury" in the DSM and opposing view, feeling ego material shouting at me like morning bad breath lately when I am on social media, and watching how so many ( eh hem, myself included) run out to read something to sense make. Not a bad think, but to slow down, digest, compost, let a new sprout to form requires a human to be humaning.

For me, I don't want to deny that the world is challenging, but there is a collective hypnosis of what Mindell calls the "low dream" getting a little stuck without some deliberate practices. The high and low dream support one another.

For example, not feeling seen is the low dream. Visibility is the high dream. Ego bad breath is the low dream. Transpersonal awe is the high dream. I loved recent substack on the Trickster Archetype. Shadowy figures in the world and politics may be pointing to our high dream.

One points to the other.

Sending love.

11/04/2025

I get it.
Psychotherapists want to protect depth.
Psychotherapists want to defend nuance.
Psychotherapists want to shield the sacred from being flattened into “5 steps to fix yourself by Tuesday.”

The moment we start deciding who is doing “real” healing and who isn’t, though, we slip into the same dogma and superiority we say we’re trying to dismantle.

Recently, I watched a therapist with a big following publicly drag Mel Robbins on socials, and while I understand the impulse (yes, pop psychology can be simplistic… yes, it can profit off pain), my insides felt curious and paused.

It wasn’t just a critique.
It looked like an enactment.
A therapist mid-transference… out loud… on Instagram.

The vibe is familiar - heck I am guilty of it sometimes (don't get me started on the 5 Love Languages 🤮 :
“My way is the righteous, sophisticated way to grow.
Therefore, you and the millions who find help elsewhere are naive.”

And here’s what I know:
𝗣𝗼𝗽 𝗽𝘀𝘆𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆 𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗯𝗲 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗼𝘄. 𝗔𝗡𝗗 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗹𝘆 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗵𝗲𝗹𝗽𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗶𝘁.

Both are true.

There is no single doorway into healing.
There never was.

𝗠𝘆 𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝘀 𝗮 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘀𝘁:
Curiosity > superiority
Humility > righteousness
Multiplicity > one good path
Love for the messy ways humans heal

I don’t want to win the “Most Enlightened Therapist” award.
I want to keep listening, learning, and making space for many paths home.

I’ve wondered whether the popularity of Mel Robbins’ 𝘓𝘦𝘵 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘮 is a kind of cultural correction. As attachment theory seeped into the mainstream, we may have drifted too far into the land of co-dependence and emotional over-functioning.

Maybe “𝘓𝘦𝘵 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘮” is the pop-psych version of healthy differentiation.

I haven’t read the book, Mel isn't my jam, but from the videos I’ve seen, that’s the theme I pick up, and honestly, it makes a decent amount of sense.

So "let them" heal however they want. For me, I do dig the deeper, messier, trauma-informed stuff. And that's cool if you don't.

11/01/2025

I had a recent psychedelic journey that surprised me with a lesson about joy. Not the float-away kind, but grounded-in-the-body joy. Not performing to be liked kind of joy, but a kind of gratitude, even for the hard stuff. I cannot explain it all yet. Plant medicine is weird that way. It puts your nose on a scent because it wants you to stay curious about something for a good long while.

For years at my spiritually minded grad school, the message I absorbed was that curmudgeonly parts meant low vibes or unhealed trauma. That being cranky meant you had work to do. Today, I had a crank response to something I saw on Instagram by practitioners I respect. After doing some inner work, I discovered in me a bunch of stuff wanting my attention. Some grief that these folks I admire see things differently, and it feels cozier to agree. Some projection of material in me I do not always dig. Some flag of discernment saying, "Yeah, look into those ideas more before you buy them or deny them."

I actually wrote my master's thesis on anger in grad school, trying to stand up for my curmudgeonly, judgmental parts. And what I learned is that these feelings are not "low vibes" but a sign that something matters. A spark of self-trust. When I hold my curmudgeon with joy, she has wisdom to share. But getting good at sense making a curmudgeon's wisdom takes some practice without getting black or white in our thinking.

I see this curmudgeon as a cheeky old aunt inside of me who cares deeply. I call her Aunt Edna.

In Object Relations Theory, honoring Aunt Edna is related to what is called the depressive position. Not depression. Depressive as in being able to hold ambivalence, complexity, and contradictory parts of ourselves without making any of them bad. It is a sign of healthy differentiation between different parts of our personality and staying a healthy 'me' in a big group of 'we'.

So my current practice: joy with roots that allows my curmudgeonly edges instead of becoming a "kindness and high vibes bully" to myself. If you have a little cranky truth-teller in you too, may they be welcome at the table, not as a flaw, but as part of your aliveness.

Aunt Edna is quite helpful now that I do not scold her for "being negative." Instead, I say, "Oh, thanks for getting my attention with that little jab in the side. Tell me what you are seeing, girl."

10/31/2025

What if your business, your voice, your creativity did not have to be well-behaved?

I am practicing moving from my highest possible joy and my ethics and values.
Not from capitalism’s anxious voice.
Not from collapse energy.
Not from moral self-policing or “good girl” conditioning.

Joy with responsibility.
Joy with integrity.
Joy that does not abandon the world, but feeds my ability to meet it with care.

This Clever Fox has become a little symbol for me. Mischief as medicine. Curiosity as wisdom. Play as power. I even built a GPT for my upcoming couples course called Clever Fox. I made it because it felt fun and alive, not because someone said I should.

I am learning that when I follow joy rooted in values, I find my truest voice. I return to aliveness. I create from meaning instead of fear. And my work feels like art again instead of performance.

That is what this first Mischief Lab playshop is:
A space for therapists and healers to explore voice and desire without the shadow of capitalism or collapse or the pressure to be morally flawless. A space where we experiment with visibility, creativity, business, and belonging through play instead of pressure.

If you want to practice being a little more fox and a little less obedient, come join us.

And stay tuned for upcoming playshops:
Bad Therapist Charades (online for therapists only)
If I were in charge of the world. (online) (in person in Heidelberg)
Dream Collaging for the new year. (online)
Together Time for couples (in person in Heidelberg) and again in Austin, Texas in February.

First Mischief Lab
This Monday, Nov 3
Online
Pay what you can
https://www.traciruble.com/sales-person

We grow through play. We act from values. We create from joy. Let’s remember how alive we get to be. The world needs this from us right now.

10/30/2025

I woke up this morning outlining Monday’s very first Mischief Lab for therapists and healers. It will be online and full of creative sparks. Later today, I am getting brave and walking to a new restaurant to use my terrible German to ask for a space for Together Time, my first in-person Mischief Lab, where I will MC play for couples. (Thanks to the Art of Hosting Community for helping me plan this one.)

The Mischief Lab is not a revenue project for me. I feel called to build joyful connection. I believe in play as growth. I use it with my clients. With my grumpy teens. With my business. With my friends. With my marriage.

The Mischief Lab is a place to co-create through play, explore, and break a few rules in service of aliveness.

It will always be pay-what-you-can. Not as a performance of being “good” or anti-capitalist or because we should do anything in one particular way. But because my heart wants to play with you and this feels like an honest exchange.

Why start with therapists? You are my people. And honestly, there is so much pressure in our field about how to show up online, how to sell, how to market, how not to market. So many rules. So many scripts.

I do not want more “should.”
I want pirate ship energy.

When I was seven, I played pirate ship on the playground with Michael Schmidt. I can still smell the wet bark and feel my soaked pant legs and remember how we tied our sweatshirts on our heads as pirate hats. No rules. Sweaty flow. A passionate “look what I found” kind of joy. That is the energy I want here.

Marketing does not have to be shameful or performative or narcissistic. It can come from curiosity and delight instead of fear.

Come play.
Come explore your voice and desires without the shadow of capitalism, collapse, or moral self-surveillance.

We need therapists who feel free and alive right now. Join me.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗠𝗶𝘀𝗰𝗵𝗶𝗲𝗳 𝗟𝗮𝗯
First Playshop for Therapist Online - Monday, November 3
Pay-what-you-can
📌 https://www.traciruble.com/sales-person

10/27/2025

The Mischief Lab was born out of how pressury, competitive, and capitalistic “growth” has become.

Everywhere you turn, someone’s telling you how to heal faster, brand your authenticity, optimize your nervous system, and hustle your way to enlightenment.

But the stuff that really needs tending, the old, limbic, trauma-imprinted stuff, doesn’t respond to pressure.

It responds to play.
To slowness.
To laughter in a room full of other humans.

We don’t grow by climbing.
We grow by connecting.
And goodness, do we need that right now, before AI spoon-feeds us every answer and we forget how to stumble toward our own wisdom together.
(I love AI, but come on… we’re starting to look like infants at the algorithmic breast.)

The Mischief Lab is my experiment in bringing back the messy, social, embodied side of being human.
A playground where we explore and grow, not by being better, but by being real.

Our first experiment is for therapists, coaches, and healers:
Therapist as Salesperson — A Mischief Lab Playshop
🗓️ Mon, Nov 3 · 11:30am PT / 8:30pm CET
⚡ One-time only
Sign Up Here: https://www.traciruble.com/sales-person

Join the mischief. Let’s play our way back to something human.

Traci Ruble, MFT

11/17/2025

11/14/2025

11/12/2025

11/11/2025

11/10/2025

11/07/2025

11/05/2025

11/04/2025

11/01/2025

10/31/2025

10/30/2025

10/27/2025

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