Space Between Counseling Services - Susan Stork, CST

01/29/2026

Hump day update 🐪✨
Chemo was supposed to start today. It didn’t.

Reasons include insurance, an overworked hospital system, snow days, logistics… and if I’m honest, a quiet part of me that wanted two more days to myself. So I watched. I observed. And somehow, I landed with a small bonus buffer.

Two unexpected days to tend to midlife realities: a teenager, a business, employees, a marriage, weather, roads, school schedules, feelings… and yes, W-2s getting mailed to everyone who crossed my path in 2025.
💭Memory lane, activated 🐍.

📬😅 thank you - could NOT do it without you 👯‍♀️

From here until Friday, I’m taking cues from my cat Peabody 🐈

Adopted in 2019 from a precious cat café rescue in Berkeley Springs, WV. SideNote: Peabody is apparently almost seven now. Time is fake ⏰

These are my last 36 hours with this hair, this version of my body, these particular cells. My partner in crime is away, so I’m solo-existing into this threshold (physically + spatially).

Not ideal, but familiar.
I’ve done what I can.
The rest is release 🌒

❣️Feeling held by the texts, voice memos, chemo shirts, and warrior socks.
Thank you for seeing me 🤍🧿

Cat nap mode activated for the next 36 hours 💤

01/25/2026

With a bird’s-eye view over Jones Falls on a heavy, snowy January Sunday, I keep wondering what the mill workers would have thought of a storm like this.

Before weather apps.
Before salt trucks.
Before the language of inconvenience.

These walls hold that knowing. Winters stacked on winters. Historic storms cursed and endured because there was no other option.

2003. 2010. 2016. 2026.
Baltimore storms of my time.

In Baltimore, snow still carries an industrial weight. It settles into brick and iron, asking us to remember who we were before convenience.

Buildings still standing.
Modern lights for the bling.

01/25/2026

Two days ago, a port was placed beneath my skin.

A small quiet doorway 🚪 so medicine can arrive without wrecking what it touches along the way.

My son and I decided it feels like a dog toy squeaker.
Minus the squeak.
Bodies are strange and oddly funny even when things are heavy 🫧

Wednesday is chemo day. Or maybe not. Baltimore snow likes to remind us who is actually in charge. ❄️

The body is preparing.
The nervous system is watching.
I am listening.

I am still feral with my hair.
And I am very sad.

Both can be true.

This is not bravery.
It is consent.
It is modern medicine meeting agency.
It is letting help in.

One step at a time. One infusion at a time. One weather report at a time.

🫶🏼🤘🏽🫂

01/25/2026

Before Alex Pretti was killed by ICE agents, he was helping a woman who had been pushed to the ground by other agents.

His last words were, “Are you okay?”

That feels like the most important question in America right now.

Especially for those who voted for this.
And especially for the 23 elected Americans who have the power to stop it.

Are you okay with American citizens being killed in broad daylight while peacefully exercising their Constitutional rights?

By all accounts, Alex Pretti was a kind, caring person. He loved his dog, the outdoors, and his country. My heart is broken. I am not okay. WE are not okay. ❤️‍🩹

From Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter today:

“As G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers wrote, Republicans could stop this at any time they wanted to.

All it would take to end the killing of American citizens by an untrained government force is 16 Republicans in Congress voting with Democrats to defund ICE or 23 to impeach and remove Trump, 3 in the House and 20 in the Senate.

That’s it.

Twenty three people could choose to vote 🗳️ for the public and end this.”

01/17/2026

Awayness meets reality.
#2026

01/16/2026

I keep thinking about Play It As It Lays 🐍
how survival is quiet
not inspirational
just staying
one breath
one day

Chemo is approaching
January 28
a low hum beneath everything

Somewhere in the background is Lust for Life
not the shine
but the ache of wanting to stay
to love
to feel beautiful while things are uncertain

I’m grateful our “16 year old”
for less than a week
picked Grand Cayman for his birthday
to answer a season of too little sunshine ☀️
and because our memories here began in 2017

Deep gratitude for the many loves❣️
friends
and family
who have shared this place with us
across these past nine years
each visit layered with laughter, salt air, and time

This is a season of roots showing
hair wild
body honest
no fixing
just letting it be

I’m playing it as it goes

There are no known guides for this chapter
so I’ll be the witness
with consent
with boundaries
with softness and grit

With gratitude to Joan Didion for naming endurance
and Lana Del Rey for soundtracking longing 🎧⏺️🪈

Still here
Still messy
Still salty

🐚 SMS

👇🏼📖✍️
Play It As It Lays — a very concise summary

By Joan Didion, the novel follows Maria Wyeth, an actress drifting through Hollywood and the desert after the quiet collapse of her marriage and inner life.

It captures the modern feminism of its time: women with choice and visibility, but little protection from isolation or collapse. Freedom, without a safety net.

Nothing is redeemed. Nothing is fixed.
The book is about endurance and accepting reality without forcing meaning onto it.

The title says it all: you live the life you’re given.

The title comes from a gambler’s phrase: you play the hand you’re dealt. ♠️♥️♣️♦️🃏🎰

For Maria, this means accepting reality as it is rather than insisting it make sense.

Didion refuses catharsis. There is no inspirational arc. The power of the book lies in its honesty: sometimes living means staying, watching, breathing, and not pretending the pain has a lesson.

🌑🔥📝 Swap Hollywood for Instagram, pills for wellness trends, and silence for therapy-speak and welcome to 2026, still playing it as it lays.

01/13/2026

Chemotherapy begins 1/28.

Between now and then, I am embracing my hair.
Big. Epic. Messy. Roots and all.

I am not going into chemo with damaged roots if I can help it.
I want to keep as much of myself as I can, if I can.
This is not vanity. This is agency.

I am letting my hair be wild and alive and uncontained for these next weeks.

Because this body has already been through enough.

I have never had someone close to me walk through cancer like this.

No roadmap. No mentors. No elders pulling me aside saying here is what helped.
So I am doing what I have always done.
I am paying attention.
And I am teaching in real time.

This awful, unwanted journey is becoming an education.
For those who want to learn.
For those who have never been close to cancer.
For those who are quietly scared.
For those who need language, timing, realism, and hope that is not toxic.

I am learning how to be the guide instead of waiting for one.
Apparently this is one of my roles in this lifetime.

And I am also learning something new and important.
I will not give my gifts away without consent anymore.
Thank you, s*x therapy, for that training.

This is me.
Rooted. Conscious.
Choosing how I enter this next chapter.

More to come.
🖤✨🌱

SMS

*** And yes for those who watched closely and paid attention
I do have a pet bird

She is a pigeon
Her name is Saffron

If you hear wings flapping or catch a blur overhead in the video
That is her flying above me

A small, ordinary miracle
Keeping watch
Adding her own punctuation to this moment 🕊️✨

01/09/2026

🧳 Disclosure: I want to share an update I never imagined writing. I thought I had a few more years before something like this could happen.

💭 Blind spots. We all have them.

None of us really know what the future holds.

I have been diagnosed with Stage 2B .

In my case, it behaved much like : quiet, hidden, not caught on routine exams. It was found because I listened to my body and pushed for deeper imaging.

The tumor was removed.
It weighed just under four pounds ⚖️

Over the next roughly 20 weeks, I will be moving through . Treatment weeks. Rest weeks. Showing up when I can, resting when I need to.

I’m not sharing this for sympathy. I’m sharing it for truth.

Modern medicine with agency and resources : is a gift 🎁

A gift I wish ALL had access to with the same agency and resources.

I am surrounded by cultivated love + long-term relationships that are tried + true. I am scared + steady at the same time.

This will shape my affect for the rest of the year. Some days will be quieter and slower. Please don’t take that personally.

Listen to your body. Early attention changes outcomes.

🛋️ Care + 🗓️ Scheduling Note

Previous clients: please reach out to my assistant, , if you have needs in 2026. Depending on the day and treatment cycle, I may be able to see you, but flexibility will be essential.

Current Clients: we’ll map out our needs in session 🛋️

New clients: all inquiries will also go through N***y. I will be taking on a limited number of cases in 2026, with specific timelines and fit.

Thank you for your understanding and for meeting this season with care and patience.

🔥✨🖤
SMS

🫂 I may not be able to respond to every message or DM. Quiet days are part of treatment and healing, not distance. Thank you for understanding and for holding me with care

12/18/2025

Here’s what many of us inside the work are quietly exhausted by 🫧

language has outpaced relational capacity.

In modern relationships, people often arrive armed with concepts instead of curiosity 🧠⚔️

Everyone knows the words now gaslighting, boundaries, attachment wounds, nervous system, trauma responses.

But knowing the language is not the same as knowing how to stay when things get tense.

And here is the part we do not say out loud enough 👀

💥We see the same pattern in therapists in training and yes even in seasoned clinicians.

When stress enters the room, skills often vanish.

People go quiet.
They retreat.
They cite boundaries instead of having conversations 🧱
They intellectualize instead of repairing 🪞

frameworks keep leaking into relational work and workplace systems where they do not belong. The result is not safety. It is fragmentation.

work asks more of us than insight.
It asks for tolerance.
It asks for contact.
It asks that we metabolize conflict without turning the other person into a diagnosis 🧬

Relational maturity is not proven by how fluently you can name a dynamic.
It is proven by whether you can remain present inside it 🌗

This is the work beneath the work.
The shadow seamstress stuff 🧵
And right now it is where many of us partners, clinicians, and leaders are getting stuck.



SMS

🔗 Link to article : if the other link gets trapped behind a paywall : https://web.archive.org/web/20251217112536/https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2025/12/therapy-speak-therapy/685218/

12/17/2025

Here’s what many of us inside the work are quietly exhausted by 🫧

Therapy language has outpaced relational capacity.

In modern relationships, people often arrive armed with concepts instead of curiosity 🧠⚔️
Everyone knows the words now gaslighting, boundaries, attachment wounds, nervous system, trauma responses.

But knowing the language is not the same as knowing how to stay when things get tense.

And here is the part we do not say out loud enough 👀

We see the same pattern in therapists in training and yes even in seasoned clinicians.

When stress enters the room, relational skills often vanish.

People go quiet.
They retreat.
They cite boundaries instead of having conversations 🧱
They intellectualize instead of repairing 🪞

Individual therapy frameworks keep leaking into relational work and workplace systems where they do not belong. The result is not safety. It is fragmentation.

Relational work asks more of us than insight.
It asks for tolerance.
It asks for contact.
It asks that we metabolize conflict without turning the other person into a diagnosis 🧬

Relational maturity is not proven by how fluently you can name a dynamic.
It is proven by whether you can remain present inside it 🌗

This is the work beneath the work.
The shadow seamstress stuff 🧵
And right now it is where many of us partners, clinicians, and leaders are getting stuck.



SMS

Link to article : if the other link gets trapped behind a paywall : https://web.archive.org/web/20251217112536/https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2025/12/therapy-speak-therapy/685218/

Therapists say that “therapy-speak” has invaded their patients’ sessions and lives—and it’s making things difficult on everyone, Olga Khazan reports. https://theatln.tc/SGJZv553

“Gaslighting” and “love-bombing” are just two of the terms that couples therapists told Khazan their clients are misusing, typically after seeing descriptions of the ideas on social media. But according to the therapist Terry Real, no phrase is used as frequently as this one: “I’m the spouse of a narcissist.”

“True narcissistic personality disorder is marked by, among other traits, an abnormally high sense of self-importance and a lack of empathy,” Khazan explains. “And in reality, it’s very rare.”

Still, the therapists Khazan spoke with said that their clients seem very sure this unusual diagnosis must apply to their spouse. “People are incredibly confident in these conclusions and are not curious, are not open to discussing them and figuring out if they’re accurate,” another therapist told Khazan. “They’re coming in as the experts.”

“Most of the therapists I spoke with said they are glad that people are learning more about mental health,” Khazan continues. But “before the advent of social media, people picked up these ideas in self-help books, psychoanalysis, and pop culture.” Now, therapists say, too many people are getting sucked into online posts about pop-psych concepts—and they misapply them to their own relationships.

“Spouses’ attempts to diagnose each other can become a problem in couples’ sessions, these therapists said, because they distract focus from the dysfunctional patterns that both members of the couple are likely perpetuating,” Khazan writes. As one therapist told her, these labels can, in effect, say: “I’m not gonna change anything about our relationship. You have to change your personality or change all your behaviors to stay with me.”

But therapy-speak language appears to be here to stay. “‘I’ve got issues,’ which originated decades ago as a psychological euphemism for ‘I’ve got problems,’ is now so much a part of the lexicon that it no longer registers as originating in therapy,” Khazan writes. “Perhaps ‘gaslight’ and ‘narcissist’ are headed there too.”

📸: George Marks / Getty

12/16/2025

A pause. A threshold. A conscious turning inward 🌒✨

I will be out of the office for the next six weeks 🕊️

I am definitively having a full hysterectomy and the removal of an 18 plus centimeter tumor 🩺🫀

The work ahead is healing.
Or healing while metabolizing the possibility of Stage 1 cancer 🌱

The likelihood of Stage 3 continues to lessen which feels like light breaking through a dense cloud ☁️➡️☀️
I am deeply grateful for the doctors who have walked beside me with steadiness skill and care 🤍

Lately I feel as though I have been dating three surgeons 😌
Surgical oncologists to be exact.

I never imagined this would be my evolution into deeper polyamorous ways but here we are 😅

It turns out even medicine is relational
There are conversations
Attunement
Trust
Choice 🔗✨

I am sharing this openly because midlife is where stories get mislabeled 🔍

Where symptoms get flattened into just hormones or just stress or just aging.

Jung would say the body carries the psyche when the psyche has been ignored 🌀

Toni Wolff would remind us that initiation often arrives unannounced 🔥

This was not just perimenopause.
This was an 18 centimeter teacher asking for attention 🧿

As of December 22 I am signing off for the year 📅
I was meant to be in New Mexico right now on retreat 🌄
To those who were registered thank you for your grace and understanding around the cancellation 🤍

Health reorders the calendar without asking.
I hope there is space in 2026 to gather again
We will see ✨

This is not disappearance.
It is incubation 🐚🌙🌑

I will still offer a year end reflection in our SBCS way.
Look for that either in the office or arriving quietly in your mailbox like a note meant to be read slowly 💌 🔥

Thank you for the care.
The witnessing
The steadiness
The way you have held me without trying to fix me 🤲

Cheers to 2026 🥂✨

We will see 🌱
SMS https://www.instagram.com/reel/DSVYjPXkSow/?igsh=ajJ4dXlpN21nejVh