Yazar: Karen Roller

Karen M. Roller, Ph D, MFT, is a cis-het, white, temporarily able-bodied tomboy whose body increasingly reminds her she is now in midlife. Born into the middle class and raised Catholic, she aims to retain the service orientation of that tradition”s true Teachers while she spends her adult pennies traveling the inhabited world unlearning the colonial aspects of it and learning how the rest of the world embodies connection with the Divine; this makes her a yogic Sufi with an environmental conservation bent. She is an associate professor of counseling at Palo Alto University, and clinical coordinator at Family Connections, a parent-involvement preschool serving low-resource migrant families in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a bilingual marriage and family therapist and supervisor who has been primarily field-based, she has spent a lot of years facilitating sessions in tri- and quad-generational homes, foster homes, hospitals, and community-based settings; this has made her a trauma-informed, cross-cultural attachment nerd. Humbled by the impact of how oppression, cultures, and quality of caregiving relationships inform the sense of self across the lifespan, she has been blessed to learn from babies, children, teens, and adults through each phase of life to death. She is a fortunate daughter, sister, grandchild, niece, cousin, co-worker, friend, and (now most importantly) mom. Collaborating with this wise and inspiring writing sisterhood has enlivened her to more deeply embrace what life may send her way.