About me

Dianea Kohl

Dianea is a psychotherapist in private practice in Ithaca, NY. Graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelors of Nursing, then a MA in Marriage and Family Therapy from Syracuse University in 1985.

“We are here to have our hearts broken by life. To learn to live with vulnerability and turn pain
into love.”
– Miriam Greenspan

– This I Believe –

Essay written for NPR

“It has been said that as you grow older you grow wiser…the irony of it all is that I believe I knew the most when I was born. I’ve just forgotten. I am in my sixtieth year, yet feel I am thirty, so maybe I have retrieved half of the life I had lost to a strict “born again” religious upbringing that puts you in a black and white box of what you should believe and feel.

I have come to believe that we have needed that “safe” box because of our insecurities about being loved. We ARE afraid that we ARE not loved. So, we reach for love in a being called god. As we all know, religions have divided us around ‘who knows god best.’ We have lost love and respect for each other, even fighting wars over whose religion holds the truth.

My fourth marriage felt like my soul mate and was the most painful. I regressed into being a stomping toddler, and screaming baby. Yet, I functioned well in the world as a psychotherapist and as a single parent much of the time. My husband was too depressed to work for a couple of years until we flew into primal country. I shut down my private practice for a year so both of us could attend the Primal Center in California, 3,000 miles away from our home in Ithaca, NY. This became my salvation to learning how to truly love. This is WHY we ARE on this planet….to EVOLve, by learning how to keep the LOVE that babies ARE born with, alive. Just look into their eyes! What do you see?

They stARE at you…with wide-eyed (I’d) openness. There is no fear. They smile with abandon. They grip your finger with trust. They FEEL all their feelings without reservation. They cry and giggle. WHY is it that we ARE drawn to their joy?

Children are curious about the simplest things, like an ant crawling along the sidewalk. They voice the wisest statements like my three-year-old granddaughter while picking up pretty stones on the beach: “I’ll put this rock back in the water so it will grow.” Emily knew water is essential to growth as I have found out that tears ARE for all of us in order to LOVE, everyone.”