What are the opening hours?

Tuesday 4am - 2pm Wednesday 4am - 2pm Thursday 4am - 2pm Friday 4am - 2pm Saturday 4am - 2pm

Traci Ruble, MFT, San Francisco, CA (2026)

04/20/2026

I've been in a lot of spaces this week where people are taking up really big, painful topics in the world: violence, environment and AI in particular. Some are so beautifully relational, and some are shouty and non-relational.

And I keep seeing the same thing: the old operating system running underneath. Urgency. Progress. Reputation. Me vs You. Trauma. Policing.

Oh gosh, I feel the pull to act this way too.

But grief slows us down so we can be quickly effective, rather than move urgently from coercive ineffectiveness.

Grief helps us get honest with ourselves about what is ours to do. I know it sounds weird, but I am a little bit in love with the power of radical acceptance mixed with grief about our reality right now to resource us so we can birth a new next.

We need so much grief tending right now in community.

Who is doing this work well that you love? Tag em.

04/15/2026

This morning I felt an ache in the center of my chest as I reflected on endings: projects, relationships, groups, seasons. I could feel my mind jumping to analyze what I was feeling. I have a long history of not allowing a feeling until I understand why I am having it (that is an old nervous system regulation strategy lots of people use). And, in actuality, thinking can help us down-regulate emotions but...
..psychologically, we can use thinking as a defense mechanism to fix or solve our feelings in a way that is not helpful. Lots of folks are using AI this way.

Here is the big scoop: down-regulating and getting over the feeling isn't always the goal. Sometimes a feeling needs to be felt. Yes, of course, there are good reasons to think first: when the nervous system is too activated, and you need to titrate, or now isn’t a good time. Thinking can be a helper there. The trouble is more and more folks are using thinking to exit feeling (which is also exiting being an alive human) because many humans lack the skills to feel.

In STAIR, we practice the skills to first differentiate from the feeling. Notice where it lives in the body or an image or shape that represents it. No story or narrative. Stay with the sensation or image without becoming it. And let the feeling know you are there with it. “I am here with you. You aren’t alone.” And wait and notice (no analyzing).

Sometimes the feeling gets intense so you add regulation by opening your eyes: look around the room, push your feet into the floor, and let the feeling stay active while you witness calmly.

So often, what lives under our feelings is grief. Not self-pity grief, but completion grief. The grief of yeah, this is reality. This loss happened. This goodbye happened. This care was not offered. This inclusion was not offered. This thing I can't stop is happening. You stay reverently with the feeling, differentiated and witnessing, as a first step to contact your human experience. No diagnosing here.

I'm curious: when feelings arise, do you move toward them, or do you reach for something to explain them away?

03/24/2026

A colleague was presenting a case last night in my consult group. We noticed how, when therapists slip into a helper role with a client, we negatively impact the client's work. We're doing a lot of practice on this in my STAIR training with Juliane Taylor Shore right now, the helper or "fix it" moves that look like care but don't help.

According to my NARM training, many people who are drawn to helping professions learned early to hyper-attune to others as a way to stay safe in relationships. We got really good at orienting outward, but our orienting inward was underdeveloped.

Some memes call this "self-abandonment." Sure, ok. I like to think of it more as self-protection. We protect ourselves by focusing first on the world around us and fixing it, rather than attending to ourselves. To work with it requires some boundary skills (note: not the kind taught in pop psychology books).

The first is a psychological boundary: the practice of knowing that you have your own mind and that someone else has theirs. You can listen, be moved, be influenced, and still come back to: wait, is this mine, is it about me, and is it true? It's a discernment practice that lets you stay with your own mind instead of mind-melding with the other person's and reacting to get some space. It oddly allows for more connection.

The second is a containing boundary, which is less about the mind and more about feeling. It is about not letting a feeling run you and spill out on the other. For many without a containing boundary, they need to change people or the outside world to feel okay inside themselves. It's a fab recipe for burnout. The containing boundary is developed through a practiced gesture linked with your values and relational intention, repeated until it becomes a habit. It calms you and helps you choose how you respond to reality.

Here's why I think this matters beyond the therapy room.

I think community is built or broken at the level of how we relate to each other, and we can't relate if we don't have these boundary skills.

Psychological boundary. Containing boundary. Small practices bith big ripples to community building.

01/30/2026

Something I notice again and again in my couples work is how quickly people rush to accountability or reaction after conflict.

And I am making sense of this neurobiologically - rather than just teaching couples skills.

When there is a rupture via a tone shift misreading your partner's feelings, the nervous system often goes straight into threat physiology.

Heart rate rises.
Muscles tighten.
Attention narrows to all the bad stuff and all the good is forgotten.
The brain shifts toward protection via judging and blaming stories.

From that state, the courtroom litigation vibes begin.

Who is right.
Who is wrong.
Who owes whom.
Who needs to fix this first.

Winning, blaming, withdrawing, over-explaining, or delivering empty apologies become stand-ins for moving that threatened nervous system back into safety.

This is not people being jerks or being manipulative.
These are threatened nervous systems still in protective mode.

Most of us never learned how threat gets activated and what the mind does under threat.
So we reach for whatever strategy helped us survive earlier in life (the blaming, withdrawing, empty apologies, dominating etc etc etc).

Real repair starts when the body has been helped out of threat.

It slows physiology first.
It centers reconnection rather than verdicts.
It helps two nervous systems find each other again before the accounting begins.

From there, accountability becomes possible without collapse or performance.

Apologies land because they are carried by emotional presence.

If conflict keeps looping even after someone says sorry, it isn't because there is a jerk over there.

It is usually about a threat state.

Shift the state first.
Then repair can actually happen.

01/26/2026

Something happened this morning. I received some personal news, and my chest tightened, my jaw clenched, and my thoughts moved quickly into a clear and convincing story about what had happened and what it meant. In my body, that story felt true. (And it made me really think deeply about what is happening to my friends and colleagues in Minneapolis right now.)

My nervous system was under threat this morning.

When the nervous system is under threat the body takes over. So urgency replaces curiosity and certainty replaces complexity. This is not a failure of character or intelligence. It is how the nervous system is designed to work. Under threat, the brain prioritizes speed, protection, and coherence over nuance. That design keeps us alive. The problem is not the response itself. The problem is trying to draw conclusions or solve complex relational or systemic issues while we are still inside it.

This has also been shaping how I think about power, rank, and responsibility. Rank always produces nervous system threat. It can come from role, identity, expertise, access, or certainty (not just identity stuff). Because of that, responsibility follows impact, not intention.

One word of caution, and this is something I have to watch closely in myself. When we only identify as lower rank, we can miss the ways we still hold power. Unacknowledged power is one of the fastest ways to create threat in others and harm in a system.

When people enter communities with the institutional power to detain, control, or use deadly force people’s nervous systems are going to have less capacity. Law enforcement actions can quickly escalate threat and make people very very unsafe.

It is helpful to have awareness of our power and rank and its impact on nervous system capacity. Unawareness of rank increases reactivity and danger.

Using power wisely is about dignity, timing, and creating the conditions where nervous systems can stay online long enough for real understanding and change.

This is what it means to be "trauma-informed" or "nervous system-informed".

01/23/2026

I am getting ready to start STAIR Level 3 this spring, and I want to share something honestly.

I am actively practicing this work on myself as I learn it, and it has been wildly impactful after 27 years of personal therapy and 22 years practicing as a therapist.

Over the last couple of days I was working with something called status threat in my body. In plain language, status threat is what happens in the body when we feel dismissed, morally mischaracterized, or less legitimate in relational dynamics with folks with higher status, think degrees, identities, class, and so on.

Alongside that, I was also working with grief about injustice in the world, fear related to abuses of power, and the loneliness or attachment threat that can arise when it feels like we are carrying these things by ourselves. When any sort of limbic threat is high, many of us move into fixing, analyzing, or attacking as a way to regain control.

What STAIR is helping me move out of control into self-trust and integrated resilience (which is what STAIR stands for btw). This week, I practiced orienting to where I actually was in space and time, differentiating and labeling different feelings without soothing or solving, coming into relational presence with what is, and allowing my nervous system to finish a stress response that had been stuck in my body.

I am nerdy. I love psychological theory. I love thinking. And in both my clinical work and my own life, nothing has created more lasting change in my nervous system than experiential work.

STAIR is a method grounded in neuroscience, interpersonal neurobiology, and decades of trauma research. At its core, it is about meeting reality as it is and coming into power through contact with yourself, rather than power over.

If this resonates, you are not alone. Me too. And if you are a clinician or coach who feels drawn to this kind of work, it is not too late to join STAIR Levels 1, 2, or 3. I am sharing this simply because it feels profoundly helpful at a time when our nerves are frayed by the world. https://www.julianetaylorshore.com/stair-method

So much love everyone.

01/22/2026

Lately I have been deliberately experimenting with bringing my couples therapy and trauma work how I engage with people about politics because I am earnest about change in relationships.

The goal isn't to persuade but to notice and do better.

Like most humans, I have a unique set of sensitivities that unfold in dialogue, things my nervous system reads as threat.

Common dialogue styles that create threat include:

1. tone that carries superiority

2. speed that feels overwhelming

3. certainty that blocks curiosity

4. humiliation masked as expertise

5. public ranking (I know more than you)

6. accusations of bad faith (you are gaslighting me)

7. language that collapses a person into a position ("you are untrustworthy" instead of "I disagree with your point of view")

You all have read some of my think pieces. I can overly contextualize as a defense against being direct and putting my neck out there. So I have been experimenting with being more direct in low stakes places like social media comments to practice.

I intentionally pick people who already signal they inhabit status positioning because I know it will be a harder place to practice, so I can really have a good little in vivo exposure in my nervous system.

I did this today on LinkedIn and recently on Instagram, and it was fascinating to track threat responses in my body.

Jaw tightening.
Heat rising.
Urges to explain, or withdraw.

With one person today, I could feel a gripping in my low back, a threat response where bracing and immobilization often show up together. (fight and freeze)

We are often in embodied threat states when we talk to one another without realizing it, especially when the stakes feel high, and belonging or safety are in the mix. When conversation stays super intellectual, those threat signals don't get noticed, but are totally shaping the dialogue and the outcome.

How we engage is not cosmetic. This isn't about tone policing.

How we track threats in our bodies when we are relating shapes the world we are creating.

I am hopeful in making an impact with me, my clients, and the broader community.

As usual, shout out to Juliane Taylor Shore.

01/21/2026

I wrote this not to calm anyone down or tell anyone what to think, but to explore how our very human defenses shape the political world we are living in, including my own. I look at both Trump supporters and anti-Trump folks through the cyclical psychodynamic lens of Paul Wachtel, partly to understand this moment and partly to reckon with my own culpability in it. And also practice applying this particular psychodynamic view for practice.

Read on here: https://www.traciruble.com/blog/how-we-are-psychologically-creating-the-political-world-we-fear

This is not a nervous-system soothing piece and it is a bit heady, so read as you see fit. There are some strong inquiry questions at the end, and I also include a friendship breakup story to show how these same dynamics play out in everyday life.

01/20/2026

I’ve gotten a little obsessed with Paul Wachtel recently. Have any of you already trained with him?

I stumbled onto David Puder’s Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. He had Paul Wachtel on, and the role play they did around disavowed feelings had me so touched I had to stop in the middle of my tricep curls to grin and savor. Of course, I went out and bought several of Wachtel’s books and consumed every YouTube video I could find. Gosh, I am having a therapy crush.

What excites and inspires me is that Wachtel is the first analytically trained clinician I’ve encountered who is also a staunch integrationist, deeply grounded in psychoanalysis, while fully incorporating behaviorism and experiential therapy. I struggle with elitism and cult like followings of different psychotherapy schools of thought. He is not that.

Therapy is a weird job. I had a supervisor say that at 10 years in, you will start to develop competence, but you are always learning. This year, I am aiming for excellence but being excellent requires something more demanding than than theory mastery or being able to make good psychology social posts:

a) getting honest about your own rigidities and blind spots
b) noticing where your preferred theory has quietly turned into a kind of fundamentalist religion
c)learning how to support real change that your client wants (not what you want) without coercion, moral pressure, or reenacting the very relating cycles we’re trying to interrupt

That’s what I’m zeroed in on right now.

For me, combing Wachtel with my fangirling of Juliane Taylor Shore and Process Oriented Psychology feels good to me.

Key takeaway from these slides?

Every stuck behavior is a patient trying to reinforce the wounded conclusion they drew way back when, in the present time. People unconsciously may block change when keeping the old pattern going protects them from bearing grief, bearing love, bearing disappointment, bearing that is all does work out, bearing anger, bearing they may need to say goodbye to someone and the list goes on.

A post will be up tomorrow using Wachtel's frame to wonder what is being protected when we uphold our political self righteousness in this cu

01/20/2026

I’ve gotten a little obsessed with Paul Wachtel recently. Have any of you already trained with him?

I stumbled onto David Puder’s Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Podcast. He had Paul Wachtel on, and the role play they did around disavowed feelings had me so touched I had to stop in the middle of my tricep curls to grin and savor. Of course, I went out and bought several of Wachtel’s books and consumed every YouTube video I could find. Gosh, I am having a therapy crush.

What excites and inspires me is that Wachtel is the first analytically trained clinician I’ve encountered who is also a staunch integrationist, deeply grounded in psychoanalysis, while fully incorporating behaviorism and experiential therapy. I struggle with elitism and cult like followings of different psychotherapy schools of thought. He is not that.

Therapy is a weird job. I had a supervisor say that at 10 years in, you will start to develop competence, but you are always learning. This year, I am aiming for excellence but being excellent requires something more demanding than than theory mastery or being able to make good psychology social posts:

a) getting honest about your own rigidities and blind spots
b) noticing where your preferred theory has quietly turned into a kind of fundamentalist religion
c)learning how to support real change that your client wants (not what you want) without coercion, moral pressure, or reenacting the very relating cycles we’re trying to interrupt

That’s what I’m zeroed in on right now.

For me, combing Wachtel with my fangirling of Juliane Taylor Shore and Process Oriented Psychology feels good to me.

Key takeaway from these slides?

Every stuck behavior is a patient trying to reinforce the wounded conclusion they drew way back when, in the present time. People unconsciously may block change when keeping the old pattern going protects them from bearing grief, bearing love, bearing disappointment, bearing that is all does work out, bearing anger, bearing they may need to say goodbye to someone and the list goes on.

A post will be up tomorrow using Wachtel's frame to wonder what is being protected when we uphold our political self righteousness in this current US presidency tomorrow. www.traciruble.com/blog to follow along

01/18/2026

Going to the gym to pump some iron for my body muscles but also to do some emotional weight lifting so all the crazy p**p my ancestors overcame to create cool stuff like democracy, freedom of speech, a government by the people for the people, free enterprise...isn't in vane.

They did some hard stuff.
And yeah, I gotta keep learning how to improve upon what they built.

Means I am ernestly learning practices for increasing my capacity for feeling a little more every day so instead of being anasthetized, frozen, or reactive, I am living with intention, clarity, and capacity to act wisely.

May we all increase our capacity to respond.
🥰

01/14/2026

This week in my psychotherapy consult group, seven of us therapists gathered, and our wise guide, Rebecca Wong, invited us to not forget about imagination as a practice alongside our grief about the world.

This was not a call to spiritually avoid but to grieve what’s unfolding, hold one another, and include imagination as a deliberate practice as part of this moment.

I shared something in our group that kinda surprised me.
I’ve fallen in love with grief. It is my favorite feeling. The feeling I spent years learning in therapy how to stop avoiding and feel all the way.

Grief is clean.
It isn’t clingy or self-righteous.
It doesn’t sort people into villains or heroes.
It lets my heart stay open, even to people with very different political views who grieve different losses.
Grief is a shared language.

Grief takes that big pot of feelings, and if tended to just right, makes soup that can nourish us. Now something else becomes possible.

Imagination, I am reminded, must be my practice after grief.
The kind that asks "What are we calling forward?"

A silly story.
I used to be a competitive runner. The 800 meters was my race. Before the biggest meet of my life, I rehearsed one moment over and over: the 600-meter mark, when my legs usually seized, and my mind said, You can’t.

I imagined over and over and over again the night be fore my race...
My arms dropping.
My stride lengthening.
My body trusting it could.

And when race day came, that exact moment arrived. My mind did it's usual freak out. But my body remembered and opened. I was capable of so much more than I ever thought because of my imagination preparation. I ran the fastest 800 of my life.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.
This feels like our 600-meter mark.

I’m offering this with love.

When politics and mental health feel inseparable, one way to resource ourselves and contribute is:

Use your imagination.

Not instead of grief.
But because of it.

🤍

Traci Ruble, MFT

04/20/2026

04/15/2026

03/24/2026

01/30/2026

01/26/2026

01/23/2026

01/22/2026

01/21/2026

01/20/2026

01/20/2026

01/18/2026

01/14/2026

Address

Opening Hours

Website

Alerts

Contact The Practice

Shortcuts

Share

Tuesday	4am - 2pm
Wednesday	4am - 2pm
Thursday	4am - 2pm
Friday	4am - 2pm
Saturday	4am - 2pm