Tanya Dantus

09/07/2026

This started because I went to the Freud Museum in Vienna and ended up having one of those conversations you keep thinking about after you leave.

I was particularly struck by Aaron Wölfling’s (Aaron Wölfling ) way of talking about Freud, psychoanalysis, antisemitism and the historical world Freud was actually living inside.

Not because I agreed with every idea.

Because it made me think.

And I immediately had the feeling I often have when someone gives me a perspective that rearranges something:

Other people need to hear this conversation.

So tomorrow, Aaron and I are having it publicly.

We’ll talk about what Freud actually gave us, what gets flattened when we reduce him either to genius or obsolete dead white man, and what psychoanalytic ideas like projection, splitting and the unconscious may still help us understand about relationships, groups, prejudice and ourselves.

This isn’t going to be Freud worship.

And it isn’t going to be Freud demolition.

I’m much more interested in the territory in between.

The place where we can stay curious long enough to discover something we didn’t already believe.

Join us for Freud Without Filters, Sept. 9. Registration link in bio.

09/04/2026

Is Freud just another dead white Western man we need to “decolonize” therapy from?

This question came up yesterday while I was preparing for Tuesday's Common Ground conversation with Aaron Wölfling, and his reaction made me laugh.

Because Freud was Jewish.

And in the Vienna of Freud's lifetime, that wasn't exactly an irrelevant detail.

It opened up a much more interesting conversation: what happens when contemporary frameworks flatten historical people into categories that make sense to us, but may obscure something essential about who they actually were?

I'm deeply interested in decolonizing psychology. I'm also increasingly wary of any framework becoming so certain of its own categories that it stops being curious.

That's one of the reasons I'm excited about this conversation.

I met Aaron after visiting the Freud Museum in Vienna, and I've loved discovering that he's not interested in defending Freud from difficult questions. Quite the opposite.

Want to ask about Freud's supposed obsession with the phallus? Bring it.
His ideas about sexuality? Bring it.
His Jewishness? Bring it.
Whether psychoanalysis itself needs to be decolonized? Please bring it.

The agreement Aaron and I have is essentially: provocative is welcome. Respectful is required.

That's my kind of conversation.

I’m kind of amazed that we already have more than 50 people registered. Zoom caps us at 100, so if you’ve been thinking of coming, I’d register sooner rather than later.
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/D87iGLzARmSiDAbxKYcLBw
Freud Without Filters: What Psychoanalysis Still Offers Us
Tuesday, September 9, online.

What does Freud still offer us today? Where is psychoanalysis most misunderstood? And what can psychoanalytic thinking help us understand not only about ourselves, but about the social and political world we live in? Join Tanya Dantus and Aaron Wölfling for a live, unscripted conversation exploring...

08/26/2026

Sometimes the shame you feel in an interaction isn’t evidence that you did something wrong.

There can be older, carried shame already living in the nervous system. And then someone else avoids responsibility, blames, projects, or shifts their discomfort onto you, and suddenly that old shame lights up.

That’s when fight, flight, freeze, or fawn can take over.

The work isn’t to immediately decide, “I’m right and they’re wrong.”

It’s to slow down enough to ask:

What actually happened here?
What is mine to take responsibility for?
What belongs to them?
And is something old getting activated in me right now?

Feeling shame is not the same thing as being shameful.

Sometimes healing is learning to feel the shame without automatically believing the story it tells you.

08/24/2026

There’s something I do in therapy sessions that clients may not even realize I’m doing:

I use my own body.

As a somatic therapist, I’m paying attention to what’s happening in your nervous system, but I’m also noticing what happens in mine while we’re together.

Maybe I notice I’ve started holding my breath. Maybe I feel an urge to slow things down. Maybe I notice tension, distance, or a pull to rescue.

That information can be clinically useful. But it is not “truth” about you.

My body gives me information to get curious about, not an internal X-ray of your experience.

You are still the authority on what is happening inside you.

This is one of the things I love about somatic therapy: we’re not pretending the therapist is a perfectly neutral observer outside the relationship. We can notice what is happening in you, in me, and between us, and get curious together.

And yes, this can happen online too.

I’m sharing more about what somatic therapy actually looks like, including what I’m paying attention to on Zoom and how I think about the limits of online work.

08/21/2026

A boundary isn’t really a boundary if you’re only allowed to have it when nobody is upset.

One of the hardest parts of learning boundaries isn’t figuring out what you want.

Often, we know.

The hard part comes afterward.

Someone is disappointed.

Someone misunderstands you.

Someone thinks you’re selfish.

Someone withdraws.

And suddenly the nervous system says:

FIX IT.

Explain more.

Soften the no.

Send another text.

Make sure they understand you’re a good person.

Offer something else.

This is why I don’t think boundary work can simply be about learning the correct words.

You can memorize every assertiveness script in the world and still abandon yourself the moment another person becomes unhappy.

Boundary work is nervous-system work.

It is attachment work.

It is grief work.

And sometimes it is the slow discovery that another person’s disappointment does not automatically mean you have done something wrong.

One of the central questions inside my RIFRA work is not simply:

What boundary should I set?

It’s:

What happens inside me when I try to set it?

Because that is often where the real story lives.

I’m opening a small RIFRA practitioner training this fall for clinicians who want to go deeper into this intersection of boundaries, relational trauma, attachment and embodied choice. More soon.

08/19/2026

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what repeatedly being in a subordinate position does to a person’s relationship with power.

This is particularly interesting through a trauma and attachment lens.

Children are profoundly dependent on adults.

They cannot simply say, “This relationship isn’t working for me, so I’m going to find another family.”

Their nervous systems have to solve a much more complicated problem:

How do I remain connected to the people I depend on, even when being connected requires giving something up?

Maybe I stop saying no.

Maybe I become exquisitely attuned to everyone else.

Maybe I become the easy child.

Maybe I disappear.

Or maybe I eventually decide I will never need anyone again.

These adaptations don’t magically disappear when we turn 18.

They show up in partnerships, workplaces, friendships, families and even therapy.

For me, the work has never been about moving people from dependency to total self-sufficiency.

It’s about agency.

Can I remain myself while I am in relationship with you?

That question is at the heart of so much of my work around attachment, boundaries and RIFRA.

08/17/2026

Good therapy should make you need your therapist less.

That may sound like a strange thing for a therapist to say, but I mean it.

For many people with trauma histories, the issue isn’t simply “trust.” It’s what happens when another person has power, expertise, authority, or access to something we need.

Some of us learned to comply.
Some learned to distrust.
Some learned to hand our authority over to someone who seemed to know better.
And some learned never to need anyone at all.

I don’t want therapy to become another relationship where someone else becomes the authority on you.

The work, as I see it, is helping you build a stronger relationship with your own authority.

To know yourself.
To recognize what is happening in your nervous system.
To have tools.
To make choices.
To ask for support without surrendering yourself.

And eventually, yes, to need me less.

That isn’t therapy failing.

Sometimes that’s exactly what success looks like.

08/14/2026

Before I became a therapist, I studied anthropology.

One of the things that fascinated me then, and still fascinates me now, is how humans create rituals around change.

Across cultures, we've found ways to mark birth, coming of age, marriage, death, harvest, religious milestones and all kinds of transitions between one stage of life and another.

But I've been wondering lately about all the enormous transitions in modern life that we often don't mark at all.

Divorce.

Infertility.

Miscarriage.

Menopause.

Migration.

The end of a friendship.

Leaving a career.

Finally ending a relationship that took you years to leave.

Becoming someone your younger self wouldn't recognize.

Sometimes something enormous happens and... Tuesday comes. You answer emails. You make dinner. Life keeps moving.

Maybe ritual isn't only about tradition or religion.

Maybe it's one of the ways human beings say:

Something happened here.

Something ended.

Something is beginning.

This mattered.

I wonder what we lose when we stop marking the moments that change us.

And I wonder what transitions in our lives are still waiting to be witnessed.

What is something in your life you wish had been marked with a ritual?

08/12/2026

When I ask a client, “What are you noticing in your body right now?” sometimes I can almost see them wondering:

What am I supposed to notice?

And I always want people to know: there is no right answer.

I’m not looking for a particular sensation, emotion, or response. I can’t take an internal X-ray and see what’s happening inside you. You’re the one who gets to tell me.

Maybe you notice warmth or cold. Tightness or softness. Pain or pleasure. Your heart beating quickly. Your breath getting shallow. A heaviness somewhere. An emotion. Even the quality or pace of your thoughts.

Or maybe you don’t notice much at all.

We’re simply taking a snapshot of what’s happening inside your nervous system in that particular moment.

And then we get curious about it together.

That’s one of the things I love about somatic work. There’s no test to pass and no “correct” way to experience your body.

What are you noticing in yours right now?

08/07/2026

One of the things I've realized over the years is that by the time we're trying to say "no," we've usually already left ourselves several times.

We laughed at something that hurt.

We said, "It's fine."

We agreed because disappointing someone else felt harder than disappointing ourselves.

By the time the boundary arrives, we've often been negotiating against ourselves for quite a while.

That's why I'm less interested in the word no than I used to be.

I'm fascinated by the moment just before it.

The moment you notice:

"Actually... I don't want this."

Before you explain it away.

Before you justify it.

Before you convince yourself you're overreacting.

I think healing begins there.