Illuminating the moon: Discussion of Alyson Kepple's "Exploring, claiming and expanding the frontiers of an emerging self".

Alyson may already be sensing this intuitively when she writes: "I think it was important to [Kathleen] that I was willing to keep looking at her, seeing, feeling and acknowledging the hurt I had caused" (Kepple, [2], pp. 584-585). As testament to the power of Alyson's overall response, Kathleen wells up with tears which spill down her face as she feels Alyson's full recognition of her experience. I feel honored by Alyson Kepple's use of my 2019 paper, "Airless Worlds", to help her make sense of her patient Kathleen's life-long struggles with the sequelae of her parents' disappointed, frightened, and reflexively aversive responses to her from birth on. Alyson describes how she and Kathleen spent "a good part of our first year together exploring her somatic complaints in great detail" (Kepple, [2], p. 588). [Extracted from the article]