Traci Ruble, MFT

12/18/2025

Ever notice how being told “don’t take it personally” does absolutely nothing for your nervous system?

I wrote a piece about trauma language, fragility, cross-cultural shock, and why thinking your way out of triggers doesn’t actually work.

This isn’t about being fragile.
It’s about building capacity without shaming the body.

📙 Read my latest long form essay and a great paint by numbers on how to show up for yourself and others when someone is triggered. https://www.traciruble.com/blog/has-trauma-language-outpaced-healing-fragility-capacity-and-the-nervous-system

12/11/2025

How do you play with yourself? 😏

(Yes, I said it. Mischief Lab was never going to arrive quietly or without mildly inappropriate innuendo.)

For the last two years, I’ve felt a tug (more like a trickstery inspiration we**ie) pulling me toward creating a space where we stop trying to optimize or fix or be productive… and let soulful creativity do its magic instead.

I’m someone who stands between worlds: shadow and light, joy and grief, left and right, sacred and absurd.

Humor and play are how I’ve always helped people belong -->to their bodies, to the land, to each other.

And for real? In a time when everything feels like a performance review, play is prevention medicine. It restores the brain’s flexibility, softens polarization, and lets our intuition breathe.

So… I’m building Mischief Lab --- with you all.

Not “workshops.” Labs. Experiments. Portals.

Pay what you want-->$0–$40, online + in person in Heidelberg.

And I want you in the creative chaos with me.

✨ What kinds of labs would you love to see?

✨ Want to co-create one with me? Tell me in the comments.

And… the very first lab is open to all:

Dec 28 – Collaging From Essence.

Not resolutions. Not “new year, new you.”

https://www.traciruble.com/mischief-lab

Bring your creativity and intuition showing you what they want for you in the year ahead. And I like to make folks feel included and safe even if play isn't totally natural to you.

Let’s play with our lives a little. Maybe a lot. Share your ideas in the comments. Share the post. Sign up to get lab updates. Co create a lab with me.

12/10/2025

12/06/2025

Psychotherapy is a field in transition right now.

Scott Galloway’s “Cult of Psychotherapy” article stirred something in me, not because he’s wrong, but because I’ve been asking these questions for years. I am allergic to anything that starts smelling like a cult, including my own profession.

And yet… I’m still here. And I still believe in this work.
I don’t want to be a therapist who helps people “feel good” or “think positive” or “never burn out again.”

That is not therapy.
That is marketing.

What I do want is to help people make the changes they actually want in their lives, even if those changes aren’t the ones they initially imagined. Most people walk into therapy assuming healing means not feeling badly anymore. But real healing is the opposite. It asks you to feel what you feel, think what you think, and see how your life shaped your patterns, your nervous system, your relationships, and your defenses.

Not so you can fix yourself.
So you can free yourself.

I don’t tell people what to do. I help them come into regulated, coherent contact with all the parts of themselves so they can relate honestly, choose consciously, and live a life that isn’t run by fear, performance, or inherited social roles. We make meaning. We orient toward values. We reclaim authorship.

And yet therapy has a shadow.
It can drift into priesthood.
It can reinforce dependency.
It can get swallowed by trending language on social media.

And soon, AI will be shaping the public imagination of therapy almost as much as Instagram already does.

I’m here for innovation, imagination, and growth.
But I also hope we can have grown-up conversations about what therapy is, what it is not, what it should evolve into, and what we must protect as sacred.

Because therapy, at its best, is not a cult.
It’s two humans making room for the truth.

11/29/2025

What a gorgeous book of case studies by such a brilliant psychoanalyst.

Not a psychological paint by numbers. Reads like a novel.
Touches your heart.
Makes you reflect.

I am working on a piece on going no contact or family estrangement and considering estrangement as a collective unconscious communication was illuminating to apply.

Piece will be up later today.

I am really enjoying wrestling with ideas and writing after an 8 year hiatus from writing. I really enjoy it.

My dream would be to share an office with another therapist for only writing and talking about our writing. Wouldn't that be fun?

Until then...

11/26/2025

Maybe we don’t need to spend so much energy avoiding loss.

That was the concluding sentence my analyst offered me this morning.

I’ve been deeply integrating my own clinging to certainty, the rush to “figure it out,” to find answers, and how that rush is really a defense against human helplessness.

It’s not that we shouldn’t materially address the real problems of the world. It’s that this grasping, this returning again and again to fixity, tries to turn the human soul into a machine. It tries to turn the lived process, with all its mystery, into ten commandments of righteous living, or into the story that “healing” means going from broken to unbroken. That framing is a loss in itself.

A grief rose in my system. A whole constellation of losses surfaced: lost time, leaves falling in forests I didn’t walk through, loss of peace, loss of rights, loss of love, loss of presence. The list kept growing.

I told him I had just watched the recent documentary about the final chapter of Andrea Gibson’s life. I read their poem Tincture to him. In Andrea’s embrace of loss, an embrace with no resistance, they seemed to have nothing left to protect except their commitment to loving life. (I recommend. It is powerfully uplifting despite the subject matter.)
Poem: https://poets.org/poem/tincture

My analyst nodded. “Yes, loss is inevitable. So maybe we don’t need to make avoiding loss a lifelong project.”

We smiled. Because that really is what so many people come to therapy hoping for, that somehow therapy will teach them how to avoid loss. But the deeper truth is that we eventually learn we cannot. And once we stop trying, we can love life with all its beauty and all its painful, ordinary loss.

This Thanksgiving holiday, I will have a house full of my sons' teenage friends here in Germany, doing the traditional US food and savoring the bittersweetness of children becoming adults and the glorious loss that comes with loving a child into adulthood. I am grateful for the privilege.

Happy Thanksgiving.

11/25/2025

I have been savoring.

Not sure if you do this, but I sometimes consume information as opposed to savoring wisdom.

I doodled this while savoring a convo with Ian McGilchrist, John Vervaeke, and Daniel Schachtenberg.

That after wandering listening to an interview on Meaning with John Vervaeke.

And these two questions seemed important to add to the drawing and doodling around them seemed to imprint them permanently on my heart.

What do you want to exist even if you don't?
How do you contribute to it now?

I didn't answer the first at all in alignment with how I spend my time...well most of it.

First answer was nature. Human kindness was a close second.

Anyway, hope you are savoring wisdom, making art, and answering John's questions today.

💕

11/17/2025

I have been writing up a storm. But then don't share. This is my accountability post to publish. Lol. I finish a B- draft, learned from the writing, and am like OK, no need to post it. At least I know I am writing to discover something rather than espouse something.

This quote made me happy from today's writing so sharing asap.

I so love nerdy psych theory, but my favorite part of my own analysis is to think together with someone. To relate. To sense make. Not from a diagnostic or academic or even wound place. And in that soup, wounds heal.

This is from a piece I wrote today. on Social Media and Status Seeking after engaging with some posts on LinkedIn on the addictive quality of status seeking on social media. I really wanted to take up Interpersonal Neurobiology and that even a healthy mind seeks validation. And why? But how those drives are preyed upon by algorithms.

I kinda love social media has made louder what the left brained dominance under capitalism's influence was already doing to us.
Wee.

But I have finished pieces on
1. The Neurobiology of Learned Helplessness

2. Psychadelics, Ego, and the Gifts Of Integration

3. Left Brain Dominance and Hierarchy of Humaness

4. An Analysis of Theoretical Elitism and Certainty Peddling in Psychological Theory

5. Play in Mental Health

For now, this quote hit me in the guts.

Oh, and...

You can follow my writing here: www.traciruble.com/blog

11/14/2025

I am a little obsessed with Ian McGilchrist again so pardon the obsession.

As I was reading Stephen Grosz's Love's Labor with full embodied savoring this came thought came to me.

We can't heal our with left brain only strategies. That is what hot us into the mess we are in.

11/12/2025

I was in a Christmas Shop last week here in Germany and we spotted this brown stuffed toy at the exit.

The person I was with giggled and said "What is that?"

I said "A pine cone?"

She said "Chocolate?"

She thought it looked sad. I thought it was cute and so soft.

Then we wondered, "Who would buy that? And for what purpose?"

We asked the shop owner, "What is it supposed to be?"

The shop owner shrugged and said "The tag says its a meat cake. But we aren't sure if that means meatball."

We left. A little delighted. Openly curious. And our linear minds were left in the dust. Someone thought to sell stuffed anthropomorphized meatballs at a Christmas Store. Huh. Cool.

And this experience came up in my own therapy today. Good therapy is often a conversation just like this. Not one that defines where the problem came from and how to fix it.

Good therapy opens us to a virtuous kind of curiosity and relatedness. Where we don't see what is wrong but rather, in a 3D Awe Embodied way make our own meaning. And that is the healing.

I said today "I am a little weird and don't fit in many groups easily" and I am really uninterested in trying to spend more years compensating for being a little weird or performing sameness. Next.

Sometimes, in therapy, we accept and move on. And it is a hell of a lot of fun when we do. I get worried with all this self surveillance so en vogue because of teaching psychological theory on media.

Embrace the meatball.
Be kind to yourself and others.
Next.

11/11/2025

Guess what?

I am seeing expats IN PERSON here in ... how cool is that?

11/10/2025

Nothing like wandering and listening to John Vervaeke on Meaning Crisis and Ian McGilchrist.

Right and left brain journey.

When we have a scarcity for meaning we become too fragile to deal with polycrisis.

❤️🇩🇪