Ever since we moved to California, I’ve been seeking some sort of community for my son Adam, who, as many of you know, has Down syndrome. I haven’t had much luck.

Most of our neighbors are wild animals, and there’s no well-developed special-needs program among the bobcats and the bears I’ve met so far. Even nearby towns don’t have many activities for people with special needs.

It finally occurred to me that I wasn’t walking my talk in this area. I’ve been feeling like a defeated little critter, unable to access an existing program or structure that would meet my family’s [...]

You may think that a huge carnivorous dinosaur would be a good animal totem. It’s so strong and sassy and rambunctious. But in truth, T-Rex energy is the ultimate inner lizard, the totem of fight-or-flight reactions so severe they’ll cause you to burn down your house because there’s a spider in the basement.

As you can see from this totally un-Photo-Shopped photograph of me on my ranch, I myself have a Tyrannosaurus Rex as a totem. (The one pictured was sent to me recently by an anonymous donor. Probably Jesus.) If T-Rex is your totem it will look much like [...]

Photo by Amanda Hatfield

Boris came to me at the behest of his new girlfriend, Cecily, whom I’d known for years. Since most people dislike being pushed to see any sort of adviser, I expected Boris to be reticent, if not downright hostile. How wrong I was! After a few minutes of chitchat, Boris himself raised a very personal issue.

“I know why Cecily’s confused,” he said sheepishly. “We’ve been dating for months, and we still haven’t slept together.”

“Okay,” I said cautiously, not wanting to disrupt a delicate moment.

“You see,” Boris said, looking at the floor. “Ten years ago I had [...]

Our animal totem for this month, the Lemming, is a cute little thing—perhaps too cute for its own good. Lemmings reproduce in such numbers that every four years or so, their population density becomes so extreme that they all flee to the suburbs—which is problematic because they have no cities. When they encounter a body of water, such as the Pacific Ocean, they try to swim it. They fail.

Lemming energy is fixated, obsessive, and frazzled. If Lemming has tunneled its way through the yurt walls of your life, this is a good time to find a public space such [...]

My client Francine’s husband had started behaving oddly. “I’ll do something ordinary, like offer to check his e-mail for him, and he’ll react as if I’ve killed a child,” she said. Another client, Selma, was a sunny optimist—except when her sister Eve called to complain about life; by the time they hung up, Selma was always exhausted and depressed. Meanwhile, my friend Pamela was getting blindsided at a public-speaking workshop. “I gave a speech that went really well,” she told me, “and then this other woman got up and spent her whole speech mocking everything I’d done wrong.”

Let’s call [...]