When did you first notice it? What seems to bring it on? What would you call that feeling? Does it remind you of anything? What happens to it when you talk about your father? What does your body seem to want to do? Has this happened before? When doesn’t it happen? What do you imagine it is telling you? It doesn’t take long before the clean distinction between the somatic and the narrative begins to fall apart. We are suddenly talking about history, memory, metaphor, relationship, context, meaning, temporality, identity, expectations, the past, and the future. We are telling stories about bodies.

I started thinking about this again after receiving a response to something I wrote about narrative practice. The commenter suggested that therapy needs to move beyond narrative and begin attending to other signals, particularly those coming from the body and nervous system. The practitioner, they suggested, might facilitate close observation of somatic experience “without interpreting it,” following the client naturally and trusting “the body’s own intelligence” and where it might lead. I understand the appeal. I am less convinced that we have escaped interpretation. In fact, I think we have already done quite a lot of it.

Consider the phrase “the body’s own intelligence.” What does it mean? I don’t mean that dismissively. I mean it as an actual therapeutic question. What makes a bodily sensation intelligent? How do we distinguish intelligence from sensation? Where do we imagine the body is trying to lead us? How would we know when we arrived? What makes one bodily experience a signal and another simply indigestion, fatigue, sexual arousal, caffeine, muscle tension, illness, hunger, or the ordinary noise of being an organism? Even describing bodily experiences as “signals” introduces a metaphor. Signals are sent. Signals contain information. Signals are meant to be detected. Signals point toward something. The moment I describe tightness in someone’s chest as a signal, I have already begun constructing a relationship between that sensation and its possible significance.

Likewise, “following the client naturally” sounds wonderfully non-directive until we examine the therapeutic situation itself. Two people are sitting in a room for example. One has been designated the therapist. The other has come seeking some form of help. The therapist slows the conversation and directs attention toward internal bodily experience. Certain sensations are noticed. Attention is sustained. The therapist asks questions about those sensations. Perhaps the client is encouraged not to explain them too quickly. Perhaps particular movements, impulses, changes in breathing, or shifts in bodily tension are given significance. There is nothing natural about this. That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with it. It means it is a practice. Practices have histories. They have theories. They privilege certain forms of attention over others. They contain assumptions about what people are, how problems work, where knowledge resides, and what counts as change. The problem begins when a practice becomes so familiar that its assumptions disappear. It becomes taken for granted and theory starts masquerading as nature.

One of the misunderstandings I sometimes encounter about narrative therapy is the idea that narrative means cognition. Story equals thought. Language equals mind. The body, therefore, becomes the alternative. If narrative therapists are interested in stories, somatic therapists are interested in something deeper, more immediate, perhaps more authentic. But this distinction has never made sense to me. Bodies have histories. They are disciplined, celebrated, punished, gendered, racialized, sexualized, medicalized, measured, trained, starved, decorated, hidden, exposed, strengthened, diagnosed, desired, feared, and compared. We learn when bodies should be quiet. We learn which bodies are dangerous. We learn what pain should be tolerated. We learn which sensations deserve medical attention and which should be endured. We learn when crying is acceptable. We learn how men should sit. We learn how women should take up space. We learn which bodies are healthy, attractive, productive, disabled, old, young, fit, unfit, professional, threatening, or desirable. Families teach bodies. Schools teach bodies. Religions teach bodies. Medicine teaches bodies. Pornography teaches bodies. Athletics teach bodies. Capitalism certainly teaches bodies. Psychotherapy teaches bodies too.

None of this means bodily experience is unreal. Quite the opposite. A racing heart is real. Sweat is real. Tightness in the chest is real. Nausea is real. A clenched jaw is real. The impulse to move away from someone is real. But the meaning of these experiences is not simply secreted by the body along with sweat. A racing heart might become fear, excitement, attraction, shame, danger, panic, anticipation, a trauma response, cardiovascular disease, or too much coffee. The sensation matters. So does the interpretive world into which the sensation arrives. This is where I become suspicious whenever therapeutic discourse promises access to experience “without interpretation.” I don’t think we get that luxury.

Something interesting has happened in psychotherapy over the past decade or two. The nervous system has become one of our most prolific storytellers. Spend enough time around contemporary therapy culture and you learn the vocabulary quickly: regulated, dysregulated, activated, triggered, fight, flight, freeze, fawn, safety, threat, window of tolerance, trauma response. The body keeps the score. The nervous system remembers. Some of these ideas can be useful and people often find tremendous relief in understanding their experiences differently. A person who has spent years calling themselves weak, irrational, dramatic, or broken may encounter another description of what they have been experiencing and find that it opens possibilities. Narrative therapists should understand this well. Descriptions can change lives. But descriptions are still descriptions.

Imagine someone says, “My stomach tightens whenever I talk to my father.” The therapist responds, “Your nervous system doesn’t feel safe around him.” Notice what just happened. We moved from an account of bodily sensation to a claim about the meaning of that sensation. The stomach tightening is observable by the person experiencing it. “The nervous system doesn’t feel safe” is an interpretation. Perhaps a useful one. Perhaps even a transformative one. But a theory has entered the room. The problem is not that interpretation occurred. Interpretation is unavoidable. The problem is that one interpretation may acquire the authority of biology. Now we are no longer telling a story. The nervous system is supposedly telling us what is true.

This is precisely where narrative thinking becomes useful. Not because narrative therapists have a better interpretation, but because we might become curious about how particular descriptions acquire authority. How did we learn to call this sensation dysregulation? What becomes possible when we describe it that way? What becomes more difficult to see? Who introduced this vocabulary? How has the person taken it up? Does the description increase their sense of possibility? Does it narrow it? Does “my nervous system doesn’t feel safe” help this person understand something important, or does it quietly transform a complicated relationship into a biological verdict? Those are not arguments against somatic therapy. They are narrative questions about somatic therapy.

There is another assumption worth troubling. The body is sometimes imagined as a kind of refuge from culture. Words can deceive us. Stories can be imposed upon us. Cognition can rationalize. Society can manipulate. But the body knows. I understand why this idea is attractive. I just don’t think bodies live outside culture. Consider someone who notices their heart racing before entering a crowded room. What happens next is not merely physiological. Perhaps they grew up in a family where fear was considered weakness. Perhaps they have learned through therapy that their nervous system is activated. Perhaps their religious community taught them to interpret bodily unease as spiritual discernment. Perhaps years of panic attacks have taught them that a racing heart means catastrophe is coming. Perhaps they are a performer who has learned to understand the same bodily sensations as readiness. Perhaps they are practicing meditation and have developed an entirely different relationship with bodily arousal. Same heart but different worlds.

We don’t simply experience bodies. We learn how to experience bodies, and that learning doesn’t occur once. It continues. This is one reason therapy itself deserves scrutiny. Every therapeutic tradition teaches people what to notice. Psychoanalysis taught generations to notice slips, dreams, repetitions, and unconscious conflict. Cognitive therapy taught people to notice thoughts. Family therapy taught people to notice patterns. Narrative therapy taught people to notice stories, discourses, exceptions, audiences, and preferred identities. Somatic therapies teach people to notice sensations, impulses, activation, tension, movement, and regulation. None of these are neutral. Attention is an intervention. To repeatedly ask someone to notice something is to participate in making that thing consequential.

This is also why I have little interest in defending narrative therapy against somatic therapy. The opposition itself is the problem. Narrative is not located exclusively in the head. Stories happen between bodies. A child learns something about anger when a parent’s jaw tightens. Someone learns something about belonging when another person moves closer. We recognize contempt in a face before anyone explains it. We learn when to lower our voices, when to brace ourselves, when to make ourselves smaller, when touch is welcome, and when a room feels dangerous. These experiences become part of the stories through which lives are organized.

Stories reorganize bodies too. Tell someone they are about to give a speech in front of five hundred people and watch what happens physiologically. Receive a text from someone you love saying, “We need to talk,” and watch the body respond to five words. Language did that. Or perhaps more accurately, language, history, relationship, anticipation, memory, and embodiment did that together. Trying to determine which part is the “real” experience seems less interesting to me than becoming curious about how the whole thing works.

Narrative practice can learn from somatic practice here too. Narrative therapists can become overly verbal. We can become enamored with clever questions. We can listen so carefully for language that we fail to notice the person sitting in front of us: the pause, the breath, the shoulders dropping, the sudden laugh, the eyes looking away, the body moving toward or away from something before an account has fully formed. There is no reason narrative practitioners shouldn’t become better at noticing these things. But noticing the body doesn’t require abandoning narrative. It requires expanding our understanding of where stories happen.

My invitation to somatic practitioners, then, is not to become less somatic. It is to become more curious about the narratives of somatic therapy. Where did your ideas about regulation come from? What history produced your understanding of trauma? Who taught you what “safety” means? When did the nervous system become the preferred language for describing distress? What assumptions about human beings accompany the idea of bodily intelligence? What cultural histories sit behind the distinction between mind and body in the first place? What becomes possible when someone understands their experience as dysregulation? What possibilities disappear? And perhaps most importantly, what story about the body are you inviting the person sitting across from you to inhabit?

These questions don’t weaken somatic practice. They make it more accountable. Narrative practice has had to wrestle with similar questions. Narrative therapists inherit vocabularies too. We have our own preferred metaphors, theoretical commitments, histories, blind spots, and rituals. Externalizing conversations are not natural. Re-authoring is not natural. Asking about unique outcomes is not natural. They are practices. Knowing their histories helps us hold them less tightly. Somatic therapists deserve the same freedom.

Learn the narrative of your practice. Learn where its language came from. Learn what its metaphors accomplish. Learn what kinds of people its theories produce. Learn what its favorite questions make visible and what they leave outside the frame. Not so you can stop listening to bodies, but so you can listen better.

I began with the question I often tease somatic therapists about: “Where do you feel that in your body?” I actually think it’s a beautiful question. I just want to know what happens next. Because eventually someone has to decide what that sensation might mean, what history it belongs to, what relationships have shaped it, what possibilities it opens, and what kind of future might become available through attending to it.

The body can hold the pen too. But the body never learned to write alone.

Peace.

The process of writing this essay was human writer first and human editor last. I used generative AI for ideation, research, images, and spellchecking. Pass judgement accordingly.

Come Join the Conversation

If the kinds of questions I write about here matter to you, Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon is where I hope we can take some of them off the page and into a room together.

October 1–3, we’ll gather in Irvine for three days of conversation about therapy, culture, politics, art, ethics, and the stories shaping how we understand ourselves and one another. There will be provocative speakers, live art, small conversations, disagreement, curiosity, and plenty of room for ideas we haven’t thought yet.

I’m less interested in another conference where experts tell us how therapy should be done. I want to create a place where we can wonder together about what therapy is becoming, what it might leave behind, and what else might be possible.

And because Dangerous Stories is a fundraiser for California Family Institute, your registration also helps us continue providing affordable, sliding-scale therapy in our community.

Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon
October 1–3, 2026 · Irvine, California
CEUs available

Come be part of the conversation.

- Bruno Latour

Okay yes, psychoanalysis is making a comeback. I’ve seen it happening for a while now. You can see it pretty much everywhere these days. In cultural discourse, in the podcasts, in the think pieces, in therapy rooms where therapist’s are reaching back toward Freud, toward Lacan, toward object relations. The CBT hand-outs are done. The evidence-based practice movement produced competent technicians and bored clients. Therapists and their people (notice how I didn’t say patient..) want depth. They want a story and practice that feels equal to the strangeness of being alive. So, many are returning to psychoanalysis or psychodynamic practice. We shouldn’t be surprised. Therapy has always been better at looking backward then toward the future.

I get it. I too have been drawn to psychoanalytic thinkers, even Lacan when I was feeling ambitious. For a long time, I couldn’t quite explain the attraction, because I was skeptical of the foundational claims. The unconscious as hydraulic system. The Oedipal thing. The drive theory. None of it held up for me clinically or philosophically. But I kept paying attention to what was going on in the psychoanalytic world. It’s been recently that I figured out why. It wasn’t what psychoanalysis said it was doing. It was what it was actually doing. The philosophical range and depth. The willingness to sit with ambiguity and contradiction. The quality of the world-building. Psychoanalytic thinkers write well because their project, whatever they believe about it, is fundamentally a narrative one.

In 1930, Sigmund Freud was awarded the Goethe Prize. Not a science award. A literature award. He wasn’t happy about it. I think it’s one of the more telling things that ever happened to psychoanalysis. Because this is what I’ve come to believe: psychoanalysis is a narrative therapy. It always was. It has just refused to admit it.

Let’s start with the case studies. Dora, Wolf Man, Rat Man. I mean come on; these are novellas. They have characters, dramatic tension, interpretive revelation, a narrator with a very strong point of view. Freud was constructing a world where he storied himself as the discoverer. The unconscious isn’t a place he found. It’s a place he built. Brilliantly written, coherent, aesthetically compelling. But all a construction.

What came after tracks the same way. Jacques Lacan produced work so dense and referential it functions as experimental literature. Carl Jung built a full mythological cosmology populated with archetypes. Donald Winnicott gave us transitional space, and I challenge anyone to tell me that isn’t a poet’s formulation. Melanie Klein had internal objects at war with each other inside the infant psyche. These are not scientists describing a territory. These are writers building worlds.

The giveaway is what happens when you compare the gifted analysts to the mediocre ones. The gifted ones (see Jamieson Webster and Adam Phillips) produce more elaborate, more persuasive, more internally coherent interpretive universes. Which is exactly what you’d expect from writers. A beautiful interpretation doesn’t become more accurate because it’s beautiful. It becomes more convincing. Those are not the same thing.

Narrative therapy, the tradition I work from, understood that therapy is a narrative practice and took that seriously instead of hiding it. Michael White and David Epston didn’t pretend that storytelling is some sort of depth psychology. They named that the person is the author of their own life. The therapist is a curious, decentered witness who helps them find alternative stories, thicker descriptions, counter-narratives to the dominant plot. The therapist isn’t interpretive or prescriptive. They ask questions that open space.

The problem with psychoanalytic world-building isn’t that it’s world-building. It’s who holds the pen. In classical psychoanalytic practice, the analyst knows what your dream means. In contemporary psychodynamic practice they have access to your interiority that you don’t have. The interpretive authority belongs to the expert, and the client is essentially a character in someone else’s story about them. That’s a significant power arrangement performed as analytical insight.

Narrative therapy looked at the same fundamental insight, that human meaning-making is storied, that our suffering and our resilience both live inside narratives, and asked what happens when we give the pen back. When the person becomes the author rather than the character. When the therapist’s job is to hold space for that authorship rather than to perform a more impressive one.

So, when people are circling back to psychoanalysis or psychodynamic practice right now, I understand it. They’re hungry for an imagined depth, for something with enough imaginative spirit to hold the complexity of a human life. That wanting is legitimate. The question is whether we can meet them without handing interpretive authority back to the clinician. Whether we can have the literary seriousness without the power differential.

Even though Freud tried otherwise, therapy has always been a cultural practice, not a medical one. The unconscious, the self, the inner child, the authentic core waiting to be found, these are cultural constructions, products of particular times and places and power arrangements. Some are more useful than others. Some are more honest about being constructions. That understanding and the honesty about it matters. It determines whether the person in front of you gets to be the author of their own becoming or a supporting character in someone else’s very well-written theory.

Freud’s Goethe Prize judges were right. They just didn’t know how right.

Peace.

The process of writing this essay was human writer first and human editor last. I used generative AI for ideation, research, images, and spellchecking. Pass judgement accordingly.

Come Join the Conversation

If the kinds of questions I write about here matter to you, Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon is where I hope we can take some of them off the page and into a room together.

October 1–3, we’ll gather in Irvine for three days of conversation about therapy, culture, politics, art, ethics, and the stories shaping how we understand ourselves and one another. There will be provocative speakers, live art, small conversations, disagreement, curiosity, and plenty of room for ideas we haven’t thought yet.

I’m less interested in another conference where experts tell us how therapy should be done. I want to create a place where we can wonder together about what therapy is becoming, what it might leave behind, and what else might be possible.

And because Dangerous Stories is a fundraiser for California Family Institute, your registration also helps us continue providing affordable, sliding-scale therapy in our community.

Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon
October 1–3, 2026 · Irvine, California
CEUs available

Come be part of the conversation.

There was a time when the answer might have been yes. Certain moments in twentieth-century music seemed to come as breaks with what had preceded them. The distance between popular music in 1955 and 1975, or between 1965 and 1985, could feel enormous. Imagine hearing the Sex Pistols in 1955. New technologies, forms, subcultures, rhythms, and ways of organizing sound appeared. The future seemed capable of producing cultural objects that the present could not yet understand.

Fisher worried that something had changed. Contemporary culture had become increasingly adept at recycling its own archive. Styles returned and genres were recombined. Old sounds were polished and repackaged. There was plenty of new music, of course, but less of the sensation that something had appeared that could not have existed before. Fisher connected this to hauntology, a term he borrowed from Jacques Derrida and developed into an account of a culture increasingly haunted by futures that had once been anticipated but never arrived. The problem was not nostalgia. It was a disturbance in our relationship with historical time. The future no longer seemed capable of surprising us. I have begun wondering what happens if we perform Fisher’s experiment on psychotherapy.

Imagine that I could walk into my office twenty years ago and introduce myself to the Chris Hoff of 2006. I tell him I have come from the world of psychotherapy in 2026. After we get past the obvious questions, I tell him I want to show him what therapy looks like twenty years in the future. What could I show him that would genuinely shock him?

I could tell him about Internal Family Systems. He would encounter a sophisticated language of parts, multiplicity, internal relationships, and the organization of experience, but I am not sure he would experience it as something arriving from an incomprehensible future. I could tell him about somatic therapies and the renewed attention to bodily experience. I could describe the enormous influence of attachment theory and trauma. I could explain ACT, DBT, mindfulness-based interventions, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, EMDR, neuroscience-informed practice, and the many approaches that now describe themselves as integrative, relational, embodied, trauma-informed, or evidence-based.

Much has happened in the last 20 years. I do not want to dismiss these developments or ignore their differences. Some have changed clinical practice in consequential ways. Some have opened possibilities unavailable to people twenty years ago. Yet I still wonder whether any of them would leave the Chris of 2006 unable to recognize what he was seeing.

He would recognize the room and recognize the therapist and the client. He would recognize the problem. He would recognize the assumption that something called therapy occurs when a person experiencing difficulty meets with someone professionally authorized to help them understand, manage, heal, resolve, or transform that difficulty.

Even teletherapy would probably be less conceptually disruptive than technologically surprising. The screen would be new. The relationship would not. Perhaps the most startling development would be artificial intelligence. I would show him a person discussing grief, anxiety, relationships, or identity with an artificial intelligence system capable of producing something resembling therapeutic conversation. That might initially look like science fiction. Yet after watching for a while, he might notice something strange. A technology that would have seemed almost unimaginable in 2006 was being used to reproduce a recognizable therapeutic encounter. The technology had arrived from the future, but the form had not. A futuristic machine doing Carl Rogers is almost too perfect an image of Fisher’s hauntology. Still caught in the loop.

This doesn’t mean psychotherapy has remained unchanged all these years. Its history contains genuine conceptual disruptions. Freud and the early psychoanalysts did more than introduce another therapeutic technique. Psychoanalysis proposed a different kind of human subject: divided, opaque to itself, shaped by unconscious forces, desire, repression, memory, and conflict. Whatever one now thinks about psychoanalysis, it changed the kinds of questions that could be asked about a human life.

The second wave of family and systems therapists produced another disturbance. The problem might not reside inside the person at all. Bateson, Bowen, Minuchin, Satir, Whitaker, Haley, the Milan group, and others shifted attention toward relationships, communication, systems, patterns, contexts, and recursive processes. The identified patient could no longer be understood independently of the relational worlds in which the problem became understood. The consulting room expanded conceptually even when its physical walls remained in place.

The third wave of constructivist, feminist, social constructionist, postmodern, and poststructural approaches created another disruption. The individual and the family could not be treated as natural objects existing independently of language, culture, discourse, history, gender, race, class, institutions, and power. Narrative therapy, collaborative approaches, feminist therapies, and related traditions questioned the authority of professional knowledge itself. They asked who gets to describe reality, whose descriptions become legitimate, how identities are produced, and how therapeutic practice might participate in the very forms of power it claims to relieve.

These movements disagreed about a lot, but shared something. At their most interesting, they did not simply offer better ways to conduct therapy. They destabilized what therapists thought they were looking at. And then? That question interests me.

There have been countless developments since these movements. As we all know new models appear with regularity. Training institutes flourish and certifications multiply. Therapists learn new acronyms, interventions, protocols, and conceptual vocabularies. The psychotherapy marketplace is hardly stagnant. Yet proliferation is not the same thing as conceptual novelty. A field can generate enormous quantities of new material while remaining inside a remarkably stable imagination of what it is doing. Perhaps psychotherapy has entered its own hauntological period.

The ghosts are everywhere. Freud remains present even in approaches that reject psychoanalysis whenever we assume that a presenting difficulty conceals something deeper that must be discovered. Humanistic psychology remains whenever we speak about authenticity, growth, congruence, or becoming who we really are. Systems theory returns whenever distress is relocated from individuals into relational patterns. Postmodernism remains whenever therapists speak about stories, identities, meaning, discourse, or social context. Older organismic traditions echo through contemporary somatic language. Earlier theories of multiplicity return in the language of parts. Developmental explanations reappear through attachment. Neuroscience sometimes provides biological authorization for observations therapists have been making for decades.

None of this means these ideas are identical. Genealogies are not accusations and ideas change when they travel. Different practices produce different effects. My concern is with something underneath the proliferation of therapeutic models: the persistence of the therapeutic imaginary itself. A person has a problem. The problem belongs, in some meaningful sense, to the person. The person seeks professional help. The professional assesses or formulates the problem. An intervention is selected. Change is expected to occur. Progress is evaluated. The process ends when sufficient improvement has occurred. Even approaches that contest parts of this sequence often leave most of its architecture intact. We argue about what happens inside therapy while asking less often why helping has come to take this particular form.

This is where Fisher’s idea is helpful. Hauntology is not simply the claim that culture repeats itself. Fisher was interested in what happens when a culture loses its capacity to imagine futures qualitatively different from its present. The problem is not that nothing changes. Things change constantly. The problem is that change increasingly occurs inside established coordinates. Psychotherapy may have become extraordinarily innovative within the boundaries of psychotherapy. The harder question is whether it can imagine anything outside them. Perhaps the crisis facing psychotherapy is not that it has run out of techniques. Perhaps it has run out of futures.

There is another side of hauntology. Fisher’s ghosts were not only remnants of the past. They were traces of futures that had once seemed possible. The haunting came partly from what did not happen. Cultural forms carried memories of abandoned trajectories, roads history appeared ready to travel and then did not. Psychotherapy has its own lost futures.

There were moments in the history of therapy when the field seemed connected to a much larger project of rethinking how people might live together. The early family therapists did not simply develop techniques for treating families. They challenged the assumption that pathology belonged inside individual people. Feminist therapists asked whether suffering could be understood apart from gendered arrangements of power. Community psychology questioned the usefulness of treating individuals while leaving damaging environments untouched. Radical psychiatry and anti-psychiatry challenged the institutions authorized to determine who was normal, who was ill, and who required treatment. Liberation psychologies insisted that psychic suffering could not be separated from political and material conditions. Social constructionist and narrative practitioners questioned whether therapists possessed privileged access to the truth of other people’s lives. These were not competing clinical models. They contained different possible futures for helping. What became of those futures?

Some survived. Some developed in ways their founders did not anticipate. Many remained at the margins. But many others were absorbed into the very professional structures they had once placed under question. This is one of psychotherapy’s peculiar talents. It can metabolize critique.

A challenge to professional expertise becomes a workshop for professionals. A critique of individualism becomes an individual treatment modality. A political analysis of suffering becomes a clinical competency. A practice developed in opposition to diagnostic authority becomes something documented in the treatment plan. A movement becomes a model. The model becomes a certification. The certification becomes a professional identity. Eventually the rebellion becomes continuing education. On and on. Anybody else notice all the “deconstructing fill in the blank” workshops these days?

This is not necessarily the result of bad faith. Therapists need to make a living and institutions need ways to train people. Practices need to be taught, sustained, evaluated, and passed along. Professionalization can protect people from harm and preserve valuable forms of knowledge. Yet professionalization also changes the things it touches. Practices developed as critiques of institutions can become services offered by those institutions. Ideas intended to question expertise can become new forms of expertise. Movements concerned with social transformation can become methods for helping individuals adjust more successfully to the worlds those movements once hoped to change.

The result is not that radical ideas disappear. Something more interesting happens. They remain with us as ghosts. We continue to use their language. Context. Power. Relationship. Collaboration. Social justice. Liberation. Meaning. Community. But the institutional form in which those words are spoken often remains unchanged. The therapist still sits in the therapist’s chair. The client still sits in the client’s chair. The insurance company still asks for the diagnosis. The licensing board still determines who is authorized to practice. The treatment plan still locates the site of intervention. The fifty-five minutes still ends. This may be one of the more consequential lost futures of psychotherapy. There was once a stronger possibility that therapy might participate in changing the arrangements that produced suffering rather than primarily helping people survive them.

I do not want to romanticize this history. Earlier radical movements had their own exclusions, blind spots, hierarchies, and failures. Some of their experiments caused harm. Nor is there some pure revolutionary therapy waiting to be recovered from institutional corruption. Hauntology does not require that kind of nostalgia. The point is not that the past was better. The point is that the past contained futures. Some of them remain unfinished.

This changes the question I want to ask. I am less interested in what the next major school of psychotherapy will be. In fact, the expectation that another school should appear may itself belong to the old therapeutic imaginary. Psychoanalysis gives way to humanistic psychology, which gives way to systems approaches, cognitive therapies, postmodern therapies, trauma therapies, somatic therapies, and whatever comes next. The history becomes a succession of branded intellectual territories competing for clinicians, clients, legitimacy, and institutional recognition. But what if the next significant development does not look like another psychotherapy?

Let’s return to the thought experiment. What could I show the Chris of 2006 that would make him say, “I don’t think that’s therapy”? That seems a much more interesting threshold.

Perhaps there is no therapist.

Perhaps there is no client.

Perhaps there is no office.

Perhaps there is no diagnosis, treatment plan, or therapeutic hour.

Perhaps the distinction between helping and being helped becomes unstable.

Perhaps people gather temporarily around situations rather than presenting as individuals who possess problems. Friends, family members, neighbors, artists, organizers, teachers, elders, technologies, landscapes, objects, and institutions might become participants in practices of change. The unit of concern might cease to be “my anxiety” and become the world in which this particular anxiety has become possible, necessary, or sensible.

This would require something other than expanding our catalogue of interventions. It would require expanding our relational imagination: our capacity to imagine arrangements of people, practices, institutions, places, and possibilities that do not yet have established forms.

One possibility is that therapy might become less organized around repairing the past and more explicitly concerned with composing futures. Psychotherapy has always had a complicated relationship with time. Much of the field remains genealogical. What happened? Where did this begin? What did you learn in your family? What experience produced this pattern? What does this reaction remind you of? Even approaches that reject causal explanations often remain interested in histories: histories of problems, relationships, identities, trauma, resistance, meaning, and preferred ways of living.

These are important questions. But there is another temporal direction available to us.

What futures are currently organizing this person’s present?

Which futures have disappeared?

Which futures have become difficult to imagine?

Whose future is being treated as inevitable?

What possibilities have been defutured before they could be explored?

What conditions would make another future possible?

What could be rehearsed now?

Here therapy begins to encounter practices that have developed elsewhere: futures studies, scenario planning, speculative design, participatory inquiry, community organizing, philosophy, political theory, art, ritual, and world-making. The point would not be to import these practices and convert them into another therapeutic model. That would simply reproduce the familiar cycle. We would soon have certification programs in “Futures-Informed Therapy,” complete with competencies, branded diagrams, workbooks, and continuing education credits. That possibility makes me laugh because I can already imagine the conference brochure. And because it’s pretty much what I’m doing these days.

The more interesting possibility is allowing these encounters to alter therapy beyond recognition. Scenario work, for example, begins from a different relationship with uncertainty. Rather than attempting to predict what will happen, scenarios make multiple futures available for examination. They allow people to inhabit possibilities provisionally and ask what each future makes possible, what it forecloses, and what actions in the present might participate in bringing one future rather than another into being. The future stops being a destination waiting for us and becomes something already acting upon the present.

This matters clinically because people often arrive in therapy already living inside futures.

“I will always be alone.”

“My child will never forgive me.”

“I am going to fail.”

“This marriage cannot survive.”

“I will never become the person I thought I would be.”

These statements appear to describe the future, but they organize conduct in the present. Futures exert force. They invite some actions and make others difficult to perceive. They distribute hope, fear, agency, and resignation. They shape what can be noticed. A future-oriented therapeutic practice might therefore be concerned not simply with helping people feel better about the future but with examining how futures are produced, circulated, inhabited, contested, and composed.

This also raises a problem for those of us drawn to postmodern and poststructural therapies. We should not assume that because our traditions once represented a disruption, they remain disruptive. Narrative therapy can become haunted too.

A practice that questioned professional knowledge can acquire professional experts. A critique of fixed identity can become a recognizable therapeutic identity. Practices designed to remain responsive to local knowledge can become reproducible maps taught across contexts. Even anti-models can become models if repeated long enough. No tradition gets permanent exemption from institutionalization. Perhaps fidelity to the radical edge of these traditions requires something other than preserving them. Perhaps it requires allowing them to become vulnerable again to what they do not yet know.

That, for me, is where the question of the future becomes ethical rather than merely innovative. The task is not to invent a therapy nobody has seen before. It is to remain available to forms of helping that might disturb our existing categories, including the categories from which our own professional identities are built.

I am not arguing that therapy should abandon the consulting room, individual conversation, professional training, or the accumulated knowledge of the field. Nor do I think novelty is valuable simply because it is novel. Fisher’s work is more interesting than a demand for constant innovation. The question concerns our relationship to possibility. Have we become so accustomed to the existing organization of psychotherapy that we mistake its present form for the limits of helping itself?

Twenty years from now, I hope something exists that would confuse me. I hope someone could arrive from 2046 and show me a practice of helping that I would initially fail to recognize as therapy. Perhaps I would think it was education, art, politics, ritual, community, design, play, or something for which I did not yet have a category. Perhaps the people participating in it would find some of our current arrangements equally strange. They might find it curious that a person once sat alone in a room with a licensed professional every Tuesday at three o’clock to work on something called their mental health. They might wonder why distress was separated so thoroughly from housing, work, technology, climate, economics, community, place, politics, and the futures people believed were available to them. They might wonder why the person seeking help was called the client while everyone else remained outside. They might wonder why we spent so much time asking where problems came from and comparatively little time asking what worlds those problems were helping to produce.

And perhaps they would look back at our hundreds of therapeutic models, our certifications, our evidence bases, our treatment manuals, our competing theories of change, and see a field surrounded by ghosts. Not ghosts asking us to return to the past. Ghosts reminding us that other futures were once possible.

The work is not to recover some lost golden age of radical therapy. It is to recover the capacity to imagine helping otherwise. To recognize that psychotherapy as we currently practice it is not the inevitable endpoint of a century of progress. It is one historical arrangement among others, produced under particular economic, professional, institutional, and cultural conditions. It can therefore be otherwise.

I would like therapy to become strange again. Not strange for the sake of novelty, but strange because we have once again become capable of imagining forms of helping that the present cannot completely understand. Perhaps the question is not what comes after psychotherapy. Perhaps the question is whether psychotherapy can make enough room for something it cannot yet recognize.

Something that would make the Chris of 2026 pause twenty years from now and say: I don’t know what that is. But I want to know more.

Peace.

The process of writing this essay was human writer first and human editor last. I used generative AI for ideation, research and spellchecking. Pass judgement accordingly.

Come Join the Conversation

If the kinds of questions I write about here matter to you, Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon is where I hope we can take some of them off the page and into a room together.

October 1–3, we’ll gather in Irvine for three days of conversation about therapy, culture, politics, art, ethics, and the stories shaping how we understand ourselves and one another. There will be provocative speakers, live art, small conversations, disagreement, curiosity, and plenty of room for ideas we haven’t thought yet.

I’m less interested in another conference where experts tell us how therapy should be done. I want to create a place where we can wonder together about what therapy is becoming, what it might leave behind, and what else might be possible.

And because Dangerous Stories is a fundraiser for California Family Institute, your registration also helps us continue providing affordable, sliding-scale therapy in our community.

Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon
October 1–3, 2026 · Irvine, California
CEUs available

Come be part of the conversation.

1. Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

- Walt Whitman Song of Myself, 51

2. “Chris, you better get comfortable in the gray.” - Randy Moss (private conversation 1993)

3. “Be careful what you pray for, you might actually get it.” - Randy Moss (private conversation 1993)

4. My earliest memory is the time my mother forgot to pick me up from pre-school. The people responsible for watching me put me in a room of cots for nap time by myself. I waited for what seemed like an eternity. I imagine this was the beginning formation of what I have named as my “philosophy of self- sufficiency.” A philosophy that would ultimately lead to ruin and one that will rear its ugly head still.

5. Curiosity has taken me farther in my life than any other aspect of my being (persistence is a close second).

6. You don’t discover yourself; you compose yourself.

7. Read books outside of your social location.

8. You can spend your whole life critiquing a world that you never helped build. Don’t do that.

9. I read something recently about William Burroughs final thoughts that he wrote in his journal:

"There is no final enough of wisdom, experience-any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no final solution. Just conflict. Only thing can resolve conflict is love, like I felt for Fletch and Ruski, Spooner and Calico. Pure love. What I feel for my cats present and past. Love? What is It? Most natural painkiller what there is. LOVE.”

Yeah, Love is all there is. (and I miss all my cats as well William)

10. Your bookshelf predicts your future.

11. For example, a book that altered the course of my life was Richard Ronhr’s Falling Upward: A Spiritualty for the Two Halves of Life. In the book Rohr popularized a poignant quote by monk Thomas Merton that goes “people can spend their whole lives climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.” I’ve never forgotten it and it gave me permission to leave a successful business and become a therapist.

12. Collect ideas more than possessions.

13. Be suspicious of anyone selling certainty.

14. “Be lamps unto yourselves. Be refuges unto yourselves. Take yourselves to no external refuge. Hold fast to the truth as a lamp. Hold fast to the truth as a refuge. Look not for refuge to anyone besides yourselves.” –Shakyamuni Buddha

15. If your world keeps getting smaller you are doing something wrong.

16. I believe that the originators of Alcoholics Anonymous had great vision, and a

profound understanding of the significance of rites of passage. At the centre of AA

is a ritual event that provides for a formalisation of the stages of separation and

reincorporation, and for a marking of the turning points of personʼs lives. This is

accompanied by the convening of forums that provide the opportunity for

persons to give testimony to the decisions that they have made to break from

excessive alcohol consumption, to the desires and purposes that motivate these

decisions, and to tell and retell the stories of their lives before a group of

witnesses, many of whom are veterans of such journeys. In this context, the

responses of the witness group are powerfully acknowledging and authenticating

of these decisions, desires, purposes and stories. As these decisions and stories,

and these accounts of desire and purpose, become more richly described, they

become more influential – they are more significantly shaping of personsʼ lives.

- Michael White

17. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.

I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

- the Upajjhatthana Sutta (“Subjects for Contemplation”)

18. “…that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. “

- Henry Thoreau

19. Protect your attention more fiercely than your reputation.

20. Therapy is less about solving lives and more about enlarging them.

21. Not everything broken needs to be fixed. Some things just need to be mourned.

22. I’m beginning to think that purpose is the answer to everything.

23. Make things. Not because they will last or be important or find an audience. Rather because they change you while making them.

24. I have always found a north star in what writers on Buddhism call the “bodhisattva ideal.” This refers to a spiritual outlook and way of life rooted in a resolute vow and dedicated to the welfare of all sentient beings. I am struck with the promise of the bodhisattva of not entering Nirvana until all sentient beings are freed from suffering. It is a heroic ideal for me. I like the idea of going out as the last man on the sinking boat after getting everybody in their lifeboats. I mean, we all want to be a hero in some story.

25. Speaking of sinking boats. “Life is like stepping onto a boat which is about to sail out to sea and sink.” ― Shunryu Suzuki

26. More boats. (sorry, I grew up and still live very close to the ocean)

I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

- Cheryl Strayed

27. A life organized around validation eventually becomes inhabitable.

28. People remember how you made possibility feel.

29. Go where interesting conversations happen. Artist talks. Panels. Webinars. Book clubs. Organizing events. Salons. I recently went to a bookseller’s event for the first time and learned so much and made a new community of friends and colleagues.

30. On that note. The world becomes larger every time you meet someone genuinely different.

31. Travel as much and often as you can. Even if it’s just a couple of hours away.

32. Sometimes your job is to remember.

33. Books have been some of the best mentors I’ve had.

34. Most people need accompaniment more than advice.

35. My work is becoming less psychological, and more ecological.

36. If someone asked me to summarize the twenty years of my life, I don’t think it would mention therapy. I think it would be something like: we become who we are through our participation in stories, communities, and futures, and we have more freedom than we imagine to compose those worlds.

37. A well lived life isn’t measured by what you accomplish. It’s measured by whether your participation leaves the world more alive than when you found it.

38. Life always invites us back into participation after disappointment.

39. Not everything should become content.

40. Love doesn’t require complete understanding. Neither does ethical relationship.

41. The world is becoming louder. Become someone who can hear whispers.

42. Information wants circulation. Wisdom wants relationship.

43. One of the deepest forms of respect is to allow people to be partially unknown.

44. Build the room you wish existed. Then leave the door open.

45. Culture is made by amateurs.

46. The question isn’t whether you’re angry. It’s whether your anger is pointing toward something worth building. Honestly, much of what I have built, I built on anger.

47. Don’t organize your life around avoiding embarrassment. Most things worth becoming or doing require you to look foolish, at least in the beginning.

48. A lot of life requires you surviving your own opinion about yourself.

49. I don’t care what the problem is, it grows in isolation.

50. Some of the most radical things you can do are slow down, listen carefully, and remain present.

51. When we both of us knew how the end always is
How the end always is

- Robert Smith The Cure Disintegration

52. The sacred often arrives disguised as ordinary life. The world is already richer, stranger, more beautiful, and more alive than we usually notice. Our job is to learn how to pay attention.

53. Every life deserves more than one future.

54. Be careful of the rooms you continue living inside after you’ve left them.

55. Most of us are running on inherited stories and calling it reality.

56. The world is always larger than the story fear gives us.

57. The strongest people I know aren’t the ones who’ve never needed help. They’re the ones who have learned how to accept it.

58. Don’t become so critical that you lose what once gave you life. I have been there. Trust me, not a fun place.

59. The growing pragmatist in me believes that a good life is less about having the right beliefs (or theory) and more about cultivating the practices, relationships, and forms of attention that keep enlarging your participation in the world.

60. I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

- Robert Frost The Road Not Taken

When I’m gone, I hope people remember that I tried to leave the world a little more interesting, a little more compassionate, and a little more alive than I found it.

Peace.

Come Join the Conversation

If the kinds of questions I write about here matter to you, Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon is where I hope we can take some of them off the page and into a room together.

October 1–3, we’ll gather in Irvine for three days of conversation about therapy, culture, politics, art, ethics, and the stories shaping how we understand ourselves and one another. There will be provocative speakers, live art, small conversations, disagreement, curiosity, and plenty of room for ideas we haven’t thought yet.

I’m less interested in another conference where experts tell us how therapy should be done. I want to create a place where we can wonder together about what therapy is becoming, what it might leave behind, and what else might be possible.

And because Dangerous Stories is a fundraiser for California Family Institute, your registration also helps us continue providing affordable, sliding-scale therapy in our community.

Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon
October 1–3, 2026 · Irvine, California
CEUs available

Come be part of the conversation.

A recent Wall Street Journal article asked an attention getting question: Are therapists to blame for the rise of adults cutting off their parents? It is a question that reflects a broader cultural conversation that has become difficult to ignore. Family estrangement, once treated as a private tragedy or a source of quiet shame, is now discussed openly in therapy offices, podcasts, memoirs, and across social media. Some see this development as long overdue. Adult children who experienced abuse, neglect, or chronic invalidation have found language for experiences that previous generations often had to endure in silence. Others worry that therapeutic culture has become too quick to frame estrangement as a milestone of psychological health, leaving little room for ambiguity, repair, or the ordinary complexity of family life.

Like so many contemporary debates, the conversation quickly splits into opposing camps. Either estrangement is viewed as liberation, or it is viewed as evidence that therapy has encouraged people to abandon their families too easily. I think both positions miss something important.

The question that interests me is not whether estrangement is justified. In many situations it absolutely is. Nor am I interested in defending reconciliation as some higher moral achievement. Reconciliation without accountability has never struck me as particularly ethical. Instead, I find myself wondering whether the debate itself has become trapped inside a framework that offers only two imaginable futures: remain in relationship or leave it. Once those become the only available possibilities, therapists inevitably find themselves helping clients decide between competing moral positions rather than exploring the much larger landscape of relationships that might still be composed after harm has occurred.

One of the contributions of poststructural thought is its suspicion toward fixed categories. Rather than asking what family is, it asks how family comes into being through discourse, culture, institutions, obligation, memory, and everyday practice. Family is less a natural fact than an ongoing accomplishment. It is continually composed through conversations, rituals, loyalties, expectations, silences, and shared histories. The same might be said of estrangement.

It is tempting to think of estrangement as the absence of relationship, but in practice it rarely functions that way. Silence organizes relationships. Distance organizes relationships. Refusing contact continues to shape lives just as surely as maintaining contact does. Even after decades of separation, people continue dreaming about parents, grieving them, worrying about them, or quietly imagining conversations that may never happen. Estrangement is not the end of relationship. It is one form that relationship can take. I think this shift in perspective has important implications for therapeutic practice.

Much of contemporary clinical discourse remains organized around values of autonomy, boundaries, differentiation, and self-protection. These have been seen as correctives to generations of minimizing abuse or demanding unquestioning loyalty in the name of family. Yet every conceptual advance has its own shadow. If autonomy becomes our only organizing value, relationships begin to appear primarily as matters of individual choice rather than historical, cultural, and ethical inheritances. We risk replacing one simplified moral story with another.

This is one reason I have always appreciated Michael White’s work was because he resisted reducing people to singular identities. No one was simply a victim or simply a perpetrator. Lives were always more complicated than the dominant stories available to describe them. Allan Wade’s response-based work similarly reminds us that violence is never the whole story. Even under conditions of abuse, people are continually responding in ways that preserve dignity, protect others, maintain hope, and resist domination. These perspectives make it difficult to accept the neat moral categories that often dominate public discussions of family estrangement. They encourage us to remain curious about the complexity of people’s responses rather than confident in our conclusions about what healthy relationships are supposed to look like. What continues to strike me, however, is how little attention we give to the persistence of love.

Children frequently continue loving those who frightened them, neglected them, manipulated them, or abused them. This should not surprise us. Long before a child can evaluate a parent’s behavior, their life has already become organized around that relationship. Jennifer Freyd’s work on betrayal trauma helps explain why preserving attachment to an abuser can itself become a strategy of survival. From this perspective, loving someone who caused profound harm is not evidence that something has gone wrong.

This reality is uncomfortable because it resists the moral clarity our culture increasingly demands. We are encouraged to sort people into categories that make ethical decisions feel obvious. Unfortunately lived experience is rarely so cooperative. Love often survives where trust cannot, and compassion sometimes emerges without reconciliation.

Australian Alan Jenkins extended this conversation in a way that I think has relevance for the current debate. Rather than asking only how those who have been harmed might recover, Jenkins asked what accountability requires of those who have caused harm. His work refused both condemnation and absolution. Accountability is not reduced to confession, remorse, or emotional displays of regret. Nor is it measured by whether someone is eventually forgiven. Accountability is a sustained ethical practice. It involves accurately naming one’s actions, acknowledging their effects without minimization, respecting the autonomy of those who have been harmed, making restitution where possible, and accepting that reconciliation may never occur. Responsibility, in Jenkins’ work, is not something one achieves. It is something one continues to practice.

I think this is important when thinking about family estrangement. Public conversations often assume that relationships move toward one of two endings. Either the adult child returns, or the relationship remains permanently severed. Jenkins invites a different way of thinking. Accountability does not determine the future of a relationship, but it does transform the ethical conditions under which different futures become imaginable. A parent may become deeply accountable while an adult child still decides that no further relationship is possible. That decision can itself be ethical. Another parent may demonstrate years of accountability, respect boundaries, stop denying the past, and gradually participate in building a relationship that bears little resemblance to the one that existed before. Neither outcome should become our preferred therapeutic ending. Both represent different responses to different histories.

This is where I find Bruno Latour’s distinction between critique and composition helpful. Latour argued that critique, valuable as it is, eventually reaches its limits. Once we have identified structures of domination, exposed myths, and named injuries, we are still left with a practical question: What shall we build now? Arturo Escobar poses a similar challenge in his writing on the pluriverse. The goal is not merely to dismantle inherited worlds but to participate in composing different ones. Both thinkers redirect our attention from judgment toward creation, from exposing what has gone wrong to participating in what might yet become possible.

These ideas have profound implications for how we think about family estrangement. If our therapeutic imagination remains organized around the binary of reconciliation versus estrangement, then every conversation becomes a debate over which ending is morally preferable. This sort of conversation assumes there are only two ethical futures available to people whose lives have been shaped by harm. A poststructural perspective encourages us to question that assumption. Relationships are not static entities that are either preserved or destroyed. They are continually being composed and recomposed through history, accountability, memory, boundaries, absence, care, and changing forms of participation.

All this leads me to a concept that I believe deserves greater attention within narrative practice and the helping professions more broadly. I want to propose the idea of relational imagination as a complement to our existing conversations about relational ethics.

Relational ethics asks how we ought to live with one another. It concerns itself with questions of responsibility, dignity, power, care, and accountability. Relational imagination asks a different question. It asks what forms of relationship become possible once we refuse the inherited scripts that tell us relationships must either return to what they once were or disappear altogether. It is the capacity to imagine ethical relational futures that have not yet been named.

Relational imagination is therefore not optimism. Either is it an argument against estrangement or an argument for reconciliation. It doesn’t ask people to preserve relationships at all costs, nor does it celebrate separation as an achievement in itself. Instead, it begins with the assumption that relationships remain open to composition. It asks what ways of connection, distance, acknowledgment, care, accountability, grief, memory, and even love might become possible given this history, these people, and these ethical commitments.

This understanding also situates the role of the therapist. We don’t need to become advocates for reconciliation, nor champions of estrangement. Neither position adequately honors the complexity of people’s lives. Our work is better understood as expanding the field of imaginable futures. We accompany people as they explore what kinds of relationships they can live with, what forms of accountability matter to them, what boundaries protect dignity without foreclosing possibility, and what futures allow them to move forward without denying the truth of what has happened.

Perhaps this has always been one of narrative therapy’s strengths. Michael White didn’t ask clients to inhabit the story he believed was healthiest. Instead, he worked to enlarge the landscape of stories that became available for living. Family estrangement deserves the same generosity. Rather than asking whether someone should stay or leave, reconcile or cut ties, perhaps our first responsibility is to help them imagine more than the two futures our culture so often presents as the only viable choices. The more interesting question is no longer whether families can be repaired. I think the more important question is whether we can become imaginative enough to compose relationships that neither deny the past nor surrender the future. The alternative to estrangement is not reconciliation. It is relational imagination.

Peace.

Dangerous Stories
A Therapy Salon

I hope you’ll consider joining us this October for Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon.

For three days we’ll gather therapists, scholars, artists, writers, and curious people who are willing to ask questions that don’t always fit comfortably within the profession. Together we’ll explore the cultural, political, ethical, and relational stories that shape helping work today, not through certainty, but through conversation.

This isn’t another conference built around techniques or clinical formulas. It’s a salon: a place for ideas, disagreement, creativity, and the kind of encounters that can change how we think and practice.

Every registration also supports California Family Institute’s nonprofit mission of providing affordable, sliding-scale therapy to individuals, couples, and families who might otherwise go without care.

I’d love to see you there.

October 1–3, 2026
Irvine, California

Learn more and reserve your place here: https://www.californiafamilyinstitute.org/dangerous-stories/

There is a particular criticism that I have faced as someone spends much of their life trying to make things. It is the suggestion that my producing, publishing, teaching, recording, organizing, or building is ultimately a form of insecurity. That the need to contribute is really the need to be seen. That my productivity is another treadmill, powered by the approval of strangers. I have a friend often puts it to me this way. She believes my consistent creating reflects an attachment to what others think. From her perspective, the wiser and better path is one of greater detachment from the endless pressure to produce.

It is not an inaccurate critique. There have been periods when my work has become entangled with exhaustion. I have found myself doing the next article, the next podcast, the next workshop, convinced that one more project would finally produce a sense of arrival. There have also been disappointments when work I thought was good seemed to disappear into the algorithmic void, raising questions about whether any of it mattered at all. Burnout and failure have a way of exposing motivations that success hides.

At the same time, I don’t believe that the answer is simply to stop making things. Creating has never felt primarily like self-promotion. It has been a way I think it out. The way I work clarifies ideas that otherwise remain blurry. Teaching forces me to test concepts against lived experience. Podcast conversations have introduced me to people I would never have otherwise encountered. Even collecting books has become less about possessing them than about participating in an ongoing conversation. Creating, for me, is not the accumulation of outputs. It is a way of participating in the world.

Maybe the better question is not whether we create, but what relationship we have with our creations. It is here that I find myself influenced by Arturo Escobar’s critique of what he calls the “One-World World.” Escobar argues that modernity repeatedly assumes there is a single correct way of living, organizing society, pursuing knowledge, or imagining progress. Alternative ways of being are tolerated only insofar as they resemble this dominant model. The problem is not simply political. It is existential. We begin to believe there is one right future toward which everyone should live.

I recognize this tendency in myself. It has often appeared in more subtle forms than political ideology. As a therapist, teacher, and creator, I have frequently carried assumptions about how people should change, what constitutes a meaningful life, or which intellectual traditions deserve more attention. Critical theory itself can become another universalizing project, dividing the world into those who “get it” and those who remain trapped in false consciousness. One does not need to be dogmatic to quietly assume that one’s own map is the one others ought eventually to adopt.

Escobar offers something different. Rather than imagining a single destination, he invites us into what he calls the pluriverse: a world in which many legitimate worlds coexist. The point is not relativism, where every idea becomes equally persuasive, nor is it the abandonment of ethical commitments. It is the recognition that our own preferred ways of living remain situated, partial, and historically contingent. Other people are composing lives according to different histories, different obligations, and different visions of what flourishing requires.

Funny enough, I have found an unexpectedly similar lesson in Al-Anon. One of its enduring pieces of folk wisdom is the reminder to “stay in your own hula hoop.” The image is wonderfully ordinary. My responsibility is not to step into everyone else’s circle, rearranging their choices or correcting their trajectories. My work is to remain accountable for my own actions, my own responses, and my own values. It is a practice of humility cloaked as common sense.

That idea alongside Escobar’s has the metaphor take on additional depth. If there are many legitimate ways of inhabiting the world, then perhaps my task is not to recruit others into mine. I can still teach, create, and advocate for the ideas I believe matter. But I can hold them more lightly. I can offer them up tentatively rather than impose. I can be invitational rather than convincing. My work becomes an opening into conversation rather than something that requires agreement.

Ironically, loosening my grip on how others should live has also changed my relationship to my own work. I feel less compelled to measure its success through influence or recognition (or critique). The value of creating lies in the act itself. An essay may influence another person’s thinking, or it may not. A podcast episode may disappear into the vast empty of the internet. A workshop may alter someone’s practice in ways I will never witness. Those outcomes matter, but they no longer define the worth of the effort.

This has also lightened up another tendency that has been around for years: judgment. It is easy, especially within intellectual communities, to develop elaborate explanations for why other people are mistaken, politically naïve, theoretically unsophisticated, or ethically compromised. Sometimes those critiques are accurate. Often they become a way of protecting our own certainty. Staying inside my own hula hoop has not required abandoning critique. It has required remembering that critique is not the same as stewardship. I am responsible for my own practice before I become responsible for anyone else’s.

I imagine my friend and I will continue to disagree. She may still see my life as unnecessarily busy, overly public, or attached to production. I understand why. Her criticism continues to ask something important: Who am I creating for? That question deserves to be asked. But I no longer think the answer is to stop creating. The better question is whether I can create without trying to manage what my creations become. Whether I can let them into the world without hoping they persuade, succeed, or justify my existence. That, I suspect, is a healthier form of freedom.

I suppose this is true even of the tools we use. I have increasingly found myself working alongside AI, and I know that choice invites its own judgments. Some see collaboration with these tools as evidence that the work is no longer genuinely yours. My responsibility is not to persuade everyone that collaborating with AI is legitimate. It is simply to remain accountable for how I use it, what I make with it, and whether it enlarges or diminishes my participation in the world. The question is not whether a tool is pure. The question is whether I remain accountable for what I make with it.

All this to say that I think the real distinction is this. Production seeks accumulation. More articles. More podcasts. More followers. More recognition. Creation is something else. Creation is participation. We borrow ideas, reshape them through our own lives, and return them to the commons in the hope that someone else might find them useful.

If I have learned anything from Escobar and from the wisdom of Al-Anon, it is that these two commitments belong together. I can participate without insisting that others participate as I do. I can create without believing my way is the way. I can stay inside my own hula hoop while appreciating that countless other ways of being in the world that are beside mine. That feels less like I’m stuck in production and more like gratitude. And less like I’m trying to build a legacy and more like joining a conversation. And I think that has been what I have been trying to do all along.

Peace.

PRESENTER ANNOUNCEMENT

Courtney Olinger, PsyD

I’m Not Going to Give You a Map: Wayfinding in Neurodivergent Worlds

Therapists love maps. Treatment maps, developmental maps, social skills curricula — the whole apparatus of charting the “right” path. And for autistic and other neurodivergent people, those maps have mostly been drawn by someone else, to someone else’s territory, measured against neuronormative expectations they never agreed to.

Courtney refuses to hand you one. That’s the point.

Courtney has worked alongside autistic individuals since 2000. She holds a doctorate in Marriage and Family Therapy, trained in narrative therapy through the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, and authored a landmark three-part series on narrative practices and autism in the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work — work explicitly aimed at shedding ableism from therapy. She brings lived experience as well as clinical experience, and a career-long practice of privileging insider knowledges over professional prescriptions.

At Dangerous Stories (October 1-3, Irvine), Courtney offers wayfinding instead of mapping: attending to sensory cues, environmental landmarks, and relational practices that open therapy to people’s own knowledges and preferred ways of being. Through clinical stories spanning productivity, expectations, OCD, suicidality, and intersectionality, she’ll reflect on practices that resist replication as formula — and show us what to become curious about, how to travel alongside people, and how to stop reproducing neuronormative assumptions in our work.

No map. Better questions.

More speakers coming.
Registration open: https://www.californiafamilyinstitute.org/dangerous-stories/

Let’s build something dangerous together.

Of course I was suspicious. And said as much to my friend. The story resembled one of those mythologies that gets passed around in graduate law and ethics classes. You know, “I know a person…” or “a friend of a friend...” or “I heard a story once…” Fill in the blank with the scary story of the day.

What stayed with me however was not the video itself, because they’re everywhere, but its effect. My friend, an experienced and conscientious clinician, was unsettled. She began questioning whether her own website exposed her to disciplinary action. That reaction, not the claims made in the video, prompted me to spend some time doing some research. I started by asking the influencer for info on the complaint so I can verify. I did get a non-response response suggesting a state and that they would prefer to keep their source confidential unless they would like to respond. If you are going to use a story like this to scare people into action you should have the facts ready to go or be at risk of being accused of bullshit, making it all up.

After that, with the help of AI, I reviewed publicly available disciplinary actions from the state in question. I wanted to know whether the evidence supported the anxiety the video had produced. More than anything, I wanted to restore my friend’s confidence by replacing uncertainty with something more solid than speculation.

The disciplinary record revealed what one would expect any licensing board to contain. There were cases involving misrepresented credentials, DUI’s, breaches of confidentiality, scope-of-practice concerns, and other serious ethical violations. These were legitimate matters warranting regulatory attention. What I did not find, however, was evidence supporting the story and the broader impression that therapists were routinely facing disciplinary action because of ordinary website content. There was nothing. The discrepancy between the evidence and the narrative left me thinking less about websites and more about the role fear has come to occupy within our profession.

Fear has always had a place in professional education. It reminds us that our work carries responsibility. It encourages humility and discourages complacency. Licensing boards exist for important reasons, and ethical standards matter because the people we serve matter. Yet fear becomes problematic when it shifts from serving as a teacher to becoming a product. Increasingly, I worry that parts of our profession have learned to market anxiety as though it were synonymous with ethical practice.

This concerns me because the people most susceptible to these messages are rarely those practicing recklessly. They are students, associates, newly licensed clinicians, and thoughtful practitioners who are already deeply invested in doing good work. Many enter the profession carrying a profound sense of responsibility toward their clients. Like my friend. They do not require additional reminders that mistakes are possible; they require mentors, supervisors, and educators who can help them develop the judgment necessary to respond thoughtfully when difficult situations arise.

The distinction between compliance and professional formation is important here. Compliance asks whether one’s behavior conforms to established rules and standards. Professional formation asks a different question: What kind of clinician am I becoming? The first question is important, but it is not sufficient. Ethical practice cannot be reduced to memorizing regulations or avoiding complaints. It develops through consultation, reflection, supervision, self-awareness, and, when necessary, the humility to acknowledge and repair mistakes. These capacities cannot be cultivated through fear alone.

The timing of this conversation and these fear selling practices is significant. Behavioral healthcare is changing fast. Artificial intelligence, telehealth, digital marketing, coaching, and evolving public expectations have introduced questions for which established ethical guidance is still developing. Periods of uncertainty inevitably create opportunities for both education and exploitation. Some individuals respond by helping clinicians think more carefully about these emerging challenges. Others respond by amplifying uncertainty in ways that encourage dependence upon additional products, consultations, or trainings. While these responses may appear similar on the surface, they are grounded in fundamentally different understandings of professional development.

Perhaps, then, the question is not whether therapists should take ethics seriously. Of course they should. Rather, the question is what kind of professional culture we hope to create. Do we aspire to cultivate practitioners whose primary orientation is avoiding disciplinary action, or practitioners capable of exercising thoughtful clinical judgment in situations where no checklist provides an obvious answer? Those are not the same educational goals.

As educators, supervisors, and experienced clinicians, we should ask ourselves what stories we are telling those entering the profession. If our teaching leaves conscientious therapists feeling smaller, more hesitant, and less trusting of their own developing judgment, we should be willing to examine the unintended consequences of our approach. Ethics should deepen our capacity for discernment rather than diminish our confidence. Respect for professional standards and confidence in one’s clinical judgment are not opposing values. At their best, they grow together.

Peace.

PRESENTER ANNOUNCEMENT

Stacy Marsh, MA, LMFT

Eating Disorder Resistance and Recovery

Narrative therapy has never been polite about eating disorders. When David Epston and his colleagues formed the Anti-Anorexia/Anti-Bulimia League decades ago, they named the stakes plainly: anorexia and bulimia are not identities, not deficits, not diagnoses to be managed. They are voices that colonize a person’s own voice, and they can be resisted.

Stacy Marsh continues that legacy.

A narrative therapist, adjunct professor, and eating disorder specialist practicing in Newport Beach, Stacy works at the frontline where problems try to convince people that the problem is who they are. Her practice is built on the conviction at the heart of this tradition: the person is not the eating disorder. And once that separation is made, resistance becomes possible, and recovery becomes a story of reclaiming a life, not just managing symptoms.

At Dangerous Stories (October 1-3, Irvine), Stacy takes on one of the most formidable problems our field faces, and shows us what resistance looks like in practice.

More speakers coming.
Registration open: https://www.californiafamilyinstitute.org/dangerous-stories/

Let’s build something dangerous together.

So the personal part. When I was eighteen, maybe nineteen, my parents split up. At the time was drinking and using every day back then, so a lot of that period is blurry. But what I do remember is the apartment.

At the time my father moved out and started half-heartedly trying to keep some kind of relationship going with my brothers and me. Once a month we’d do something together. Bowling, usually, because bowling doesn’t require you to talk about anything real.

One visit was different. He had us over to his new place for a meal. This was the first time I’d seen it. I walked in and got hit with this thickness in the air, this loneliness you could almost touch. What I remember was this one chair in the living room. One small chair in a large room, that’s it. There was no warmth to the place, nothing that said life was happening here. Just my dad and a chair. It was the saddest thing I’d ever seen.

Of course at the time I didn’t have a word for what that did to me. I do now. That apartment turned into a chronotope, and it burned itself into me.

Concretely, what happened is this: I didn’t just remember my father’s apartment. I moved into it. Some part of me looked at that one chair and decided this is where men like us end up. Alone. Bare walls. I started treating that lonely place like it was where I was headed, not as one possibility among others but as an inheritance, a future somebody had already built and was just waiting for me to sit down in.

This is the part people miss when I talk about chronotopes and they think I’m doing literary theory for its own sake. A single afternoon in a single room can become the architecture your entire relational life gets built inside of. You don’t agree to it. You don’t even notice it happening. It can run like that for decades before you notice it.

I didn’t understand any of this at the time, obviously. What I felt was fear. A sense of dread about being abandoned that showed up in every relationship I tried to build. I didn’t know I was preparing for a future I’d already decided was true. I just kept doing the same defensive relational moves over and over without knowing why. I was frozen in that particular piece of space-time, and when you’re frozen you don’t know it. You just think this is what normal feels like.

It took years, and it took sitting with my own therapist, before I could even see the apartment as something outside of me. That’s the first task, narrating the space-time instead of just living inside it without knowing it. Once I could put words to it, this happened, in this room, at this age, this is what I decided it meant, I could finally ask the question that actually matters. Did it have to mean that?

Because a chronotope only holds power over you as long as you haven’t questioned it. The apartment was real. The chair was real. What I built on top of that, the verdict that I was destined for an empty, bare life, was a story. Not a fact. And stories can be re-authored. That’s more or less the whole premise of the work I’ve been doing. We don’t just tell stories about our lives, we live inside the space-time our stories build for us. Change the chronotope and you change what’s actually possible.

I should be honest about what that work took, and what it gave me back. Looking hard at the strength of that chronotope, not just naming it once and calling it done, was some of the harder relational work I’ve done. It’s an uncomfortable thing to find out you’ve been organizing your intimate life around one afternoon you didn’t choose and can barely remember choosing to hold onto. But on the other side of that discomfort was something I hadn’t had before. Futures. Plural. Not the single future that apartment had handed me.

I don’t think people talk enough about how rare that is. Most of us are running on one inherited chronotope and calling it realism.

I’ve never told this story publicly before now. I’m telling it because I think people run into my work, all this talk of space-time and futuring and the chronotopes we’re living inside without naming them, and aren’t totally sure what I’m getting at or why any of it matters clinically. This is why. Not as a concept. As a chair in an empty room that almost became my whole future.

It didn’t have to be my inheritance. It wasn’t. And if some version of that apartment is sitting in the back of your own chest right now, I want you to know there’s a way out of it. It starts with just naming the room you’re standing in.

Peace.

PRESENTER ANNOUNCEMENT

Michelle Myers, M.S., PPS-SC

Schools respond to bullying the way our culture responds to most problems: find the bad kid, name the bad kid, punish the bad kid. It doesn’t work. Punishment reproduces the very power relations that bullying runs on. The labels stick. The kid becomes the problem.

Michelle Myers has spent years practicing something more dangerous: what if the bully is not the problem, and bullying is the problem?

A veteran school counselor and longtime collaborator of the beloved narrative therapist John Winslade, Michelle has been on the front lines of Undercover Anti-Bullying Teams — a non-punitive, restorative practice that recruits peer influence to transform bullying relationships from the inside. No blame. No labels. No forcing the victim to confront anyone. Just kids, given real responsibility, quietly rewriting the story of their own classroom. Alongside this work, she brings deep practice in narrative mediation, resolving conflict without producing winners and losers.

Longtime listeners of The Radical Therapist will remember Michelle from episode #064, where she broke down exactly how these teams work. Now you get to be in the room with her.

This is narrative therapy off the couch and loose in the hallways of public schools, where the stakes are a child’s daily life.

At Dangerous Stories (October 1-3, Irvine), Michelle shows us what it looks like when a school stops policing kids and starts trusting them.

More speakers coming.
Registration open.

Let’s build something dangerous together.

Honestly, it’s becoming difficult to watch.

Not because the disagreement is bad. A profession should be able to argue with itself and reflect on its practices. What troubles me is that many of these conversations seem to hint at the same question without ever examining it. We argue endlessly about which approach works best, whose evidence is strongest, which model deserves to survive.

If you pay attention, the growing question about psychotherapy is, what works? It is an understandable question. Suffering people want relief. Public money demands accountability. Researchers employ methods capable of distinguishing effective practice from ineffective practice. Yet I have begun to wonder whether this question has become so dominant that it now blinds us from something more fundamental. Before asking what works, maybe we ought to ask what therapy is for.

Here and elsewhere, I see more folks pointing to common factors research. The common factors literature tried to provide an interruption to the endless competition between therapeutic models. Rather than searching for the intervention that would finally outperform all others, researchers began noticing that different schools of therapy often produced surprisingly similar outcomes. Jerome Frank pointed toward remoralization, the restoration of hope in those who had become demoralized by life. Bruce Wampold emphasized the therapeutic relationship, expectancy, shared explanatory frameworks, and meaningful therapeutic rituals. In all this, therapy appeared to succeed less because of its unique techniques than because it created conditions in which change became imaginable.

At the same time, it seems that common factors research now finds itself criticized from opposite directions. Researchers working within the empirical tradition point out that much of the evidence remains correlational rather than causal. The therapeutic alliance may not produce improvement so much as improvement produces stronger ratings of the alliance. Others argue that the famous “dodo bird verdict” smooths over meaningful differences between treatments, particularly where approaches like exposure therapy appear to outperform alternatives for specific problems. There is also the question of whether the contextual model can ever really be disproven. If every successful outcome can be explained after the fact by hope, relationship, and ritual, what evidence could counter it?

These are important debates sure, but what interests me is something they share. Both sides continue to accept the same underlying picture of psychotherapy. Therapy remains an intervention delivered by an expert to an individual whose effectiveness is determined primarily through symptom reduction over a brief period. The disagreement concerns which ingredients matter most, not whether the framework itself is adequate.

This is where I find myself wanting to examine the conversation rather than choosing a side.

Bruno Latour once argued that critique had reached a point of exhaustion. The work of exposing hidden assumptions, dismantling institutions, and revealing social construction had become so successful that it left us increasingly unable to describe what we wished to build. His proposal was simple. That the task before us was no longer critique but composition. Not explaining the world differently but participating in the careful construction of new realities.

I now think psychotherapy finds itself at a similar threshold.

Much of the research literature remains committed to asking how therapy produces symptom reduction. That is important sure, but it may also be a narrow description of what therapists spend their lives doing. Narrative therapy, for example, has never understood its work as symptom management. Michael White described therapy as a process of re-authoring lives, restoring agency, of helping people become different participants in the stories available to them. Identity, belonging, responsibility, memory, hope, and preferred futures were not secondary outcomes. They were the work itself.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope takes this even further. He believed every life happens within a particular organization of time and space. Some people live in what feels like endless repetition. Others find themselves stuck within threshold experiences where the future has not yet become imaginable. Others remain organized around catastrophe, nostalgia, obligation, or anticipation. Therapy often involves far more than reducing distress within these worlds. It participates in helping people move between them. It creates conditions under which another relationship to time becomes possible. This is not simply emotional change. It is temporal, narrative, and cultural change.

Seen this way, many of the most meaningful moments in therapy become invisible within our dominant research frameworks. We don’t have an instrument that measures the experience of finally being believed after decades of silence. How do we quantify what happens when a family begins telling different stories about one another? Where does an outsider witness ceremony fit within symptom management? What scale captures dignity, recognition, or the experience of becoming imaginable to oneself again?

Hartmut Rosa’s work offers another way of approaching the question. He argues that contemporary societies increasingly organize life through acceleration. More speed, more efficiency, more optimization, yet often accompanied by deeper forms of alienation. His alternative is resonance, those moments in which we find ourselves genuinely addressed by the world and capable of responding in return. Therapy increasingly strikes me as one of the few institutional spaces still organized around the possibility of resonance rather than performance. Its value may lie less in correcting pathology than in cultivating forms of responsiveness that have become increasingly difficult to sustain elsewhere.

One of my favorite therapy articles over that last several years is Scott Miller and Mark Hubble’s Has psychotherapy lost its magick? In it he was not arguing that therapists should become mystics or abandon scientific rigor. I understand his concern as historical. In its understandable pursuit of professional legitimacy, psychotherapy increasingly adopted the language of medicine. It became more technical, more measurable, more procedural. Along the way, it also became uncomfortable speaking about ritual, metaphor, transformation, and the kinds of experiences that have accompanied healing practices across cultures for centuries. Jerome Frank knew this long ago. What united successful healing traditions was not shared theory but their capacity to offer compelling explanations for suffering, meaningful rituals, and relationships capable of restoring hope. Modern psychotherapy inherited many of these functions while gradually learning to speak about them as though they were incidental to technique.

Maybe this helps explain a current feature of contemporary culture. Now psychotherapy has become more medicalized and evidence-driven than ever before, people continue to seek out psychics, tarot readers, astrologers, psychedelic ceremonies, men’s groups, women’s circles, pilgrimage, breathwork retreats, ancestral practices, and countless other forms of meaning-making. It is tempting to dismiss these pursuits as irrational or anti-scientific. I suspect something more interesting is happening. Many of these practices offer what contemporary psychotherapy often struggles to make happen: rites of passage, symbolic language, communal witnessing, existential orientation, and experiences that connect private suffering to larger narratives of identity and purpose. They ask questions that symptom measures were never designed to ask.

I am not suggesting psychotherapy become astrology, nor that evidence should be abandoned in favor of charisma or mystique. The history of helping professions contains enough examples of certainty performed as wisdom. But the popularity of these practices should make us think. They may be revealing something about the limits of our own imagination. Perhaps people are not just looking for symptom relief. Perhaps they are searching for initiation, belonging, meaning, and ways of locating themselves within a larger story. If that is true, then the future of psychotherapy may depend less on becoming more scientific than on recovering dimensions of helping that medicine was never quite successful at.

These reflections feel relevant as conversations about artificial intelligence become more serious. I do not think AI presents the greatest challenge to psychotherapy. Rather, it exposes the assumptions we have already made about what psychotherapy is. If therapy is understood primarily as the delivery of standardized interventions directed toward symptom reduction, then much of that work will become increasingly automatable. We should not be surprised by this. We have spent decades translating therapy into protocols, manuals, competencies, measurable outcomes, and reproducible techniques. We have described ourselves in ways that make automation a reality.

What seems less replaceable are those dimensions of practice that have never fit inside the medical model in the first place. The creation of rituals that help people cross difficult thresholds. The cultivation of communities or coalitions rather than individual adjustment. The use of art, storytelling, ceremony, and collective witnessing. The capacity to remain with uncertainty without rushing toward resolution. The work of helping people compose futures that have not yet acquired language.

None of this requires abandoning science or evidence. People deserve practices that are accountable. History offers more than enough examples of charismatic certainty as healing. Accountability matters. The question is whether accountability must always take the form of psychometrics. Whether symptom reduction is the only language through which the value of therapeutic work can be recognized. Whether our measures have become mistaken for our purposes.

Perhaps this is the question that matters most. Not whether common factors or specific techniques better explain therapeutic outcomes. Those debates will continue. I believe the more interesting question is whether the profession has allowed its methods of evaluation to quietly become its philosophy. If so, then the task before us may not simply be to improve psychotherapy but to recover a richer understanding of what helping has always been.

I suspect the future of therapy will depend less on discovering another intervention or model than on rediscovering practices that medicine never knew how to measure. Not because they are beyond accountability, but because they belong to a different account of what it means for a human life to change.

Peace.

Have you registered Yet?

Not a conference. A salon.

Three days of provocative keynotes, intimate dialogue, and live art with therapists, cultural workers, and thinkers pushing beyond the usual scripts.

Tired of boring conferences? This is your moment.

Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon
October 1–3 · Irvine, CA

This is where therapy stops playing it safe.

(All funds support California Family Institute, CEU’s available!)

More speakers coming!

🎟 Grab your spot: https://www.californiafamilyinstitute.org/dangerous-stories/

I want to take that sort of comment seriously, but as usual, I will argue with it. I am sure there are people who have spent years in therapy that felt like a weekly appointment to be agreed with. I imagine they talked, someone reflected, doing some version of unconditional positive regard, and unfortunately nothing happened. This growth of the “challenging therapist” is based on real frustration and our field has earned it. When the challenge-therapy trend says clients are hungry for movement, it is not wrong about the hunger.

It is wrong about the food. What does “challenging” becomes in the therapy room? It almost never stays a posture. It becomes speech acts, and the speech acts are nearly always interpretation and prescription. The therapist will let you know what is really going on with you, and what you need to do about it. The challenge-therapy therapist shifts from listener to explainer, and explanation has problems the challenge trend never mentions. It is frequently wrong, for one thing, since it is built from an hour a week of secondhand report. It also forecloses curiosity, because a delivered conclusion is a question you no longer have to ask. And then there is the matter of power, which the trend treats as nonexistent, as if the person holding the license and the fee were simply a friend being refreshingly honest.

The critical theory literature tracked this a long time ago. In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jacques Rancière tells the story of Joseph Jacotot, a French schoolmaster in exile who discovered that his Flemish students could learn French from a bilingual book without his explanation. What Jacotot took from this was unsettling. Explanation does not remedy the gap between master and student. It manufactures the gap. Every act of explaining carries a hidden message, which is that you could not have gotten there on your own. Rancière calls this stultification, and it works no matter how accurate the explanation is. Swap “explanation” for “interpretation” and you have a precise description of what happens when a therapist decides that challenging you means telling you what your life means.

Michel Foucault made the adjacent point about the confessional shape of the psy-disciplines. The client speaks, at length and with feeling, but someone else holds the hermeneutic key. The speech belongs to you and the meaning of the speech belongs to the professional. This is an old arrangement in our field, older than our field, and Michael White spent his career trying to build a therapy that resisted it. So, when I hear the “challenge” celebrated as the new edge of the profession, I mostly hear nostalgia, make therapy great again, and the hermeneutic key changing hands back.

There is also an important question nobody in the challenge conversation seems to take on, which is whether it holds up over time. One of my favorites Mikhail Bakhtin has something to say here. He distinguished between the authoritative word and the internally persuasive word. The authoritative word arrives from outside, from the teacher or the priest, and it demands acknowledgment. You can accept it or reject it, but you cannot do much with it, because it stays someone else’s. The internally persuasive word is different. Bakhtin describes it as half ours and half someone else’s, and its defining feature is that it keeps generating new meaning after the conversation ends. This, I think, is the actual reason interpretation and prescription do not sustain. It is not that they are never accurate or never useful in the moment. It is that they remain the therapist’s word. The client can carry that word around, quote it, even obey it, and it will still sit in them like a stone. A good question works differently, because a question can only be answered in the client’s own language. Whatever gets built in response is theirs. John Shotter had a name for the difference: aboutness-thinking versus withness-thinking. Thinking about people produces conclusions. Thinking with them produces movement.

Behind all of this I see something the field is not admitting to itself, which is that many therapists no longer believe in talk therapy. Look at where all the therapists looking for confidence have gone. They’ve gone into psychoeducation, neuroscience explanations, into worksheets and handouts, into nervous system diagrams, into what Foucault might call apparatus. EMDR is the clearest case, a therapy that attached a visible mechanical procedure to what is, underneath, exposure and relationship, and the dismantling studies have repeatedly found that the eye movements contribute little or nothing beyond that underneath. The common factors research Wampold and others have been publishing for decades says the same thing from another direction. The specific techniques account for a sliver of outcome, and the relationship and the client’s own resources account for most of the rest. The bells and whistles are largely shiny things. The field keeps buying the shiny things anyway, and that purchasing pattern tells you that it has stopped trusting.

Byung-Chul Han would say this is not a therapy problem but a cultural one. His recent work The Crisis of Narration argues that we have lost faith in language as something that makes worlds and replaced it with information and procedure. A story orients our lives. Information just arrives, repeatedly, doing nothing. A field that once believed a conversation could reorganize a life now reaches for the reductive IG reel, TikTok, the next shiny training, which is a way of saying it believes in delivery systems more than it believes in speech. Mark Fisher, borrowing David Smail’s phrase “magical voluntarism,” spotlighted the economic pressure. When distress has been privatized, therapy must be seen to do something, and quickly, on the client’s own dime. The blunt challenge and mechanical procedures are both answers to that demand. They perform productivity.

Here is where I should admit something, so this does not come off as a defense of endless nodding and happy horseshit. Narrative therapy, the tradition I work in, challenges constantly. It challenges the problem story and deconstructs the discourses holding a totalized identity in place. It asks questions designed to unsettle conclusions a person has been living for years. The difference is not intensity. The difference is language. The unsettling happens through questions, in the client’s language, so that whatever new territory opens up is territory they walked into rather than territory they were shoved toward. Framed this way, the whole debate between “challenging” therapy and “honoring” therapy dissolves as a false binary. The real thing was never soft versus hard. The real thing is whose words the change is made of.

I will admit the trend irritates me for a more personal reason. The blunt therapist markets themselves as a rebel. No coddling, no therapy-speak. I have spent enough time around rebellion to know the difference between rebellion as posture and rebellion as practice. The challenging therapist is the most conservative figure our field has produced in fifty years, an expert restored to the center of the room, with truth once again distributed downward to a waiting recipient.

I do understand it’s not all bad. Bakhtin did take a position that a borrowed word can migrate, that something authoritative can, over years, become internally persuasive, and I have watched it happen. A therapist’s interpretation lands wrong in March and becomes a person’s own thought by November. So, I will not claim the interpretation never takes root. I will claim it is a gamble with worse odds, and that we have a whole craft, an old and demanding craft, for improving those odds. It is made of questions.

Which leaves me wondering what it would take for therapists to trust talk therapy again? Not talk as filler before the “real technique” arrives, but talk as the practice, language as the thing that builds and unbuilds realities. I do not think you can teach that in a weekend certification, and I am not sure the current economics of the field can afford it. I only know that the people who sit with me do not remember my best explanations. They remember the questions they are still answering.

Peace.

Have you registered Yet?

Not a conference. A salon.

Three days of provocative keynotes, intimate dialogue, and live art with therapists, cultural workers, and thinkers pushing beyond the usual scripts.

Tired of boring conferences? This is your moment.

Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon
October 1–3 · Irvine, CA

This is where therapy stops playing it safe.

(All funds support California Family Institute, CEU’s available!)

More speakers coming!

🎟 Grab your spot: https://www.californiafamilyinstitute.org/dangerous-stories/

This got me thinking. When did we stop talking about therapy this way?

I suppose part of the answer starts with managed care. When therapy increasingly became organized around reimbursement schedules, treatment plans, measurable outcomes, and evidence-based protocols that promised efficiency. Economic realities demanded shorter episodes of care. This is when we learned to speak the language of interventions instead of journeys. But I don’t think that’s the whole story.

Therapy also entered into an unholy alliance with the medical model. I mean, that started with Freud. Increasingly over time problems came to be understood like hospital admissions: identify the pathology, administer the treatment, discharge the patient as quickly as possible. If a hospital stay shouldn’t last more than a few days, perhaps therapy shouldn’t last more than a few sessions. The metaphor quietly changed.

However, more recently another force has entered the room.

There’s a meme making the rounds on TikTok and Instagram. It goes “Why are therapists becoming influencers? Because influencers are becoming therapists.” It’s funny because there’s truth to it. The influencer economy rewards certainty, speed, simplification, reduction, and hot takes. It’s all done in thirty seconds. Three tips. Five signs. Seven hacks. In this world attention is the currency, and attention demands acceleration. The danger here isn’t simply that therapists make videos. It’s that in these videos we begin importing the logic of the platform into the practice of therapy. That is a deal with the devil. Everybody loses. Clients begin to imagine that insight should arrive quickly, healing should be visible immediately, and suffering that persists represents failure. Therapists, meanwhile, begin feeling responsible for producing rapid movement every session. Let the influencers be influencers. This is a dangerous game for therapists.

I’ve also been wondering if what we’re witnessing is more than a change in expectations. Perhaps it is a collision between different experiences of time itself. Mikhail Bakhtin used the word chronotope to describe the inseparable relationship between time and space. Every human practice, every institution, every culture lives within its own chronotope. The courtroom has one. The classroom has one. Social media certainly has one. Therapy has one too.

The therapy office isn’t simply a room where conversations happen. It is a particular space-time. A world with its own rhythms, tempo, its own possibilities. The problem is that other chronotopes are invading it. The chronotope of managed care is, “How quickly can this be resolved? The chronotope of medicine is, “What diagnosis explains this, and what intervention treats it?” The chronotope of social media is, “Can this be summarized into a reel?” The chronotope of late capitalism asks, “How can this be optimized?” Each of these carries its own assumptions about progress, success, and how long transformation should take.

Therapy, when it’s at its best, asks something different.

Good therapy makes room for stories that cannot be rushed. For identities that come together unevenly. For people who move forward, then backward, then sideways. It allows confusion to remain confusion for a while. It allows silence to do some of the work. It allows a conversation to matter even when nothing appears to have changed by the end of the hour. These are not inefficiencies. They are the conditions under which many forms of change become possible.

Today many clients arrive never quite alone. They are accompanied by the tempo of the culture. Productivity. Optimization. Algorithms. Fragmentation. Self-improvement. The expectation that every problem should yield to the right technique if only we could discover it. Unfortunately that urgency doesn’t stay outside the office. It enters the room, sits in the empty chair, and quietly begins directing the conversation. And what I know about urgency, it isnt long before it has recruited the therapist as well. Urgency is a shitty therapist.

This all has me now thinking one of the ethical responsibilities of therapy today is to protect a different experience of time. Not because longer is always better. Not because endless therapy is the goal. Because there are transformations that are not going to happen on demand. There are stories that cannot be edited into thirty seconds. There are identities that need seasons rather than solutions. And perhaps there is something even more important at stake.

Narrative therapy has never been about solving problems. It has always been about composing lives. A life is not repaired the way a machine is repaired. It is authored. Revised. Interrupted. Reimagined. Futures are not discovered waiting for us somewhere ahead. They are composed through conversations, relationships, experiments, setbacks, acts of courage, and moments of recognition that accumulate over time. This is why therapy needs its own chronotope. Not simply because healing takes time. But because futures do.

A possible future cannot be rushed into existence any more than trust, intimacy, grief, forgiveness, or wisdom can. They require incubation. They ask us to linger with uncertainty long enough for something genuinely new to emerge. Perhaps one of the quiet tasks of the therapist is not to help people solve the problems of the present, but to protect the temporal conditions under which different futures can become imaginable.

Maybe the future of therapy isn’t simply better techniques, better management, or better videos on TikTok. Maybe it is recovering and defending its own chronotope. Its own space-time. A place where people are permitted to become, rather than simply improve. To say, without apology, “This may take a year.”

Or two.

Peace.

Have you registered Yet?

Not a conference. A salon.

Three days of provocative keynotes, intimate dialogue, and live art with therapists, cultural workers, and thinkers pushing beyond the usual scripts.

Tired of boring conferences? This is your moment.

Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon
October 1–3 · Irvine, CA

This is where therapy stops playing it safe.

(All funds support California Family Institute, CEU’s available!)

More speakers coming!

🎟 Grab your spot: https://www.californiafamilyinstitute.org/dangerous-stories/

Too often, that resistance is dismissed as defensiveness or a lack of insight. I don’t think that’s what’s happening.

In this video, I explore why conversations about culture, masculinity, and social influence can feel like a threat to agency rather than an invitation to greater freedom. Drawing from narrative therapy, supervision, and years of clinical work, I offer practical ways to approach these moments without arguing, persuading, or retreating into academic language.

We explore:

• Why “culture shaped you” can sound like an attack on dignity
• How resistance often protects a deeply held sense of agency
• Why the resistance itself can become the doorway into the conversation
• Clinical questions that invite reflection rather than defensiveness
• How to talk about masculinity without leading with theory
• Why cultural literacy can be framed as authorship rather than victimhood
• What supervisors can do when clinicians feel stuck working with men

This isn’t a conversation about convincing clients they’re wrong. It’s about finding language that expands agency instead of diminishing it.

I’d love to hear how you’ve navigated these conversations in your own practice. If you’ve found questions or approaches that help men become curious about the stories that have shaped them, share them in the comments.

If you enjoy conversations at the intersection of narrative therapy, philosophy, culture, and clinical practice, consider subscribing for future videos.

She is a new therapist and is learning one of the harder therapies to learn. But on top of that I noticed the beginning of something I have seen repeatedly. What she was describing, even if she didn’t yet have the language for it, is something anyone who has spent time inside narrative therapy communities knows intimately: the narrative police. That imagined, and sometimes real, audience watching your every move from the sidelines of your sessions. Passing judgment. Keeping score. Making you feel, at best, like you’re failing, and at worst, like you should throw in the towel and go learn something more scripted, more reductive, more certain of itself. Those approaches will remain nameless.

The Awkwardness Is the Work

As she was doing this brave thing to share with me her struggle, I found myself wanting to do two things at once. I wanted to be curious about her experience. And I also wanted to honor her struggle. Because I believe the struggle is meaningful. It is not a bug in narrative therapy training. It is closer to the experience required for this practice.

What I tried to share in the moment was that she is learning a new language, she is learning to listen differently, she is learning that a conversation is not just a conversation. People new to narrative therapy learn quickly that what we say has effects, that the positions we take have effects, that the assumptions we carry into a room have effects. These are disruptive realizations, they are unsettling. Once you understand that language is not a neutral vehicle for transmitting meaning but a site where meaning, identity, and possibility get produced or foreclosed, you cannot go back to treating talk as transparent. Reasons why I still believe in talk therapy.

So yes. When you begin the narrative therapy path, it is going to be awkward. There is no escaping it. The awkwardness is the sign that something is actually shifting. The appropriate response to that awkwardness is not reassurance that it will go away, nor shame that it is present. The appropriate response is something closer to accompaniment. We are in this together. This is what it looks like to take language seriously.

The Long History of the Police

The narrative police is not a metaphor I invented, and anyone who has been around long enough knows that. It has a real history. Narrative therapy, like any intellectual and clinical tradition that develops through communities of practice, has also developed its factions. Its schools. Its cliques. Its unspoken hierarchies of correctness.

Michael White used to enjoy deconstructing the idea of “human nature.” He had a kind of playful skepticism about any claim to an essential human core that sits underneath culture and history and relationship. (As I understand it, when he was coming up in the early postmodern days, being accused of being an essentialist was the worst.) But I think there is something that functions like human nature inside communities organized around ideas. Something that produces insiders and outsiders. A thing that turns a way of working into a way of belonging, and belonging into a way of excluding.

I have been in and around enough different narrative therapy groups to know this. There are conversations that happen. There are the right words to say and the wrong ones. There are the lineages that confer legitimacy and the ones that do not. There are figures you cite and figures you quietly omit. This is not unique to narrative therapy, of course. It is the social life of any tradition. What makes it confusing is that narrative therapy, with its explicit commitment to power analysis and transparency and the deconstruction of normative judgment, has a particular responsibility to examine what it does with this. Unfortunately it often doesn’t.

The external police, the human one made of other people’s opinions and community membership games, is worth naming. But I want to focus on something more insidious. Something that does not require an actual audience.

Biopower in group supervision

Unfortunately, as narrative therapists we are not immune to the sort of power operations that the many people that seek are help are subject to. Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower does a good job of describing how power operates in group supervision, and modern societies. Foucault asserted that power no longer works primarily by the sovereign’s sword, by punishment and the threat of death. It works instead through normalization. Through the production of norms that categorize, measure, and rank. Through the creation of an ideal against which every actual life and practice is found wanting. What makes biopower so effective is precisely that it does not need an external enforcer. Once the norm is internalized, we become our own surveillance. The gaze moves inside. We watch ourselves. We compare ourselves against other therapists. We measure ourselves, and find ourselves, repeatedly, ultimately insufficient. Not quite there yet.

This is the more insidious narrative police. Not the community or the school or the faction, though those are real enough. This is the police that operates in the experience of a new therapist sitting with a client at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon, monitoring her own performance in real time, adjudicating every response before it leaves her mouth. This is the police born out of training cultures that, often without meaning to, have transmitted idealized images of what a narrative therapist looks like, sounds like, and is.

And it is worth asking: where does that image come from? How does it get transmitted? Who does it serve?

How It Gets Born

I do not think training programs set out to produce this. I’m not happy about it showing up at California Family Institute. The last thing I want is for someone who is training with me to feel surveilled and inadequate. But the mechanisms that produce it are real, and they operate even when no one intends them. Including me.

The first mechanism is the idealization of exemplary practice. When training relies heavily on demonstration, on watching a master at work, on analyzing recordings of elegant sessions in which everything unfolds with beautiful coherence, it inadvertently installs an image of what narrative therapy looks like when it is working. That image then becomes the standard against which the learner measures her own fumbling, stumbling, and real-world attempts. The comparison is not just unfair. It is structurally designed to produce failure. The master’s session has been selected precisely because it is extraordinary. The learner’s sessions are ordinary. That is not a moral failure.

Side note: When I keynoted the AFTA conference several years ago on Rupture and Repair in Therapy I showed work where I screwed up. Bad work. Work that had to be repaired. I remember after how many folks spoke of my courage to show bad work after the talk. Everybody was so used to seeing the extraordinary. A post for another time.

The second mechanism is the conflation of performance with value. When the emphasis in training falls heavily on what questions to ask, on the particular form of narrative inquiry, on identifying whether a move was externalizing or double-listening or scaffolding, the implicit message is that the practice lives in the performance. That if you get the performance right, you are doing it right. That if you fumble it, you are not yet there.

The third mechanism is what I would call the problem of invisible permission. Narrative therapy involves a sustained commitment to curiosity, to not-knowing, to positioning oneself as genuinely uncertain about the meaning of another person’s experience. But in training, the trainee is rarely given explicit permission to not know. To be in the middle of a session and simply not know what to do next, and to stay there without catastrophizing. The message, delivered implicitly through the structure of supervision and evaluation, is that the good therapist knows. That confusion is a deficit. That if you are lost, you have failed.

Making It Visible

I am learning that the first step in taking a position against the narrative police is to make it visible. Not as a personal flaw in the trainee, not as evidence that she is not suited for this work, but as a cultural production. Something that was made. Something that is sustained by specific practices and structures. Something that can be examined.

This is where Foucault is useful rather than just performative. If the police are not a natural response to learning but a product of how learning has been organized, then the training context itself becomes an object of inquiry. We can ask: what norms are operating here? What images of the ideal practitioner are circulating? Who installed them? What do they foreclose?

In supervision and mentorship, this means being willing to turn the lens. Not just on the trainee’s practice but on the context that is producing a particular relationship to that practice. On me. When a trainee tells me she was in her head during session, I am not interested only in what happened in the session. I am interested in what audience she was performing for, and where that audience came from, and what they were saying.

In an effort to diminish the narrative police at CFI, my coauthor of our new forthcoming book Contemporary Narrative Therapy Lindsey Hampson and I are bringing a Fish Tank Mapping conversation into CFI this month. Lindsey, a clinical psychologist in the UK, developed this chapter and this practice as a way of helping systems, schools, teams, families, slow down and look at the wider waters they swim in rather than fixing attention on any one fish. She is calling hers The Waters We Swim In, and the questions are organizational versions of the same inquiry I am describing here. What are the dominant stories within our organization. What values and assumptions shape our work. What supports people to flourish. What pressures or constraints influence practice. What aspects of our culture have become so familiar that we no longer notice them. The point is not to evaluate anyone or produce a tidy account of CFI. It is to make the invisible visible enough that we can look at it together, staff and trainees and leadership in the same room, and ask what conditions are producing the experience people are having here. If the narrative police are a cultural production rather than a personal failing, then the culture itself has to be willing to sit in the fish tank, together.

Taking a Position

Taking a position against the narrative police does not mean pretending it does not exist. It does not mean reassuring trainees that their work is fine when it needs attention. It does not mean abandoning rigor or reflection or the serious practice of noticing what we are doing and why.

It means taking a position against the particular form of judgment that the police specialize in. The judgment that says you are not yet a real practitioner. The judgment that measures your worth against an idealized image of the perfect narrative therapist. The judgment that treats the messiness of learning as evidence of inadequacy rather than as the actual experience of learning. It means building training cultures that are capable of appreciating the struggle. Not just tolerating it, not just managing it, but genuinely appreciating it as the sign that something real is happening. That a person is being changed by what she is learning. That the awkwardness is fidelity, not failure.

It means being curious about the police themselves. When a trainee reports feeling watched and judged, that is not a problem to be solved with encouragement. It is an invitation to an inquiry. What does the police tell you? Where did they get their authority? What do they say happens if you don’t listen? What has it cost you to have them as a constant companion in your sessions?

And it means making visible, in training contexts, the difference between accountability to an approach and ethic, or submission to an image of purity. Narrative therapy has commitments. Those commitments are worth being accountable to. But accountability to a practice is not the same as surveillance by an ideal. One is an ongoing, relational, contextual process of reflection and return. The other is a machine. A machine that never turns off, never says enough, and never lets you forget that you are not the exemplar in the recording.

A Word About the Traditions

I am aware that what I am writing here will be recognizable to some people as itself a move within the politics of narrative therapy communities. That by naming the factions and the schools and the cliques, I am taking a position inside a contested field. That is true. I am not attempting neutrality. Neutrality is not available, and pretending to it would be its own kind of dishonesty.

What I will say is this: the best of what narrative therapy offers, the genuine intellectual and ethical core of what White and Epston and the people who followed them who built this tradition were trying to do, is not a set of techniques that can be policed into correctness. It is an orientation toward people, toward their knowledge and their agency and the stories they are living inside. An orientation that takes power seriously. That takes language seriously. Takes the political seriously. That takes the effects of practice seriously.

If that orientation produces anything, it should produce training cultures that are capable of the same. That can look at how power operates inside their own communities. That can ask what stories about practice they are transmitting, and who those stories serve, and whether they are the stories they actually mean to tell.

The young therapist who was in her head during session, that is not a problem. She is learning something real about this work. The question worth asking is what she is learning it inside of. And whether that context is doing justice to the difficulty, and the beauty, of what she is trying to become.

Peace.

(PS. I did ask her to read this, for approval, before posting.)

Come be in composition.

Not a conference. A salon.

Three days of provocative keynotes, intimate dialogue, and live art with therapists, cultural workers, and thinkers pushing beyond the usual scripts.

Tired of boring conferences? This is your moment.

Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon
October 1–3 · Irvine, CA

This is where therapy stops playing it safe.

(All funds support California Family Institute, CEU’s available!)

🎟 Grab your spot: https://www.californiafamilyinstitute.org/dangerous-stories/

I want to revisit that conversation, because the data keeps coming in.

This week, Charter — a well-regarded outlet covering the future of work — published a piece featuring Dr. Becky Kennedy. You probably know her. She’s the clinical psychologist turned Instagram phenomenon who became the go-to voice on modern parenting. “Good Inside” is her brand. Millions of parents follow her. She wrote the book on raising emotionally healthy kids.

And now she’s presenting at leadership conferences.

Her thesis, more or less: parenting is the ultimate form of leadership. The mindsets, the attunement, the rupture-and-repair, the capacity to hold your own anxiety while someone else falls apart, all of it translates into the business world. Charter is inviting attendees to walk away with ideas for embedding her concept of “sturdy leadership” into their organizational culture.

I’ll note, without belaboring it, that most of the people running organizations are men. And most of what Dr. Becky has been teaching is emotional regulation, staying present under pressure, and not making your anxiety someone else’s problem. So yes. The parenting expertise is landing squarely in the laps of people who perhaps needed it most and resisted it longest.

But I digress.

The larger point is this: the pivot is real and it is accelerating. What I argued last October was not that therapists should abandon the clinic or that Brené Brown was a hero. My argument was simpler and more uncomfortable: therapeutic knowledge is migrating. It is leaving the office through a hundred different doors. And the question for those of us who trained in this work is whether we get to be part of that migration or whether we watch it happen from the waiting room.

The pushback I received assumed I was wrong about the direction of travel. I wasn’t. The critics were defending a boundary that the market, the culture, and frankly the therapists themselves are already dissolving.

Dr. Becky isn’t the last. She’s the latest.

Pay attention.

Peace.

After having some time to think about it I think the reason is that this saying often becomes a form of self-improvement consumerism. The potential trouble is that people will start evaluating relationships according to productivity, status, ambition, or influence. Forgetting that human lives are more complicated and richer than that.

I recently read the book Foundations of Scenario Planning: The Story of Pierre Wack. I find Pierre Wack a fascinating person with a storied career and life. Early in his life he crossed paths with the mystical teacher G.I. Gurdjieff where he learned about the idea of “remarkable men.” Gurdjieff felt it was important to seek out remarkable people who could guide his search for hidden knowledge and ancient wisdom. A blending of adventure with spiritual philosophy. After his time with Gurdjieff, Wack would make this practice part of his career and life. He would actively seek people who could help him perceive what others missed. In his case remarkable people were not necessarily successful people. He would seek out Zen master’s and Vedanta guru’s as well as thinkers at the edge. His remarkable people were often people carrying different experiences, perspectives, or sensitivities. Their value was not what they could do for him, but what they helped him to see.

Looking back over my life, I think I have always had similar practice. It has been less of “we are the average of five people,” and more of “We are partly composed by the conversations we repeatedly enter.” My training upon entering the therapy field, and seeking remarkable people in the field, allowed me to see how we are composed by conversations. This vision helped me to see that the value of a mentor, a poet, a recovery sponsor, a therapist, an artist, a community. All of these and more become participants in the stories that shaped my life.

Now, I look to remarkable to people to help find signals in a noisy world. The challenge of our contemporary culture is not information scarcity but discernment. I believe remarkable people function as signal amplifiers. They point toward possibilities that are difficult to see from inside our own assumptions. They do not tell us what to think. They help us think differently. One reason people become stuck or struggle in the new now is that they remain surrounded by the same stories, assumptions, and interpretations.

It has become increasingly clear to me that new futures often require new and different conversations. And this is not because our current relationships are deficient, but because every community has blind spots. Remarkable people help us encounter perspectives that our current social world may not provide.

Now you might be wondering, how do I find these remarkable people? Some questions that might guide your way include:

Who are the people that help you see differently?

Whose life challenges your assumptions?

Who embodies qualities you want to cultivate?

Who makes you more curious?

Who expands your imagination?

Who helps you remember what matters?

Who has helped you become more yourself in ways you didn’t expect?

I am often asked where I get my ideas from or who inspires me. Well, they come from everywhere, and I don’t gatekeep. I always share where my influences come from. Who I find interesting, and people that have taught me to think differently. In my coming soon Dangerous Stories community I do a weekly newsletter where I spotlight what is capturing my attention, who I find remarkable, and who I am learning from.

I now believe that perhaps the question is not whether you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, but that a better question is, what conversations are composing you? And are those conversations helping you become the person you hope to be?

Peace.

Two Weeks Until We Start The Next Cohort of The Virtual Futuring Sprint

Curious about the Dangerous Stories Virtual Futuring Sprint? Let me know if you have any questions or would like to participate.

The Sprint

· Four Sunday sessions: June 21, June 28, July 12, and July 19

· 9:00–11:00am PST (we’re skipping July 5th — take the holiday)

· Asynchronous work between sessions (roughly 2–3 hours per week)

· 15 participants maximum

· $699

Message me.

I get it. I spent a large part of my life trying to avoid embarrassment and cringe. When I was starting my journey going back to school in my local community college, I enrolled in a speech class for some general ed units. On the first day of class the professor went through the syllabus and let us all know that the final assignment of the class would be to give a presentation to the class. I promptly dropped the class. The thought of having to stand in front of the class and give a speech was too terrifying a proposition to go on.

I know! Look at me now.

Up until very recently if you were to ask me what my greatest fear was, I would have to admit it was being embarrassed. I couldn’t imagine a more horrible experience. But I have learned much in the last several years and have changed my opinion 180 degrees since.

So, when this participant shared her experience of cringe city, I was delighted.

Let me explain.

For those interested in liminal spaces and futuring, embarrassment may be, and often is, one of the signs that you are crossing a threshold. Putting on my narrative therapist hat I would argue that embarrassment or cringe function as a signal that we are at the limits of a familiar story. Embarrassment appears when our preferred or known identity can no longer contain what is happening. You are now in the place where you are acting beyond the social script that has organized your life so far. In that sense embarrassment is often a threshold emotion. It shows up at the border of between who we have been and who we might become.

Unfortunately, many people treat embarrassment as evidence they should retreat. I have seen too many people turn back in the face of cringe city. Abandoning dreams and hopes. It’s not fun to watch. But that sort of fear feels real. Embarrassment and cringe trigger the BIG fears of our lives. Such as:

I will be judged

I will be excluded

I will lose status

I will look foolish

I will discover I am not who I thought I was.

What began to change my mind about embarrassment and cringe was that I began to learn that my dreams and preferences for my life were on the other side of that fear. That the people I admired and looked up to seemed to be people that were willing to be embarrassed. And that every meaningful act of becoming carries some risk of looking ridiculous.

So, when our futuring sprint participant said she was experiencing cringe city, of course I was delighted. Because I now know what happens when people lean into cringe. Cringe is the cost of entry into something new. Cringe frequently happens at the intersection of vulnerability and aspiration. Think about it, growth requires enduring a period where we are visibly bad, uncertain, or worse, uncool.

What becomes possible if we risk being uncool?

Creativity expands.

One of the saddest things I experience is when so many creative projects die before they begin because people cannot tolerate the possibility of looking foolish. Every artist has to survive an awkward phase.

Realness increases.

People spend enormous energy managing impressions. Embarrassment tolerance allows a person to show up more honestly. If you haven’t seen it yet go watch the episode of Subway Takes with Austin Butler where he makes the argument that embarrassment is an under explored emotion.

Learning accelerates.

The fastest learners are often the people most willing to be bad at things publicly. This is a life hack supreme.

Relationships deepen.

Embarrassment creates opportunities for connection because it reveals our humanity.

Perfection is impressive.
Imperfection is relatable.

Freedom emerges.

One of the most liberating realizations is that most people are not thinking about us nearly as much as we imagine. Took me a while to figure this out, but when I did…

In the end, I have come to view embarrassment and cringe as not a warning sign but a trail marker. I look for it now. In myself and others. Because cringe often occurs when someone visibly wants something. They are enthusiastic. They are sincere. They are uncool. They are trying.

Peace.

Curious about the Dangerous Stories Virtual Futuring Sprint? Let me know if you have any questions or would like to participate.

The Sprint

· Four Sunday sessions: June 21, June 28, July 12, and July 19

· 9:00–11:00am PST (we’re skipping July 5th — take the holiday)

· Asynchronous work between sessions (roughly 2–3 hours per week)

· 15 participants maximum

· $699

It turned out to be one of the better explorations of the creative process that I have read. Something that can be applied across all disciplines not just songwriting.

So, I thought I’d share my creative learning’s from the book with all of you:

1. Creativity grows through volume, not preciousness

In the book Tweedy repeatedly argues that the biggest obstacle to creativity is treating every idea as if it has to justify itself. He advocates generating lots of fragments, lyrics, phrases, observations, and experiments without immediately evaluating them. Most meaningful work emerges through accumulation and recombination. In the futuring sprint it’s important that we develop multiple scenarios, and experiment with prototypes for this very reason.

2. Lower the stakes to increase the output

A major theme in the book is that writing one song feels possible, while writing a masterpiece feels paralyzing. Small containers and constraints often create the conditions for movement and experimentation. I recently read David Epsteins new book Inside The Box and it’s helping me rethink some of my own assumptions about the Futuring Sprint. One of the questions I’ve carried throughout this process has been whether the Sprint moves too fast. Four weeks is not a long time. There are prompts, deadlines, structures, limitations, expectations. Part of me wondered if meaningful change was supposed to be slower, looser, more open-ended. But I’m starting to appreciate the value of the container itself.

3. Attention is the real creative resource

Tweedy treats songwriting as a practice of noticing. Creativity is less about inventing from nowhere and more about cultivating sensitivity to language, memory, emotion, and patterns already present in the world. Sorry to bring up the futuring sprint again but, one of the more popular things we do in the sprint is the signal scanning work. In the sprint Signal scanning is a structured practice of deliberately attending to weak signals early, ambiguous indicators of emerging change, rather than waiting for trends to become obvious. In the futuring sprint context, it trains participants to look at the edges of current culture, technology, policy, and behavior for signs that something is shifting before it has a name or a narrative. Which can lead to all sorts of innovative ideas and practices.

4. Ritual matters more than motivation

He demystifies inspiration by emphasizing routine. Creative identity emerges through recurring behaviors such as journaling, note-taking, walking, reading, and showing up consistently to the work. Again, why I think containers are important.

5. The subconscious needs material to work with

Tweedy talks about collecting words, phrases, and images almost like composting. Breakthroughs often come from accumulated input rather than sudden inspiration. One of the things I that I think I am legitimately strong at is curiosity across all sorts of domains. This has been a profound practice in my life and work. Go to a museum or gallery. Go to an artist talk or book reading. Go to a salon.

6. Play is not optional

Play is not my strong suite, but Tweedy argues that word games, free association, absurd combinations, and experimentation are not distractions from creativity. They are central to it. Playfulness allows originality to emerge. Maybe I can find more room for more play in my life..

7. Identity can become a creative trap

You do not need to fully ‘be’ a writer, artist, or creative before beginning. People become writers by writing and thinkers by thinking publicly over time. This is where my rebel nature has proved helpful. I never gave much thought about the gatekeeping of many creative endeavors. Start a gallery with no experience, sure! I’ll do that. Make art with no art education, done. There have been several projects in my life where I just started. And it was the best thing I did.

8. Creativity is relational

One of my friends often tells me one of the more helpful things I told her was that, “there’s nothing new under the sun.” Tweedy also agrees that nothing is purely original. Creative work emerges through contact with culture, memory, influence, and other people. Creativity is often compositional rather than purely inventive. Drop the creative genius narrative and get to work.

9. Finishing matters more than fantasizing

This is one of the hardest for me. I have often referred to myself as “a sprinter in the game of life.” I was good at starting, not so good at finishing. Tweedy argues that unfinished projects often preserve fantasy. Finished projects create growth. Completion teaches structure, pacing, editing, endurance, and release. I’m working on it. It’s my biggest challenge.

10. Creative work is a way of staying alive to the world

Underneath the practical advice Tweedy dispenses is a deeper philosophy: creativity is a mode of participation in life. Making things helps resist numbness, passivity, and repetition.

My wife plans to retire in a couple of years. The plan is to live part-time in Europe (she has Italian citizenship). As this date is getting closer, I am getting more reflective on what retirement might look like for me. What is showing up is that I don’t think I can retire in the traditional sense. It’s not that I’m wedded to the grind. It’s more about not wanting to stop creating. I don’t think I can not be involved in creative projects, ever. More on that as it develops. It’s starting to feel like my 9th mid-life crisis.

Anyway, it might serve you well to Check out How To Write One Song by Jeff Tweedy. How to Write One Song is less a manual for songwriting and more a philosophy of creative practice. Its lessons apply broadly to writing, therapy, leadership, art-making, teaching, entrepreneurship, and any practice that requires sustained imagination and participation in the world. Good stuff.

Peace.

Curious about the Dangerous Stories Virtual Futuring Sprint? I put together this explainer video to show the process. Let me know if you have any questions or would like to participate.

The Sprint

· Four Sunday sessions: June 21, June 28, July 12, and July 19

· 9:00–11:00am PST (we’re skipping July 5th — take the holiday)

· Asynchronous work between sessions (roughly 2–3 hours per week)

· 15 participants maximum

· $699

The Sprint

· Four Sunday sessions: June 21, June 28, July 12, and July 19

· 9:00–11:00am PST (we’re skipping July 5th — take the holiday)

· Asynchronous work between sessions (roughly 2–3 hours per week)

· 15 participants maximum

· $699

To Confirm Your Spot

Payment holds your place. I’ll open this more broadly once I hear from you, but I wanted to give you first access.

· Zelle: 714-767-5862

· Venmo: @Chris-Hoff-4

· Paypal: chrishoffmft@gmail.com

What You’ll Receive Once Confirmed

· Zoom link and logistics

· Pre-work to arrive ready

· Participant workbook covering all three movements

This is not strategic planning. It’s not therapy. It’s coalitional practice, learning to analyze what’s foreclosing your futures and compose genuinely different ones.

The first cohort taught me how alive this work can get when the right people are in the room together.

I hope you’ll be in this one.

People had a lot to say, and it was a rich conversation. I sat silently with my own list: identity changes, paths not taken, the person I used to be.

The following morning, sitting in meditation, I looked up from my practice and saw a book on the floor. I’ve had it for years. How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery. Just seeing it brought a pang, grief, maybe, or something close to it. Because I understood in that moment that it wasn’t going to happen. That particular dream was not going to be mine.

I ran an alternative art space in the early 2000s called The Office. Did it for five years. It was scrappy and good, the kind of thing you do because you love it and can’t not do it. And somewhere in the back of my mind, I always thought that was the beginning of something bigger, a more serious space, something that could actually support artists financially, help them make a living. I held onto that quietly for a long time. And then this morning, approaching 60, I looked at that book and I knew. It’s not going to happen. It’s not that I stopped caring about art. It’s that I kept the possibility open long after I’d already made other choices, and there’s a kind of grief specific to that, not for what was lost, but for what was never quite let go.

After the meditation was done, I thought about a quote from Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things that I’ve had pinned up in my office at different points over the years. She writes about the life you don’t choose:

“I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

I know someone reading this will say, Chris, you’re still young, you have time, you can do whatever you want. And yes, I suppose that’s technically true. But it misses the point. I have other things I want to do, things that feel more important, more aligned with where I actually am. And that’s not a consolation. It’s just the reality of how a life goes. You make choices, and the choices foreclose other choices, and sometimes what you’re left with is both right for you and a little sad.

That tension brings me to the other thing I found myself thinking about this morning: Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The speaker pauses in a snow-filled pasture, stands there with his horse, and the horse doesn’t understand the stop, shakes his harness bells to ask if there is some mistake. And the poem resolves not in grief but in obligation: the woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

That’s where I am. My work right now is focused on helping people imagine possible futures, on what it looks like to get unstuck, to resist the gravitational pull of nostalgia, to move forward into uncertainty without needing it to resolve into something certain. That’s where my miles are.

All this to say that I’ve come to believe that grief for unlived lives is more common and more significant than we give it credit for. It’s not trivial. It shapes people. It can trap them in a permanent backward glance, or it can, if you move through it honestly, clarify where you actually want to go. That’s what we were considering on Friday night, and what I found myself inside of, alone with a book on the floor, yesterday morning.

So I just wanted to share that. A non-traditional grief, showing up in an ordinary meditation, over a book I never gave away. It’s okay. I trust the direction I’m headed. I trust the work. And sometimes trust is what you have when the ghost ship has sailed and you’re still standing on the shore.

Peace.

The next Virtual Futuring Sprint is coming.
I’m putting together a small list of people who want first access when registration opens.
If that’s you, email or DM me and I’ll add you.

Sure, that question can be a dodge. Sometimes it is. But this time it felt like something else, a crack in my usual intellectual position.

I’ve been sitting with Adam Phillips’s new book, The Life You Want, which is a long meditation on the tension between psychoanalysis and American pragmatism. Phillips doesn’t come down on either side, but I came out of it feeling something I didn’t expect, I might be an American pragmatist. A product of my particular cultural inheritance. One of them, anyway. That’s an interesting thing to notice when you’ve built an identity around critique.

Pragmatism, in its most stripped-down form, asks, does it work? Not whether it’s theoretically coherent, not whether it reproduces problematic ideological formations. Just, does it function? Does it move something for someone? These are important question, but all this had me again noticing what happens when critique becomes the only move available to us.

Longtime readers know I am a Bruno Latour fanboy. Latour spent the last decades of his life worried about exactly this. In Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? he names something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I first read it over a decade ago. Academic critique, he argues, has become addicted to a kind of unreflexive debunking, where everything gets reduced to hidden power dynamics, ideological projection, false consciousness. The move is always the same, pull back the curtain, reveal the machinery, expose the naivete of the believer. And in doing so, produce a euphoric sensation, what Latour calls the feeling of being a “critical barbarian.” Always right. Always above.

What Latour noticed is that this mode has escaped the academy. Another sort of dispersion. In our contemporary moment you can find it on Instagram. It’s in podcasts. It’s in therapy discourse and comment sections. The dunk is the unit of cultural currency. Some people have genuinely earned one. I’m not pretending otherwise. But I am asking what we’re building, because here’s what I keep noticing, actually trying in public, imperfectly, is now the most suspicious act possible. It reads as naive, unexamined, complicit. The person who builds something, who tries, is always already exposed to a critique the person who only critiques will never have to face. That asymmetry is doing something to us that we haven’t fully reckoned with.

I see it in my threshold and futuring work. When someone is standing at the edge of something, a vocation, a risk, a becoming, one of the most reliable defuturing moves I encounter is the question that arrives before anything is even attempted, what will people think? That question sounds like prudence. It presents itself as social awareness. But what it often is, is the critical barbarian internalized, the ghost of the dunk living inside the person before anyone has said a word. The imagined audience is already seated. The verdict is already in. And so nothing gets built, nothing gets tried, the threshold goes uncrossed. Tony Fry called this kind of move defuturing, the foreclosing of possibility before it can take form. The critical barbarian doesn’t just operate in comment sections. It colonizes the imagination. It kills the dream at the drafting stage, which is the most effective place to kill it, because then there’s no evidence, no wreckage, nothing to point to. Just a life that stayed safely on the near side of the threshold.

Bruno Latour’s answer to his own diagnosis was composition. In An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto he drew directly on William James and John Dewey, which tells you the connection to pragmatism isn’t incidental. Compositionists are people willing to make something, knowing it’s partial, knowing it can be criticized, doing it anyway. Where critique operates on matters of fact, fixed objects that can be unmasked and debunked, composition works with what Latour called matters of concern, things we are genuinely entangled with, that require care and collective negotiation. The detached analyst position isn’t available to the compositionist. You have to build from inside the situation, which means you have to accept that what you build will be imperfect and will not be above reproach. That’s also, more or less, what James meant by pragmatism.

Back to Mel Robbins. I’m not here to defend her framework. I have genuine questions about the neuroscience, about what gets flattened, about who the self-help industrial complex actually serves. Those concerns are real. But I thought about all the people for whom some version of what she’s saying has been, functionally, pragmatically, useful. Who found a foothold. Who interrupted a loop. Does the theoretical inadequacy of the model cancel that? Is the person who benefited wrong about their own experience? I mean, Let Them Theory has sold over 8 million copies. I’m sure a few of those have found it useful.

The ritual of the dunk has a liturgy. By now we all know the moves. And like all liturgies, it produces a feeling, of clarity, of righteousness, of belonging to the group that sees what others cannot. Latour called it a pharmakon. I’ve felt it. I’ve produced it. The harder question, the one I don’t have a clean answer to, is what it would look like to pause that reflex. Not abandon critical thinking. Not collapse into pragmatic naivete. But ask, alongside the critique, what we’re actually trying to build. Because deconstruction and ruins upon ruins isn’t a foundation. It’s just rubble with good lighting.

What would it mean for those of us in the helping professions, trained in critique, positioned as translators between theory and practice, to become builders? Not instead of critique. In tension with it. As a discipline. Latour, Phillips and James, in their different ways, all ended up at something like the same place, the critique is not the end of the conversation. The willingness to build something partial, something that might not survive, something that can be criticized, that’s where the actual work begins. I’m sitting with that, and I think the asking of it matters more right now than another do-it-for-the-clicks dunk.

Peace.

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