When I have the thought or hear the advice that I should be grateful for something, what rises in me is not gratitude, but obligation. And obligation elicits in me not gratitude, but resentment.

Though I deal with delicate issues every week as a therapist, I've increasingly noticed how I'm also walking on eggshells with certain friends and acquaintances about hot-button issues. I’ve lived most of my life with friends and family members who disagree about religion or gender, about war and peace, or who come from differing sides of political issues. In the past, we could be comfortably safe with one another despite such disagreements. But things have changed.

It is difficult to talk about all of this reasonably. Whatever our convictions, our hair is on fire from the carnage and horror that we’re witnessing, each of us from our own perspective. So whatever we say, there are those who will find us absolutely wrong or only partially correct when complete prejudice is required. When your hair is on fire, nuanced reasoning and any form of empathy go up in smoke.

For years, I could find God’s responses in the scriptures I read every day, in worship on Wednesday nights and twice on Sundays. But such unmediated contact with God is no longer my experience. The breeze has stilled. I feel no hand on my heart. My prayers, long unanswered, now go unspoken. What happened between God and me?

Deep therapeutic relationships always stir up in the therapist and the client fears and expectations that took root in our pasts and have been nourished, for better and for worse, throughout our history of relationships. Not surprisingly, these past experiences often show up in both the client’s reactions to the therapist and the therapist’s reaction to the client. The technical language for these processes in therapy is transference and counter-transference.

During this summer of Barbie and Taylor Swift, I was captivated by a nine-year-old Irish girl named Cait. She is the central character in the film THE QUIET GIRL, Ireland’s entry in this year’s Academy Award competition for Best International Feature Film. She lives in a working-class farm family in rural Ireland, but it is the world inside her – alone, afraid, confused – that first drew me to her.

The injustice of the world is not new - but perhaps there is something new under the sun, and it’s a deeper capacity in me to not just sympathize with the plight of those who suffer and to work on their behalf, but to truly expand my own inner sense of self, to imagine myself in other bodies, other identities, other life paths, and to stretch the bounds of my imagination to encompass the many Rick Thynes I might have been, had the accidents of my birth placed me in different circumstances.

I’ve aged out of volleyball and surfing, and I’m finally wise enough not to fry myself in the sun. Still, even now, I measure the seasons of our family calendar by the schedules of our school-aged grandchildren, which means that when June comes, summer’s here. It's still not easy to tend to my delight, but I try.

In our first few therapy sessions, Louisa sketched out for me her remarkable credentials. Like her father and uncle, she’d graduated at the top of her class with an MBA from Harvard Business School and, as her mother wished, joined the two of them in the family’s investment firm. Her friends were thrilled by her success at Harvard, as they had been when she’d graduated at the top of her class from a prestigious private high school, and when she’d earned her Bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale. She accepted their tributes but felt none of the joy for herself. At every level of her education, being first had been what was expected of her: not a cause for joy but relief at having not failed.

Becky invited me to a high school dance in May, 1959, when she was fifteen years old and I was seventeen. We got to know each other during conversations in the high school courtyard. She was in fifth period student government, and was often left to her own devices as a responsible young person. I, on the other hand, cut class to hang out with her.

For the past decade, there has been this moment in our worship service that leaves me quite literally speechless. I have nothing to say when the priest invites us to confess our sins. I think of confession as naming as much as I know of myself in the moment, with non-defensive clarity, owning up to the truth about who I am and what I do. And in this worshipful silence, my mind cannot conjure anything about me that rises to the level of sin.