We dig into what Karen witnessed firsthand in the very first therapist training cohort: a week spent dismantling privilege and naming genders rather than discussing consciousness, clinical skills, or facilitation. We talk about why that ideological capture isn’t just annoying — it’s dangerous. When a patient’s mind is cracked wide open in a psychedelic state, a facilitator who imprints their own politics is committing something close to abuse. Wesley shares the veterans angle, where an anti-colonial culture hopes to turn warriors into pacifists.

But this isn’t a cynical conversation. We explore the genuine healing psychedelics can offer — Karen’s work helping a dying woman conquer her fear of death, Wesley’s reconciliation with his late father — and ask the questions this movement keeps avoiding: Why does psychedelic culture skew so far left? Where are the liberals whose journeys made them more curious about people they’d dismissed? And can a self-regulating, transparent ecosystem — maybe even one built around churches — grow up outside the captured certification boards?

Paid subscribers received this episode several days early, exclusively here on Substack. Upgrade your subscription to get new episodes early and unlock the full archive.

Books mentioned in this episode:

• Sensible Psychedelics: Why the Psychedelic Renaissance Needs Conservatives, Skeptics, and the Politically Homeless — Karen King & Wesley Smith

• How to Change Your Mind — Michael Pollan

Karen King, MS, LMHC, LPC is a psychotherapist with more than 20 years of experience helping adults navigate trauma, anxiety, grief, and life’s deepest transitions. The former founder of a multidisciplinary behavioral health clinic, she specializes in contemplative and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. With Wesley Smith, she co-authored the forthcoming Sensible Psychedelics: Why the Psychedelic Renaissance Needs Conservatives, Skeptics, and the Politically Homeless, which explores how psychedelics can bridge cultural divides rather than deepen them. Find her therapy practice at NewMindTherapy.com. Karen also hosts the Nuanced Therapist Network, a private, vetted community for heterodox therapists.

Wesley Smith is a “small c” conservative psychonaut and writer working to bring the psychedelic renaissance out of the counterculture and into the living rooms of average Americans. After a head injury led him to explore nontraditional paths for healing, he found that psychedelics can deepen the values conservatives hold dear — faith, family, duty, and personal responsibility. His co-authored case in Sensible Psychedelics pairs evidence-based research with a culturally grounded argument for humility, gratitude, and moral clarity.

{{chapters}}
[00:00:00] Start
[00:03:15] Trump’s Executive Order and State Psychedelic Laws
[00:06:57] A Conservative’s Accidental Path to Psychedelics
[00:14:45] Karen’s Path Through Ketamine-Assisted Therapy
[00:18:50] Ideological Capture in Psychedelic Training
[00:21:52] Imprinting Values, Vulnerability, and Veterans
[00:29:07] Ketamine Case Study and Personal Growth
[00:35:56] Why the Psychedelic World Skews Left
[00:44:52] How Psychedelics Broadened Wesley’s Empathy
[00:48:33] Therapy as Dismantling Civilization
[00:52:23] Regulation, Transparency, and Psychedelic Churches

ROGD REPAIR Course + Community gives concerned parents instant access to over 120 lessons providing the psychological insights and communication tools you need to get through to your kid. Now featuring 24/7 personalized AI support implementing the tools with RepairBot! Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take 50% off your first month.

PODCOURSES: use code SOMETHERAPIST at LisaMustard.com/PodCourses

PRODUCTION: Looking for your own podcast producer? Visit PodsByNick.com and mention my podcast for 20% off your initial services.

MUSIC: Thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude & permission.

ALL OTHER LINKS HERE.

In this article + summary video, I spell out precisely how the belief in the existence of a thing called “trans” leads, step by step, to a vulnerable adolescent creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which nothing short of total “transition” will satisfy them. If you’ve ever wondered what causal chain of beliefs and consequences leads from Point A to Point Z, every link here is described in brief. While the specifics of how this pattern manifests in a given child is beyond the scope of this lesson, parents enrolled in the course or coaching can use the program’s tools, or my one-on-one attention, to map that out in detail.

This is an ROGD Repair bonus lesson from the UNPACKED: Concepts Animations series, offered up free on Substack for a limited time. While the core curriculum videos are of me talking, this series uses the latest technologies to generate summary animations from complex essays. To grasp the concept in its fullest, watch the video and read the essay. Find the full lesson, including the summary and reflection questions, in the course here.

How a Child Gets on the Path

Before any of the knots can be untied, it helps to see how the rope gets tangled in the first place. The whole structure rests on one premise: that “trans” names a real thing, a real condition that exists out in the world and could, in principle, apply to anyone. Grant that premise and a chain of consequences unspools from it, each link following from the one before, until your child is standing somewhere neither of you intended.

Here is the first link. If being trans is a real thing that some people simply are, then every young person carries almost a spiritual obligation to look inward and ask whether it applies to her. The question becomes not only permitted but required, a piece of due diligence owed to oneself.

And here is the second link, the one that gives the first its teeth. The thing has no objective marker. There is no blood test, no brain scan, no physical sign that settles the matter. So the question of whether it applies to you can only be answered by looking at your feelings and deciding what they mean, which makes it a psychological process from start to finish, a matter of meaning-making rather than measurement.

Meaning-making runs on the stories a person has available to her. Hand a struggling adolescent a culture in which this particular story is everywhere, normalized, celebrated, offered as the key that explains discomfort she could not otherwise name, and the odds she reaches for it climb steeply. She is not doing anything strange. She is doing what human beings always do, drawing on the narratives around her to make sense of her own life, and this is simply the narrative closest at hand. Secondary gain then sharpens the pull. When the story comes bundled with attention, belonging, a way to be interesting or brave or seen, the incentive to adopt it grows, and the incentive to question it shrinks.

Then the snowball begins. The heightened neuroplasticity of the adolescent years means the mind is unusually eager to build and reinforce patterns. Once she starts running her experiences through this frame, more and more of her life gets fed into it. A hard day at school, a falling-out with a friend, the ordinary misery of a changing body, all of it gets absorbed into the one explanation, each new addition packing the snow tighter and rolling the ball larger. What began as a tentative question hardens, through sheer accumulation, into an identity that now organizes everything.

The Fusion

Watch what happens where the distress meets the story, because this is the weld that holds the whole thing together.

On one side there is real distress, the ordinary ache of adolescence sharpened by whatever this particular kid is carrying: discomfort in a changing body, a social world that feels like a courtroom, a temperament that runs sensitive, perhaps a trauma or loss. On the other side, there is the proposed solution she has absorbed from the culture around her. The belief fuses them, so the distress attaches to the narrative about its solution.

The “dysphoria,” as your child calls it (instead of using true feeling words like sadness, or insecurity, or anger), becomes inextricably linked with the yearning for the fantasy of “euphoria.” The increasingly grandiose belief goes: I feel bad now, but my bad feelings are evidence that points me toward a new kind of good I am supposed to feel. I can and I will experience something far greater than relief — something called gender euphoria. My suffering now is evidence that I’m meant for something far greater.

Now every bad day, every wave of self-consciousness, every moment of feeling wrong in her skin gets read as fresh evidence that the belief is correct. See, I am miserable, and I will stay miserable until I get the thing. My gender dysphoria is evidence I am meant to feel gender euphoria when I finally achieve the magical state of gender congruence.

The suffering becomes testimony. This is why the misery so often deepens right alongside the certainty; each is feeding the other. The fantasy of euphoria is the escape hatch, the motivation that fuels the grandiose reaching.

Underneath the claims she says out loud, then, sits a single load-bearing belief she may not consciously realize she holds. The surface claims vary. She is a boy. He needs a different name. She will medicalize when she is old enough. Underneath all of them:

I cannot be okay, I cannot be happy, I cannot be myself, and I cannot move forward with my life, unless I am seen as the opposite sex.

Everything above the surface is scaffolding for that one belief. Once you can hear it, the whole situation looks different.

The Branching Tree

I find the picture of a branching tree useful here, and I sometimes show parents this image. Go back to any point in your own life and imagine the paths that led away from it. You met your spouse because you happened to be in a certain place at a certain time; a small change and you never meet. Every life is like that, a tree of branches, and at any fork there are outcomes down each limb that you will never get to see.

Your child stands at a fork now. Down one branch is the path she has her eye on, the path from her current misery to her imagined state of future “gender euphoria,” the only path in which she can see herself moving forward as herself, okay and happy. You and I both know where it actually leads, and it’s not a state of permanent bliss. In fact, we could spend a whole lesson (or coaching session) articulating two different visions of this path — the ungrounded pie-in-the-sky (often vague and poorly articulated) fantasy she sees, versus the cause-and-effect unfolding of unintended consequences you see. But that’s a conversation for another time.

Meanwhile, down the other branches are lives she refuses to imagine, paths lived as her own sex, with no medical change and no social performance. You and I both know there are many possible futures here in which she is happy and free and herself. In order to reach them, however, she would first have to entertain the possibility that a future in which she isn’t trans — a future in which she has desisted (which, remember, may feel to her like sacrificing autonomy and admitting defeat, plus relinquishing load-bearing psychic structures) — could actually be better than one in which she is. And she would have to struggle through this awkward phase of life without that source of protection and meaning-making and all the secondary gain it affords her.

So here is the trouble. The moment she decides she can only be happy down the one path, she stops being able to walk any of the others. The branches where she thrive as herself wither from disuse. She has made her own belief come true.

The Placebo of Belief

Our beliefs about the conditions required for our happiness carry a powerful placebo effect. They tend to manufacture the reality they describe, or at least to foreclose against the possibility of anything else. If a person decides that her okayness and her future and her very self are resting on one specific outcome, she will not permit herself okayness anywhere else. To feel hope, to relax into her body as it is, to go out and be seen as a girl, to enjoy an ordinary Tuesday without the thing she has named as essential — all of these threaten her with a sense of betrayal, like giving up the fight, like agreeing to a lesser life, like admitting to herself and everyone else that maybe she is not really trans, which would potentially open a cascade of other problems, since trans is a load-bearing belief.

So she refuses herself those feelings and denies herself enriching experiences where she would have to show up as simply a girl who does not yet “pass” as a boy. From the inside, this does not feel like a choice she is making. It feels like a discovery she keeps making, over and over, that nothing else works, that she really is trans. She has built a cage and forgotten she was the one holding the key.

The Double-Bind She Cannot See

The trap has more than one wall, and it is worth walking each one, because a parent who can see all three can stop mistaking the walls for the child.

The first wall is the one just described, and it deserves naming as a bind in its own right. She has split into two. One part of her wants to be happy and at ease and free now, or at least as soon as possible; another part stands guard and refuses to let the first part have any of it until the far-off condition is met. The very experiences that might loosen the belief — contentment, adventure, an unremarkable good week — are the ones the belief forbids her, because feeling them would reveal she never needed the change she insisted was central to her identity. The door out is locked from the inside, and the belief holds the key precisely so she will not walk through it.

The second bind cuts deeper, because here the belief manufactures its own proof. There is a version of her life waiting down another branch, a life lived as her own sex, with no medical alteration and no performance, in which she is well and whole and moving forward. That branch is real. She can only reach it by allowing herself to consider that she might be okay there. The moment she forecloses on that possibility, she stops moving toward it, and the branch withers for want of anyone walking it. She has confirmed her own belief by refusing to test it. And once she takes the first real step down the path she has chosen, she gives up any way of ever knowing what the other life held, because she will never have lived it.

The third bind is the one holding the whole structure upright, and it turns on a problem that sounds abstract but is doing real work in her mind. She cannot measure her certainty against anything, because you cannot run the experiment that would settle it. There is no A/B test on a single person’s life. We do not live in a simulation, nor have we mastered quantum mechanics to the point where we could take one person, send him down the path he is convinced he needs, watch how it plays out, then rewind to the fork and send him down another, and finally set the two side by side and compare them objectively. There is no control, no double-blind study of how a life goes in version A against version B. So when the belief speaks with total conviction — this was definitely the right thing for me, I would have been miserable otherwise — that conviction answers to nothing outside itself. We are always standing in the one version of events that actually happened, with no access to the road not taken. It cannot be shown wrong, because she permits nothing to count against it. That is not what truth sounds like. It is the sound of a belief that has sealed every exit, including the one marked doubt.

Two things compound the third bind. The first is sunk cost. Human beings are very good at defending choices that have cost them dearly, and the more a decision has already taken, the harder the mind works to justify it, which means certainty tends to grow rather than shrink as the price climbs.

The second is what remains once you accept that the subjective verdict cannot be trusted. If we want to test the belief that a life lived as trans is truly better than a life lived otherwise, the only evidence left to examine is what can actually be measured: health outcomes, longevity, the concrete markers of the body. On those matters, the road of medical intervention does not read as the road to flourishing. It is clearly inferior.

Why the Construct Itself Is the Problem

Step back from your own child for a moment and the question widens. Is the belief in the construct of trans, taken on its own, a net good or a net harm?

The harm follows directly from the machinery just described. The belief that this thing called trans exists leads to the belief that one might have it. The belief one might have it leads to the belief one should explore whether one does. The belief one should explore whether one does creates a suggestibility and a new meaning-making, experience-attributing system at a time of peak neuroplasticity and sensitivity to social influence. Once distress attaches to this meaning-making system and the belief I am trans congeals, this leads to the belief that I must become it in order to be okay. And I must forecloses everything else. The instant a young person steps onto that trajectory, she loses access to every other branch of the tree, including the one where she lives well as herself, and she loses it before she has any way of knowing what it held.

Now medicalization is almost inevitable. As the snowball effect takes place and more and more of life’s experiences are fed into this meaning-making system, everything that hurts gets attributed to “not passing” or to “being deadnamed” or “being misgendered” or to “my dysphoria.” Meanwhile, every moment of joy or unselfconsciousness or optimism gets attributed to “passing” or “euphoria.” The distress gets projected onto certain body parts, which then become scapegoated — most especially the breasts, but also of course the genitals, height, body shape, hips, shoulders, face shape, facial hair or lack thereof, voice, and so on. The belief intensifies that if only I could be rid of this, I would be rid of my bad feelings and get to live as my true self.

So what starts as entertaining the notion of an idea to begin with can end up leading for many young people to the conclusion that they must hand over their lives and futures, their fertility and longevity, to the trans medical pipeline. And the only thing we can objectively measure about any of this — actual health outcomes — is grim.

This is why I personally am a total gender atheist, and believe we would all be better off if none of us believed in any of this at all, as I further articulate in this lengthy Substack essay. Without the idea of “trans,” we’d be left with other ways of making meaning, and any of them not leading to such physically disastrous outcomes are objectively better than the one in the particular bizarro world we’ve found ourselves in.

Why Arguing Head-On Fails

Knowing all this, the temptation is to march in and knock the belief down. Sit her at the table, lay out the argument, watch it topple. It will not topple, and worse, if done incorrectly, such a push tends to harden resistance. When you argue directly for the conclusion you want, you convert an open question into a loyalty test, and an adolescent or young adult cannot adopt her parent’s view without feeling she has capitulated to her parent and surrendered her fragile autonomy. So she digs in, not because the belief has grown stronger on its own merits, but because now it has her pride bolted even more firmly to it. The cognitive dissonance that was starting to bubble to the surface gets pushed back down. You have made it about you.

What Actually Works

What actually helps is slower and more respectful of your kid’s budding intellect. You are not trying to defeat the conclusion. You are trying to reopen the possibility that was foreclosed, to get her to entertain, even briefly, even hypothetically, that a good life might be waiting down more than one branch of the tree. This is the difference between bursting the bubble and trying to understand the bubble. Using the communication tools found throughout this course, you loosen one assumption, then another, the way you would work a knot that has pulled too tight, easing it rather than yanking it. And you let the realizations arrive feeling self-generated, because the ones that arrive that way are the ones that hold. When a child gets to feel, on her own, a flicker of doubt about whether the thing she named is really the only door, that flicker is worth more than any argument you could have won.

None of this happens in one conversation. You are undoing something that took months or years to wind tight, and it comes apart the same way it went together, one strand at a time. What you are protecting the whole while is the branch she cannot currently see, the version of her life in which she is her own sex and well and moving forward. That branch stays alive only as long as somebody in the room still believes it is there. For now, that somebody is you.

This is an ROGD Repair bonus lesson from the UNPACKED: Concepts Animations series, offered up free on Substack for a limited time. Find the full lesson, including the summary and reflection questions, in the course here. If you’re a parent navigating this, you don’t need to piece together a map of the psychological terrain of “trans” from a hundred sources. My program will help you form a comprehensive understanding of your child and how to reach them while avoiding common pitfalls that trigger further entrenchment. Take half off your first month with code SUBSTACK at rogdrepair.com.

Subscribe now

So, Your Kid is Starting at a New School Next Week, empathically addresses youth's armor, the protective function that the identity (and all that goes with it) serves for a kid in the school environment. It helps parents differentiate between asking a kid not to push the identity further, versus asking them to walk it back, why this difference matters, why some parental demands may. backfire, and how to tailor your requests according to where your kid, and your relationship, stand.

A Request Is Not a Confession: Approaching Schools and Therapists Before the School Year Starts addresses how parents can work with the schools themselves, what to watch out for, and how to frame requests in a neutral, assertive manner so as to protect their kids without putting a target on their back.

I'm offering both of these lessons to the public for free for the next few days! They’re both a part of my new UNPACKED: Concept Animations series of bonus lessons featuring animated videos. In contrast, the core curriculum videos are of me talking. Both the core and the bonus curriculum include written material as well, plus reflection questions to help you personalize the concepts and apply them to your family.

Please share with parents you know who need the help.

To sign up for the program in full, you can enroll at https://rogdrepair.com and use code SUBSTACK for half off your first month.

Share

We start with the chilling case of Barry Neufeld, a Canadian school board trustee who was fined $750,000 for refusing to believe that children can be born trapped in the wrong body—what the judge’s ruling called “existential denialism.” From there, we explore how Canada’s human rights laws and conversion therapy legislation have embedded gender identity ideology into the legal framework, silencing detransitioners and punishing dissenters. Simon and I discuss how our minds are conditioned by narratives we’ve never examined, how meta-perceptions warp our view of political opponents, and what Iain McGilchrist’s work on brain hemispheres reveals about Western cognitive vulnerability. We also get into the concept of cognitive entrenchment, moral inversion, and the historical parallels between modern ideological capture and ancient child sacrifice in Carthage. Simon shares what’s next for his series and talks about the Reclaiming Birth Conference, where he’s working to empower families to take back sovereignty over pregnancy and birth.

Subscribe now

Check out the full episode right here on Substack. Or, click here to watch it on YouTube, or here to find it on your podcast app of choice.

Books mentioned in this episode:

• The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis

• Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

• The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by Iain McGilchrist

Simon Esler is a committed defender of families & the lost art of free thought. A winding career path as an actor, theatre maker, ordained minister and mindfulness entrepreneur lead him to becoming a professional content creator & independent filmmaker. His latest docuseries, You Are Here - Reconnaissance for the War on Perception, is now streaming at dauntlessdialogue.com. The rest of Simon’s work can be found at simonesler.com, where he hosts an array of films, series, courses & resources focused on leveraging the pressures of modern war to foster personal growth and collective resilience.

• To partner with Simon’s Leaving the Line Studio for content creation, filmmaking, and brand strategy check out his full portfolio.

• Reclaiming Birth Conference: reclaimingbirthconference.com — a conference in Canada in September focused on empowering families around natural birth; Simon is emceeing

• X (Twitter): @SimonEsler

• Instagram: @simon_esler1111

• Substack: Simon Esler / Subversive Clarity

Share

{{chapters}}
[00:00:00] Start
[00:01:27] Cognitive Warfare as the New Battlefield
[00:03:10] Barry Neufeld and the SOGI 123 Curriculum
[00:05:15] Fined $750K for “Existential Denialism”
[00:07:57] Gender Identity as Compelled Religious Belief
[00:10:11] Canada’s Human Rights Laws and Bill C-16
[00:13:18] Gender Identity as a Shield Against Accountability
[00:19:17] Detransitioners Silenced in Canada
[00:24:33] Recognizing Our Own Cognitive Conditioning
[00:28:06] How Media Narratives Mirror Personal Anxiety
[00:29:45] Meta-Perceptions and the 400% Violence Gap
[00:35:32] What Is Fifth Generation Warfare
[00:40:01] Moral Inversion Through Cognitive Manipulation
[00:47:25] Cognitive Entrenchment and Thinking Outside Your Domain
[00:49:18] When Ideological Capture Endangers Children
[00:53:31] Child Sacrifice in Carthage as a Modern Warning
[00:59:05] Collective Morality and Centralized Culture
[01:02:34] The Reclaiming Birth Movement
[01:08:47] Finding Purpose in Defending Free Thought

ROGD REPAIR Course + Community gives concerned parents instant access to over 120 lessons providing the psychological insights and communication tools you need to get through to your kid. Now featuring 24/7 personalized AI support implementing the tools with RepairBot! Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take 50% off your first month.

PODCOURSES: use code SOMETHERAPIST at LisaMustard.com/PodCourses

PRODUCTION: Looking for your own podcast producer? Visit PodsByNick.com and mention my podcast for 20% off your initial services.

MUSIC: Thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude & permission.

ALL OTHER LINKS HERE.

A note to subscribers of all kinds: normally, new episodes go out to all subscribers early Monday morning, and paid subscribers get early access as soon as it’s ready, usually a few days in advance if not more. This week was different. Something came up over the weekend, and I rushed to prep the episode, releasing it to everyone a few hours later than it normally goes out on Mondays. In the future, paid subscribers will still typically receive new episodes before everyone else, right here on Substack. I appreciate all of your support!

Tumbled Smooth: How Character Is Actually Made

A rock at the top of a cliff is nothing much to look at. Coarse on every face, jagged where it broke off the parent stone, whatever color it has buried under dust. Push it over the edge into the river and the work begins. It knocks into other stones. Water moves across it season after season, carrying grit. Seams that were never sound cleave away early and take the weakest material with them. What remains gets worn at the edges until you could close your hand around it without being cut, and the color locked under the rough surface starts to come through. Given enough of this, the stone comes out smooth and irregular, never a sphere, odd in some manner particular to itself, and that smooth oddness is what lets it settle into a pile of other stones with contact in some places and space in others.

A person gets made under the same conditions. Contact with other people who have edges of their own, experience arriving on its own schedule and mostly unrequested, and the sheer accumulation of years during which all of that does its work. Take away any one of the three and what comes out is thinner, with less to offer the relationships it enters and less capacity to withstand them. So when you are looking at a kid who seems stalled, it helps to ask which of the three has gone missing, because that tells you where to put your effort.

Subscribe now

The other stones

Friction between people is the mechanism, and most of us have been trained to treat it as a malfunction. Relationships strengthen through a cycle of rupture and repair, the same way muscle strengthens through a cycle of microtear and rebuilding. The tearing is the workout. A family that has never survived a hard conversation has no evidence that it can survive one, and a friendship that has never been strained has no proof of its own tensile strength. Adolescents in particular need to discover, empirically and repeatedly, that the thing they were certain would end the world happened and they made it out alive. Those are the moments where resilience gets deposited, and no amount of reassurance from you will substitute for them.

Here is where it goes sideways in the families I work with. A young person at fifteen or nineteen has little substance underneath their self-esteem, resulting in developmentally ordinary fragility. Unless a kid has carried real responsibility from an early age, or has a long history of accomplishment behind them, there is not much yet for a sense of self to rest on. But when self-esteem is that fragile, the people around it begin to accommodate. Parents soften their delivery. Siblings stop joking. Conversations get pre-screened. Everyone in the house pulls in their edges so as not to scrape anyone, and the whole environment goes smooth in exactly the way the young person has not.

That accommodation is the trap, because a rock untumbled remains jagged, and the more jagged it stays, the further everyone withdraws. The eggshells deepen the fragility that produced the eggshells. Something structurally identical happens on a cultural scale with what we are told to call affirmation, which amounts to asking the world to sand itself down so that one young person never encounters resistance. It arrives dressed as kindness. What it does is remove the abrasive medium from the river.

The bubble finishes the job. A young person whose days are spent among people who all believe the same thing, phrase it the same way, and validate each other’s grievances is in a hall of mirrors, an echo chamber. I have watched character formation go badly off course in this environment, where a young man cultivates the conviction that he and his people are morally and intellectually superior to everyone outside, which is a defense against something much more frightening: that he is young, inexperienced, and has an enormous amount to learn from people he would have to admit are above him in some way. The grandiosity is armor. Its function is to keep him from being worn down by anyone. But this is precisely what keeps him weak.

The water

The second element is experience, and it has to be actual experience — synchronous, real life experience — rather than an abstract thought. One mother described her daughter at the pool. As a younger child she could simply be in the water, absorbed, low in self-consciousness, having a good time. Now she sits at the edge, in her head, monitoring how her body looks and what it means, and she misses the whole afternoon. No waterslide, no cannonball, no Marco Polo, no splashing the brother, no forgetting herself and being in the moment.

Adolescent self-consciousness is normal and some of it is unavoidable, but gender identity supercharges it into something closer to obsessive-compulsive agoraphobia: the world shrinks to an increasingly narrow and predictable comfort zone, while everything outside of it gets branded a threat. As the ruminative, self-referential state takes over more and more of a person’s waking moments, it becomes depression. Whenever a young person is absorbed in learning something, attending to another human being, or using their body in a way that demands coordination and proprioception, they are, in that moment, out of that state entirely. This is why the intuitive move of trying to improve a kid’s self-image so often disappoints us. The direction that helps is toward thinking about oneself less. Curiosity aimed outward, at the world, at other people, at objects and skills and problems, does more than any amount of reframing.

Time, which cannot be hurried

The third element is the one we most underestimate, because it looks like something that can be made up later. Every year of adolescence is its own chapter and none of them repeat. Thirteen happens once. Fourteen comes after it and also happens once. Each of those years is a building block in the construction of a person, and the construction requires productive struggle with the difficult parts of that particular age. A girl who spends thirteen through seventeen building up an alter ego is spending four years starving the only person who will actually still be here at thirty. Some of that can be recovered. Not all of it, and not on the original schedule.

This is what makes premature conclusions so expensive. The developmental task of these years is to keep things open enough to explore, to try on things that turn out not to fit, to stay willing to sit in not knowing. Psychologists call the alternative identity foreclosure, meaning the question of who am I? gets settled before the experiences that would answer it have happened. A kid who forecloses has skipped the process that generates answers. The ripple effects turn up everywhere: vocational choices made for the glory rather than the affinity, a narrowed sense of how much pleasure to expect from an ordinary Tuesday, a general failure to imagine that life might have good things in it.

What a narrow tolerance costs

The stone that never tumbled is the one that has to be set down carefully. I see this constantly in stable, loving, comfortable families who have done a fine job of protecting and providing, and whose children consequently cannot distinguish a minor inconvenience from a trauma. Being asked to come sit outside for five minutes registers as an imposition on par with real hardship. Nobody should read that as a moral failure in the child. It is an artifact of never having had a calibrating experience, and it means the range of circumstances they can tolerate keeps narrowing, with every accommodation narrowing it further.

Running alongside this is a confusion between how the world ought to work and how it does. An immature mind holds tightly to its picture of what should be true and behaves as though acting on that picture will make it so. When the world declines to cooperate, the collision gets filed as injustice rather than information. A young person in this state may instinctively avoid the very contact that would develop the discernment they are missing, and can end up requiring people and situations to be arranged just so before anything at all is bearable.

Rejoining the river

You will not talk your kid into wanting friction. Framed as a choice, it gets declined; framed as a criticism, it gets resisted on principle. So we restructure the environment instead, and let the environment do the heavy lifting. This is why we address logistics: screen limits, physical expectations, responsibilities. The course covers several of these as their own lessons, including the digital sabbath and drawing your child out of their room, and there is one on comfort and challenge as a paradoxical pair, because growth needs both the safety and the stretch and we are usually over-supplying one of them.

Make the first steps small enough to feel almost silly, because at the beginning, establishing a new neurological pattern is a win. Someone who does one small thing daily for eight weeks becomes a person who does things, and that identity shift is what the reps actually purchase. Where a kid has developed fear-based avoidance of a whole category of activity, borrow from exposure work: graduated, undramatic, and aimed less at making the activity a favorite than at letting them accumulate evidence that they can handle themselves in a range of situations.

Some of the friction has to come from you, and this is the part parents dread. When a household has spent years arranging itself around one person’s reactivity, reintroducing an expectation feels enormous to everybody. Get clear in your own mind whether you are making a request or stating an expectation before you open your mouth, because posing a demand as a question and then overcorrecting when you get a no is worse than either one done cleanly. It might sound something like this: I’ve noticed I’ve gotten into a habit of asking you for things in a way that lets you off the hook, because I’d rather ask nicely than have a fight. That’s on me and I’m changing it. Some of what I say is a request and you’re free to decline. Some of it is an expectation, and Sunday dinner at the table is one of those. I will work on being clearer about the difference. You can be annoyed with me, but you’re coming to dinner.

Expect the behavior to get worse before it gets better, which is what we call an extinction burst; the old pattern escalates when it stops working, and escalation means it is losing. Expect the anger too. Anger is a good sign in the same way muscle soreness is a good sign, and you will both live to tell the tale.

For homework this week, take a piece of paper and write down every place in your household where somebody has softened, gone quiet, or worked around your child in the last month. If you are more visual, draw the river and put your kid in it, then mark what is actually touching them. That page is your working map.

The stone at the bottom of the river is the same stone that went over the cliff, having been in contact with everything. As it tumbles through rocks and water and time itself, it develops its own unique shape, smooth to the touch, and the friction polishes it until we can see the beautiful color of the true material it’s made of.

Share

This is an ROGD Repair bonus lesson, shared with you here on Substack. The full lesson can be found in the course here, complete with reflection questions and a discussion section to help you personalize the material. If you’re a parent navigating this, my program will help you work smarter, not harder, to lead your child toward healthier choices. Paid subscribers to my Substack get a one month free trial of ROGD Repair. All other readers can use code SUBSTACK to take half off their first month at ROGDrepair.com.

The word supplies no information about direction of travel.

One girl announced a “nonbinary” identity at fifteen; by eighteen she had been on testosterone for half a year, and her parents learned about her surgical consultation only because a hospital scheduler dialed the wrong number in the family directory. Another young woman has used the same word for four years without taking any medical steps, and talks about training as a doula and about wanting children of her own someday. The label sits still in both cases while everything underneath it moves, in one instance toward an operating room and in the other toward something that looks a great deal like an ordinary young woman’s life.

On the way in, the label tends to arrive as part of a sequence. Kids will say they are “bi,” then “pan,” then “nonbinary,” then “trans”; after watching this long enough, you stop treating any single announcement as a fixed data point. Each step costs a little more than the last and buys a little more social standing than the last.

One family described their sixteen-year-old coming home from an after-school arts program with her girlfriend, the two of them having decided the same afternoon that they were “nonbinary” and changed their names on the same day. Where the sequence is running in that direction, the announcement is worth taking seriously as an early move rather than a settled destination, because the next step tends to follow the same logic that produced this one.

On the way out, the sequence runs backward, and it runs through the same vague middle.

Most of the desistance I have watched involves a gradual reduction in emphasis on personal identity, sometimes accompanied by a corresponding increase in emphasis on the “ally” position. A young person who has invested years in a community and a vocabulary needs somewhere to land. Leaning into the “ally” role permits her to remain among the “good” people while putting far less weight on any claim about herself; she can express support for the community without asserting any particular label applies to herself.

The categories that hold the least fixed meaning become useful for the same reason. “Nonbinary,” “queer,” “pansexual,” and their neighbors are elastic enough to be occupied while a person changes considerably underneath them, which is precisely what makes them serviceable as an exit.

There is a small grammatical tell worth watching for. One son, who had cycled between “gay” and “trans” for two years, had started referring to trans people as “they” rather than as “we,” at roughly the same time that his “gay” identity stabilized. Nobody announced anything. The pronoun simply relocated him to the outside of a group he had spent years inside, and it happened in an unremarkable conversation about somebody else.

His “they” instead of “we” is the kind of evidence that matters more than any statement about identity, because it was not produced for an audience and it was not the point of the sentence. A few months later, the same boy said softly that he wasn’t interested in “that stuff” anymore, meaning trans. Wisely, his mother did not call attention to the moment.

The label is close to useless as a measure of where a child stands, while the things worth measuring instead are less dramatic. Whether your daughter can mention her period without flinching. How often, and in what circumstances, she still binds her breasts. How the relationship with the same-sex parent is faring. Whether she is doing anything at all to advance the identity beyond continuing to hold it.

One daughter whose parents I work with had been trans-identified for more than a third of her life and had never gotten weird about menstruation, still talked to her mother about her body, and had taken no steps toward hormones. By the measures that carry prognostic weight, she was already most of the way home, whatever she was calling herself.

Subscribe now

Two reasons the label outlasts the belief

The first has to do with autonomy and with the arithmetic of conceding an argument.

Adolescence runs in one direction developmentally. Asking a fifteen-year-old to, in essence, accept that her parents were right about the central question of her identity feels like asking her to abandon the very push for autonomy that is organizing her growth. She is not going back into the womb; she is following an impetus to move forward into adulthood. We are not asking for a retreat into childlike dependency that feels like giving up, but rather hoping for a version of autonomy that does not require denying her sex — one that will last throughout her life. There is a birthing process underway, and it needs to complete itself.

Nothing about that process permits a clean retraction. What you tend to get instead is a young person reaffirming her sense of herself as independent and clear-thinking while simultaneously letting the substantive claims go slack. She may tell you that you are making too big a deal of the medical question and that she has no interest in it anyway, in the same breath, never giving you the satisfaction of acknowledging you had every reason to be worried sick about the thing she just nonchalantly took off the table.

The second driver applies particularly to kids who are innocent, literal-minded, and often autistic, and it is less a psychological maneuver than a gap in language.

These children frequently lack both the vocabulary to describe their own sensory and emotional experience to others, and the theory of mind to recognize why communicating these to others, particularly parents, is essential for meeting their needs. An autistic child does not know that most people do not register the tag at the back of the collar, or give much thought to the textures of foods. Parents sometimes discover the sensory profile years after the behavior it was driving. A girl who tells you she is “nonbinary” may be telling you that fitted clothing is intolerable on her skin, that she resents the twenty minutes a day that hair and makeup would cost her, and that she has no available word for what she wants other than the one her peer group handed her.

One mother realized that her daughter’s preference for plain shirts and cotton joggers had a purely logistical origin, worked out before any identity question arose: if she slept in comfortable clothes, she woke up already dressed. Another family, describing a daughter at a school where nobody dressed in a conventionally feminine style, arrived at the observation that a realistic direction for her preferred style would be “unisex,” a word she had never once used about herself.

What these girls often mean is that they prefer an androgynous appearance, both for its ease and sensory comfort, and for the protection from judgment they imagine comes with opting out of hyperfemininity. If only it were so simple; if only they could ask for that and nothing more.

Braided into the sensory piece is a resistance to being evaluated by the standards applied to her sex. Look at what is actually sold to teenage girls in the way of summer clothing and it becomes difficult to blame a fourteen-year-old for refusing all of it. Plenty of Millennial and older women occupy a middle ground where we never played the status games, nor enjoyed the company of the girls who did, yet arrived at adulthood as women without this particular “gender” narrative for our personal difficulties, simply because we grew up in a different cultural context. (We may have developed eating disorders along the way, but no one “affirmed” our bulimia.)

A girl who does not register this humble middle ground as a safe place to land may reach for the word “nonbinary” to describe a position that has been available to women for generations under other names: androgyny, unisex, “tomboy.” But when offered such an alternative by her Gen X mother, she may scoff and double down on the part of her that still believes in a special thing called “nonbinary” that parents just don’t get. Ceding the territory of gender grandiosity for a humbler label costs her something. In her ears the unglamorous version says “plain, frumpy girl too lazy to learn to style her hair,” where the other one says “special person who’s discovered something magical about themselves no one can touch.” Your fragile daughter may not be ready for that trade.

The difference that matters, and why saying so loudly can cost you

Here lies the dilemma. Androgyny is a wardrobe and a haircut. It’s comfy, it’s low budget, and it costs your daughter’s future nothing. The “nonbinary” claim is a proposition about what a person fundamentally is, and it arrives attached to an ideology and to the possibility of iatrogenically harmful interventions.

A twenty-three-year-old woman declined testosterone because she did not want to lose her voice, while still pursuing a mastectomy on the grounds that she was neither male nor female. Her definition of the word was purely negative, an absence rather than the presence of anything, and the absence turned out to be sufficient justification for surgery.

The label protected nothing. It only narrowed which interventions she was willing to consider, and the one she settled on was irreversible. But by the same nonsensical logic, her peers “microdose” testosterone with the fantastical belief that they can somehow control the outcome: a beard without balding; broader shoulders without the belly fat.

Naming this distinction to a child who is already moving in the right direction requires care, because the confrontation can cost more than it buys. An oppositional teenager working hard on autonomy is least likely to arrive at a conclusion that has been handed to her, and telling her exactly what you think can be the surest way to keep her from thinking it herself.

Where positive movement is already underway, an argument about ideology gives her something to defend, and defending it requires rehearsing it, and every rehearsal deepens the pathways that hold the script in place. The mother who says nothing when her daughter recites something absurd about pronouns is not necessarily being passive; she may simply be wisely declining to give the script another repetition.

Sorting the harmful from the harmless is a substantial portion of parents’ inner discernment work. Figuring out how, whether and when to convey what you have sorted is another. Some portion of a parent’s objection to any given request is symbolic, and it helps to know which portion.

A girl already well along the path toward desistance asked to dye her hair blue. Her parents found a version of this they could agree to, because the request was about temporary self-expression and had no bearing on her body. Most parents feel this way: if my daughter wants to dress androgynously, fine, so long as she does not damage herself medically or build her identity on a lie.

Symbolism is what complicates the sorting. Blue hair on a girl who is settled in herself is just hair; the same request from a girl who has just announced she is “trans” arrives freighted with everything else she has been telling you, and what might lie ahead. What you are weighing is never only the haircut or the joggers or the dye, but the direction they seem to point.

Named plainly, the bind sounds something like this. If I control my child’s expression too much, I am a tyrant whose cautions are meaningless and whose overreach invites rebellion; that doesn’t earn my kid’s trust and respect, and it’s not even who I want to be. Yet I find myself unable to allow seemingly innocuous and temporary forms of teenage experimentation and self-expression, not because of anything inherent to the individual acts themselves, but because of the ideology those acts represent and the direction they reveal my child intends to go. So I have to become a more rigid and controlling parent than I see myself as, destroying my credibility, in order to protect my child from dangers they are not equipped to see.

Much of my work with parents involves loosening knots of this kind with parts language, or with the “on the one hand this, on the other hand that” construction that lets both truths stay on the table without either one winning. This particular knot sometimes gives way from a different direction. Instead of working the bind between control and permissiveness, you can step around it by separating your child from the position she is holding.

The framing that tends to survive contact is exactly that. You can express confusion that someone this independent-minded would take her metaphysics from a website, that this behavior sits oddly on her, that it does not resemble her.

That approach hands her a version of herself she wants to keep and puts the ideology outside it, where it can be dropped without any loss of face. Compare that to the alternative, in which you tell her the belief is false and she now has to choose between the belief and her standing as a person who thinks for herself.

A word on the small feminine moments, which will start appearing before anything is said out loud. She wears lip gloss to school three days running. She borrows her mother’s jewelry for graduation. She turns up to a family event in a dress.

The instinct to remark on it should be resisted, because attention triggers self-consciousness and self-consciousness produces the vulnerability hangover that pulls the concession back. Take the win and say nothing about it. One mother, after a call in which her daughter had softened considerably, wanted to revisit the moment and name what had happened; the better move was to leave it entirely alone and let the softening stand as a new normal, rather than as a subject of discussion.

The concrete work, meanwhile, is finding a presentation that suits her and that she can tolerate. There is a difference between a modest, neutral look and an awkward one deliberately designed to conceal her sex, an aspiration typically achieved poorly if at all. Swim clothes illustrate it well: rash guards and modest swim shorts cut for a female frame read as unremarkable, while enormous men’s board shorts read as hiding.

A girl who tries to pull off a masculine look while carrying a female shape usually ends up in an unsatisfying middle that pleases nobody, herself least of all, and no amount of binding improves it. What improves it is clothing cut to fit her. The distinction a parent has to make here is whether the baggy preference is about comfort, in which case there are good answers, or whether it is covering a femininity she has not yet given herself permission to want to grow into, in which case the question worth holding is what look would actually delight her. As she grows through the awkwardness inherent in adolescence, what way of carrying and presenting herself would truly allow who she is to flourish, allowing her body to move with grace and dignity?

Imagine her crossing paths, on some ordinary afternoon, with a girl who resembles her a little. Similar features, similar build, well put together without being especially girly, going about a good life, and not that far off from her at all.

Share

This is an ROGD Repair bonus lesson. Where it’s found in the course, it comes with reflection questions to help you personalize the material — and over 120 other lessons designed to help parents navigate the difficulty of responding to teens’ and twenty-somethings’ “trans” declarations. Use code SUBSTACK for half off your first month, or get one month free with a paid subscription.

Kim shares how shifting from fear and worry energy to genuine belief in her own son’s potential transformed their relationship — and how she now coaches families to do the same. We explore what I call strategic and what Kim calls clever: non-threatening, indirect approaches that plant seeds of growth without triggering the ego defenses that gender ideology has shored up in these kids. We talk about the power of fun and play in rebuilding connection, the danger of suggestion-based parenting, setting real boundaries around devices, and why personality typing tools like the Enneagram can actually give girls a healthier outlet for the same identity-seeking impulse that gender ideology exploits. Kim also introduces her new parent and teen workbook journals, designed to create structured moments of connection and self-reflection for families who don’t know where to begin.

Watch the full episode here on Substack, click here to watch on YouTube, or click here to find the audio wherever you get your podcasts.

Kim O is a Relational Soul Coach and author. She utilizes Conscious Principles, Presence, and Authenticity Mapping to awaken you to your greatest power, your Conscious Authentic Self. Through inner child work and profound mindset strategies from the stoics and sages, unhealthy coping mechanisms diminish, leaving your empowerment and high relational intelligence in the wake. As a coach, she provides personal, alchemical stories of trauma turned into gold. If she did it, so can you! Contact and find her resources at linktr.ee/heartworku

Kim’s workbooks:

My Role as the Parent of a Teen: a Journal that Guides YOU to Lead & Create Connection

Who Am I? a Teen’s Journal of Self-Celebration & Connection

{{chapters}}
[00:00:00] Start
[00:02:10] Shifting From Fear to Belief Energy
[00:06:45] Celebrating Teens and the Teen Brain
[00:10:15] The Weekly Check-In and Connect
[00:16:15] Practicing Belief When Your Kid Is Nasty
[00:20:35] Rupture, Repair, and Strategic Apologizing
[00:25:00] Untangling Emotion From Gender Identity
[00:32:15] Parents Who Never Rebelled
[00:35:00] Rebellion as the Spirit of Adventure
[00:40:00] Guilt, Self-Forgiveness, and Planting Seeds
[00:45:00] Social Media and the Immature Brain
[00:49:06] Fun, Play, and Suggestion-Based Parenting
[00:55:45] Chores, Boredom, and Preparing for the Road
[01:01:00] What Is the Role of the Teen and Parent
[01:07:53] Coaching Under a Different Name
[01:11:19] Personality Typing as an Alternative to Gender
[01:18:15] Myers-Briggs and Breaking Gender Stereotypes

ROGD REPAIR Course + Community gives concerned parents instant access to over 120 lessons providing the psychological insights and communication tools you need to get through to your kid. Now featuring 24/7 personalized AI support implementing the tools with RepairBot! Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take 50% off your first month.

PODCOURSES: use code SOMETHERAPIST at LisaMustard.com/PodCourses

PRODUCTION: Looking for your own podcast producer? Visit PodsByNick.com and mention my podcast for 20% off your initial services.

MUSIC: Thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude & permission.

ALL OTHER LINKS HERE.

Read more

On sickness

For two weeks this summer I rode around California in the passenger seat of my husband’s van while taking the maximum daily dose of Pepto-Bismol and a whole lot of ginger root. This post was supposed to be about California adventures, the people I met along the way, and a glimpse into blended family life. Instead, it’s about my illness, and the people helping me at home.

That trip was supposed to be the celebratory finish line of my digestive illness. I’d just finished a two-thousand-dollar course of antibiotics, timed deliberately so that I’d feel like a human being for the drive. I felt a little better, but nowhere near better enough.

The months leading up to it went like this. This spring, I developed chronic acid reflux and abdominal pain, referred myself to a gastroenterology clinic, and waited several weeks for an endoscopy that cost three thousand dollars and required sedation. The endoscopy found no visible damage to anything. They took biopsies for celiac disease and for a bacterium called H. pylori and sent them off to a lab. In the meantime I’d started belching constantly, which is a textbook sign of small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, so I brought up SIBO myself, because nobody at the clinic ever did. Then I had to push to get the breath test that diagnoses it. It came back positive for hydrogen-dominant SIBO.

I was expecting to be prescribed Rifaximin (Xifaxan), but instead the slow-to-respond GI doc sent the pharmacy a prescription for Cipro. It took me a while to piece together why, given how patchy the communication was. The answer turned out to be money. While Xifaxan is the standard of care and best practice for SIBO, its generic (Rifaximin) is not available in the United States. The brand-name drug costs about two thousand dollars. Somebody in that office decided on my behalf that the price would be a dealbreaker for me, and opted for a cheap generic alternative instead.

But that decision failed to account for the rest of my chart, and frankly, seems questionable for any patient. When the prescription for Cipro came through, I was fortunate enough to have recently come across alarming information about the class of drugs Cipro belongs to, fluoroquinolones. (In fact, a former guest of my podcast, Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring, has social media content warning against this class of drugs, which was the first thing to appear when I searched X for it.) This is a class of antibiotic that carries a black-box warning for permanent nerve damage. I have POTS, a form of dysautonomia affecting my autonomic nervous system’s ability to coordinate basic functions such as heart rate and blood pressure. After reviewing testimonies from several medical professionals and patients saying they wouldn’t risk the effects of Cipro on anyone they cared about, I was alarmed by how casually a doctor I barely knew was ready to submit a prescription for a cheap alternative that could have caused me permanent nerve damage.

I had to advocate quite ardenly to get the prescription for rifaximin, which stays in the gut and is standard treatment for hydrogen-positive SIBO. Along the way I discovered the pricing issue. My naturopath told me later that, with her help, I could have ordered the generic out of Canada, though that would have taken six weeks and landed well after the trip, so two thousand dollars was the price of the timing I wanted. My intention was to complete the course of expensive antibiotics in time to feel noticeably better for our family’s big summer road trip.

When the prescription for Xifaxan did finally come through from the slow-to-respond GI doc, came written for twice a day. The standard of care calls for three times a day, and when I finally met with my naturopath she couldn't work out why they'd done that, but by then I'd already started the course and I was out of fight. I filled the midday gap with over-the-counter oregano oil and let it go. I laid all of this out on episode 222 with Diana Lutfi if you want the long version.

The two week course of antibiotics went fairly smoothly, but I was disappointed that by the end of it some symptoms remained. I figured that this was because of the twice, not thrice, a day prescription. I thought perhaps I needed a longer course of antimicrobials, so I decided to continue taking oregano oil and a garlic extract called allicin while on the road, while using a complex suite of bismuth (generic Pepto Bismol), prescription drugs and over-the-counter herbal supplements for symptom relief, plus trying to stick within certain dietary guidelines.

Then, on day three of our road trip, as my husband drove us south from beautiful Mount Shasta, I was checking my email from the passenger seat when I noticed a new test result in my chart. The biopsy result, taken at the endoscopy a month prior, had finally come in. I opened it and was shocked to see I had tested positive for H. pylori, which is the opposite of what I’d predicted in my conversation with Diana. I had really thought that SIBO was the cause of my symptoms. But this explained why I was still that symptomatic with two thousand dollars of antibiotics behind me. The drugs that treat SIBO don’t affect H. Pylori. Left untreated, once H. Pylori has escalated into chronic gastritis (as it had for me), it can escalate into ulcers and stomach cancer.

This left me making a treatment decision from the road. The standard of care for H. Pylori is a fourteen day course of bismuth quadruple therapy, a heavy regime consisting of bismuth salicylate (Pepto Bismol, which I’d already been taking), omeprazole (a proton pump inhibitor, which I’d be hesitant to take for more than the two weeks required), and two hardcore antibiotics — in my case, doxycycline and metronidazole. Doxycycline makes your skin so reactive to sunlight that an ordinary afternoon outdoors can turn into a serious burn. My fair skin was already sunburned, with another week and a half of California water sports in front of us. I decided to wait until we got home and stayed on the Pepto-Bismol and ginger regime for the rest of the vacation.

H. pylori is a bacterium that burrows into the mucus lining of the stomach and stays there, sometimes for decades. It interferes with how the stomach regulates acid, and can go on to cause ulcers and stomach cancer. There’s a reasonable chance it has been causing a significant portion of my reflux and abdominal pain all along, and that it sat upstream of the SIBO as well, since weakened stomach acid makes it much easier for bacteria to colonize territory further down. The rifaximin I begged for, and completed, was aimed at something downstream while the root cause went untreated.

I decided the paywall goes here, because only people who genuinely support me deserve to hear about bodily fluids and sappy friendships. No offense taken if you do genuinely support me and still don’t want to read about those things. If you’re a paid subscriber, I promise you’ll have more to look forward to than that. If you’re a personal friend and want to read this article without paying, just text me.

Read more

Subscribe now

This is Part Two of Teens and Screens, and it’s the counterweight. Last episode, Dr. Johann D’Souza made the case for keeping toxic screens out of your teenager’s hands entirely. Today I’m joined again by Dr. Will Dobud — social worker, researcher, and co-author of Kids These Days — who thinks the story we tell ourselves about phones and youth mental health is far bigger than the evidence behind it.

I open by naming my own bias: I work with the families where it went wrong. Porn addiction, gaming addiction, failure to launch, daughters pulled into dark corners of social media. Will names his: he’s oppositional by temperament, and he wrote a book making fun of how adults talk about kids.

We get into why the meta-analytic effects between screen use and youth mental health are so small they’re arguably not worth publishing, what a third variable does to correlational data, and why Australia’s social media ban is failing six months in. I push back repeatedly — on whether “do what feels right” is useful advice to parents who don’t know what modern pornography even is, on the candy-bin problem of unregulated access, and on whether calling the phone a symptom of family dysfunction slides into blaming parents.

Then Will gets on his soapbox about school, and the conversation turns somewhere I didn’t expect: youth self-harm and ER data that tracks the school calendar. Up during term, down during holidays. Highest on Mondays. What if we’ve been pointing at the wrong thing?

Books mentioned in this episode:

• Kids These Days — Dr. Will Dobud, with co-author Nevin

• The Anxious Generation — Jonathan Haidt

Dr. Will Dobud is a social worker, researcher, and educator who has worked with adolescents and families in the United States, Australia, and Norway. Will is from Washington, D.C., and divides his time between the United States and Australia each year. He is an award-winning researcher and educator recognized for excellence in research, teaching, and crime prevention. Dr. Dobud is a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at Charles Sturt University, Australia’s largest social work school. His research focuses on improving therapy outcomes for teenagers and promoting safe, ethical practices. He has investigated and written about America’s Troubled Teen Industry, especially wilderness therapy. He has worked alongside advocates, survivors, researchers, and clinicians to protect youth from institutionalization and harm. Will is the co-author of the award-winning book, Kids These Days: Understanding and Supporting Youth Mental Health (2025).

Links

• 🌐 Website: www.willdobud.com

• 📖 Book site: www.kidsthesedaysbook.com

• 📘 Facebook: @WillDobudPhD

• 🐦 X (Twitter): @WillDobud

• 📸 Instagram: @WillDobud / @Kids_These_Days_Book

• 💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-dobud-5209ab74/

• ✍️ Substack: https://substack.com/@willdobud

• Previous appearance: Episode 202, “Label Mania: How Diagnosing Every Kid Is Backfiring on a Generation”

• Candice Odgers TED Talk
  
  {{chapters}}
  [00:00:00] Start
  [00:02:51] Where the Screen Narrative Outruns the Evidence
  [00:06:40] Australia’s Failing Social Media Ban
  [00:12:15] The Third Variable Behind Rising Diagnoses
  [00:16:26] What Violent Video Games Got Wrong
  [00:20:24] Is There a Case for Teens on Social Media?
  [00:24:09] Pushback: Most Parents Don’t Know the Risks
  [00:32:29] Advice for Parents of Kids Six, Eight, and Ten
  [00:38:45] Designed to Be Addictive: Netflix, Books, Phones
  [00:41:31] The Meta Trial and the Word Addiction
  [00:49:46] Is the Phone a Symptom or the Cause?
  [00:53:41] The Candy Bin and the Endless Buffet
  [01:05:31] Forty Years of Scaring Parents
  [01:09:19] Measuring Youth Mental Health at Scale
  [01:16:36] Autism Diagnoses, Funding, and Toxins
  [01:22:45] Will’s Soapbox on School
  [01:26:56] Suicide Rates Follow the School Calendar
  [01:35:56] Why the Youngest Kid Gets Diagnosed

ROGD REPAIR Course + Community gives concerned parents instant access to over 120 lessons providing the psychological insights and communication tools you need to get through to your kid. Now featuring 24/7 personalized AI support implementing the tools with RepairBot! Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take 50% off your first month.

PODCOURSES: use code SOMETHERAPIST at LisaMustard.com/PodCourses

PRODUCTION: Looking for your own podcast producer? Visit PodsByNick.com and mention my podcast for 20% off your initial services.

MUSIC: Thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude & permission.

ALL OTHER LINKS HERE.

We dig into why each harms kids differently: how video games train boys toward “failure to launch” by rewarding minimal effort, how social media consumes an average of 36 hours a week from teenage girls during the years their identities are forming, and why Johann believes pornography is the single biggest problem facing young men today. He lays out his four takeaways for parents: embrace your parental authority, never give your child a smartphone, build up real life, and find one friend in the battle.

We also get into the family dynamics driving early device use — what Johann calls the pattern of anxious moms and passive dads — and I bring my own framing on boundaries and why your adolescent with a smartphone is like a toddler with a candy bin.

In Part 2, coming up in episode 225, you’ll hear from Dr. Will Dobud, who argues close to the opposite: digital integration rather than prohibition. Hear both before you decide. The question this series explores is what a real childhood requires — and whether that means protecting kids from these technologies or teaching them to live alongside them.

Dr. Johann D’Souza is a clinical psychologist with an unequivocal message: Smartphones are destroying young minds, pornography addiction is epidemic among teenage boys, and social media is driving girls to suicide. His solution? Never buy your child a smartphone. Period. With 20+ peer-reviewed publications, Harvard affiliation, and his book Saving Teens from Toxic Screens, Dr. D’Souza has the credentials the establishment can’t dismiss. Former employers tried to cancel him. He’s still speaking—hosting the podcast, traveling nationwide, and helping families fight back. Listen to his podcast, Virtuous Leaders, on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube. Check out our previous conversations here and here.

Watch this episode on YouTube | Listen wherever you get your podcasts or stay right here on Substack

{{chapters}}
[00:00:00] Start
[00:02:19] What Is PsyPact Licensing
[00:07:15] Never Give Your Child a Smartphone
[00:08:04] Why Video Games Harm Boys
[00:11:00] Replacing Games With Real Life
[00:20:46] Reinforcing Limits and Consistency
[00:23:45] Embrace Your Parental Authority
[00:27:00] Slot Machine Syndrome and Extinction Bursts
[00:33:28] Parents Who Can’t Model Self-Control
[00:35:07] Anxious Moms and Passive Dads
[00:41:15] Social Media and the Teenage Girl
[00:45:36] Pornography as the Biggest Problem
[00:54:26] Why Sweet, Shy Kids Are Vulnerable
[01:04:15] What Age Is Safe for a Smartphone
[01:16:39] Raising Kids Hungry for Real Life
[01:22:42] Non-Toxic Screen Use and Tech-Savvy Kids

ROGD REPAIR Course + Community gives concerned parents instant access to over 120 lessons providing the psychological insights and communication tools you need to get through to your kid. Now featuring 24/7 personalized AI support implementing the tools with RepairBot! Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take 50% off your first month.

PODCOURSES: use code SOMETHERAPIST at LisaMustard.com/PodCourses

PRODUCTION: Looking for your own podcast producer? Visit PodsByNick.com and mention my podcast for 20% off your initial services.

MUSIC: Thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude & permission.

ALL OTHER LINKS HERE.

Róisín walks me through how a 2019 reclassification in the International Classification of Diseases — moving gender identity out of mental health and into sexual health in order to “depathologize” it — created a conundrum: how do you get hormones and surgeries reimbursed for a condition that’s no longer a condition? That question, she argues, is the thread that connects the WHO’s guideline development group to a much larger story about HIV funding, the Global Fund, Open Society Foundations money, and decades of AIDS-elimination targets.

We get into the “third gender” populations of India, Thailand, and Latin America; why so many of these vulnerable young men end up in prostitution and at high risk of HIV; and how offering the hormones and surgeries people want became a mechanism for getting them into clinics and onto antiretrovirals. We also cover the insurance-coding sleight of hand happening closer to home — mastectomies billed as “scar repair,” girls documented as males with gynecomastia — and what it all means for the parents and therapists trying to make sense of what their kids and clients are actually saying.

The question the episode keeps returning to: if the price of ending AIDS is medicalizing vulnerable kids and reframing whole populations as trans, is that a victory worth claiming?

Róisín Michaux is an Irish writer based in Brussels, Belgium. She writes about women’s rights and free speech in the context of the transgender movement. She is specifically interested in LGBTIQ activism, activists’ relationship to EU/European bureaucracies, the funding they receive, and how it has all led to deep and anti-democratic policy capture. She has 2 kids and a cocker spaniel. Follow her on Substack or on X @RoisinMichaux.

Listen to our previous conversation: 206. The Intersex Lie: Róisín Michaux on How Queer Theory Hijacked a Rare Medical Condition.

Watch this episode on YouTube | listen on any audio platform of your choice | or stay here on Substack

{{chapters}}
[00:00:00] Start
[00:02:54] The WHO Guidelines and the ICD Reclassification
[00:12:34] Third Gender Populations and the India Model
[00:20:25] Open Society Foundations and "False Consciousness"
[00:32:31] Prostitution, HIV Risk, and Marsha P. Johnson
[00:37:34] GATE, Global Fund Money, and Legal Gender Recognition
[00:47:17] Mainstreaming Trans Healthcare Into Public Systems
[00:54:16] Insurance Coding, Endocrine Disorder, and Scar Repair
[01:07:11] "End the Wait, End AIDS" by 2030
[01:27:17] PrEP, Decriminalization, and the AIDS Infrastructure
[01:36:38] Autism, Rescuers, and How Girls Get Roped In
[01:43:33] Conversion Therapy Bans and Criminalized Therapists

ROGD REPAIR Course + Community gives concerned parents instant access to over 120 lessons providing the psychological insights and communication tools you need to get through to your kid. Now featuring 24/7 personalized AI support implementing the tools with RepairBot! Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take 50% off your first month.

PODCOURSES: use code SOMETHERAPIST at LisaMustard.com/PodCourses

PRODUCTION: Looking for your own podcast producer? Visit PodsByNick.com and mention my podcast for 20% off your initial services.

MUSIC: Thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude & permission.

ALL OTHER LINKS HERE.

“I’ve done my research and I’m prepared to accept the risks.” If you have not heard your child say some version of this yet, you likely will. It is the sentence that closes conversations, that silences parental objections, that establishes the young person’s status as an adult in charge of her own body. It is meant to be unanswerable, because it borrows…

Read more

The transmission of womanhood from mother to daughter is made of a thousand small moments. The way a girl learns to care for her female body’s particular needs, from skincare to menstrual hygiene; or what to say when another girl is crying in the bathroom; or develops a personal style that suits her personality as well as her figure... such mannerisms a…

Read more

I open with a personal on-ramp: my own recent ordeal getting diagnosed and treated for SIBO, and everything it revealed about a system that pushes drugs and procedures while ignoring underlying causes. It’s a story about having to be your own advocate — doing your own research, demanding your own testing, declining the wrong prescription, and fighting for the right one — and about everyone who doesn’t have the skills or resources to do that.

From there, Diana and I widen the lens. We talk about “standards of care” as a phrase that sounds authoritative but is often anything but, from WPATH to gastroenterology. And we get into the heart of the episode: Colorado. Why is it, in my view, the worst state to be a parent — and increasingly, to be a therapist? We unpack Chiles v. Salazar, the new HB 26-1322 (Civil Actions for Conversion Therapy Survivors), and the deliberately vague “unprofessional conduct” language that lets licensing boards discipline speech.

The questions we explore: What actually counts as being “required to affirm”? How does vague law create a chilling effect? And what would it take to fight back?

Diana Lutfi, JD, MSHCM, CPHQ is an independent legal expert, healthcare regulatory and bioethics consultant, and coalition movement builder. She emerged in the center of two national movements unmasking healthcare abuses (health freedom and detransitioners), and became the tipping sphere after writing the Larger Detransitioners community amicus (cited in U.S. v. Skrmetti). She bridged 100+ detransitioners and activists supportive of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, and authored the counter-letter signed by 5,000+ academics and physicians supportive of Robert F. Kenendy Jr. She ignited a third wave of intellectuals and built a think tank dedicated to ‘Healing Science’ to push back against the mislabeling of ‘science’ and ‘data’ used as justification for public health laws and social control. She enjoys teaching and empowering people to know their healthcare legal rights and constitutional rights, and actively champions stronger protection for bodily integrity.

Links:

Think-tank: healscience.org

Consulting: outofmedicalegypt.com

For legal research projects, Diana focuses on defamation, healthcare licensing, and legislative writing. Contact her at diana@outofmedicalegypt.com

Listen to our previous conversation here: 138. United States v. Skrmetti: Detransitioners Amicus Brief in Supreme Court Case with Diana Lutfi

Watch this episode on YouTube | listen on any audio platform of your choice | or stay here on Substack

{{chapters}}
[00:00:00] Start
[00:01:57] A Personal Healthcare Saga
[00:03:47] The SIBO Diagnosis Nobody Raised
[00:06:22] Refusing a Black-Box Antibiotic
[00:13:45] Being Your Own Advocate
[00:16:08] Reforming a Broken System
[00:26:09] The Fraud of "Standards of Care"
[00:27:47] The Chart: Skrmetti and the Science Wars
[00:34:30] Lawfare and Professional Speech
[00:43:40] Colorado, Speech Censorship Capital
[00:45:47] Getting "Required to Affirm" Right
[00:53:38] Unprofessional Conduct as a Weapon
[00:59:53] Chiles v. Salazar Explained
[01:06:18] HB 26-1322 and Its Vagueness
[01:12:50] Suing Therapists After a Suicide
[01:22:34] How Healing Science Fights Back

ROGD REPAIR Course + Community gives concerned parents instant access to over 120 lessons providing the psychological insights and communication tools you need to get through to your kid. Now featuring 24/7 personalized AI support implementing the tools with RepairBot! Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take 50% off your first month.

PODCOURSES: use code SOMETHERAPIST at LisaMustard.com/PodCourses

PRODUCTION: Looking for your own podcast producer? Visit PodsByNick.com and mention my podcast for 20% off your initial services.

MUSIC: Thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude & permission.

ALL OTHER LINKS HERE.

An athletic father tells me his daughter does nothing. No exercise, no discipline, no effort toward the things she claims to want. A few minutes later it emerges that she works with a personal trainer twice a week. “Nothing,” it turns out, means “nothing by my standards”; she isn’t training to failure, isn’t tracking macros, isn’t following a scientific…

Read more

My warning to be careful about revealing your hand can land as a door slamming shut. If teachers are mandated reporters, if the wrong therapist can triangulate your child against you, if a single misjudged conversation can bring a caseworker to your porch, then how do you accomplish the one thing the coming school year demands, which is telling the scho…

Read more

Watch on YouTube | Listen wherever you get your podcasts | or stay here on Substack

Follow Reality Therapy podcast | Follow Ryan on X @ryanmcrogers

{{chapters}}
[00:00:00] Start
[00:02:06] Gas Station Heroin: What Is 7-OH?
[00:05:55] Kava, Feel Free, and Designer Drugs
[00:11:25] How 7-OH Hits the Opioid System
[00:14:30] The Little Old Lady THC Gummy Story
[00:25:30] Methadone vs. Suboxone for Detox
[00:35:56] The Carpenter’s Recovery: A Christian Approach
[00:40:32] Why AA Pushes Back on Christianity
[00:48:15] Reality Therapy and the State of the Field
[00:53:42] AI Psychosis and the Future of Therapy
[00:58:40] Tough Love and “Live Your Truth, King”
[01:04:30] Honoring Who Teenagers Are Becoming

ROGD REPAIR Course + Community gives concerned parents instant access to over 120 lessons providing the psychological insights and communication tools you need to get through to your kid. Now featuring 24/7 personalized AI support implementing the tools with RepairBot! Use code SOMETHERAPIST2026 to take 50% off your first month.

PODCOURSES: use code SOMETHERAPIST at LisaMustard.com/PodCourses

PRODUCTION: Looking for your own podcast producer? Visit PodsByNick.com and mention my podcast for 20% off your initial services.

MUSIC: Thanks to Joey Pecoraro for our song, “Half Awake,” used with gratitude & permission.

ALL OTHER LINKS HERE.