Harvey D. Cottrell MSW, PH.D 25 LCSW

12/20/2025

We don’t grieve equally.

Some deaths invite silence, dignity, and careful language. Others become opportunities for outrage, mockery, or moral performance. In moments like these, the question isn’t what we believe, it’s who we allow to remain human. This reflection examines public grief, addiction, mental illness, and the dangerous comfort of moral shortcuts.

On grief, addiction, mental illness, and why accountability must not require dehumanization

12/20/2025

There is a particular kind of fear that doesn’t announce itself as panic.

It shows up as vigilance.

A quiet scanning of the horizon. A subtle tightening in the chest. A mind that keeps running small simulations in the background: What if something goes wrong? What if I miss something? What if it all falls apart?

The Way Knows the Way: Anxiety, Uncertainty, and Letting Go of Control

12/20/2025

There are days when impermanence feels like a threat—when change arrives not as possibility but as rupture. On those days, I don’t need a philosophy. I need practice. Something older than my thinking mind. Something that brings me back into my body and back into belonging.

The Ground Is Still Here: Impermanence, Anxiety, and Returning to the Body

12/20/2025

I’m launching The Weight We Carry — The Inner Room because I keep meeting the same sentence in different bodies:

“I’m tired—and I don’t even know why.”

Not the tiredness that sleep fixes.
The inside-tired. The braced-tired. The kind that lives behind the ribs and sits in the jaw and keeps the mind scanning even when nothing is happening.

People are functioning—working, parenting, leading, caregiving, showing up—but inside they are crowded. Overstimulated. Haunted. Holding their breath without realizing it. They can describe their lives clearly, but they can’t rest within them.

I am fully present in my body, embracing the sensations that guide my emotions.

12/01/2025