I was an invited speaker this month at the Independent Schools NSW School Counsellors’ Conference. It was a virtual event and pretty well-attended, though unfortunately not recorded. So you’re going to have to deal with the notes I took throughout, which, yes, will put this reflection at risk of being a bit too much self-report, but bear with me.

When I read the program, I was surprised to see the keynote for the conference was Dr. Jean Twenge. I’ve followed Dr. Twenge’s career for some time and used data from her doctoral research on the “age of anxiety” in Chapter 1 of Kids These Days. Not only of the same title as a popular poem from the 1940s, Dr. Twenge’s research argued that this particular “Age” reflects rising rates of anxiety from the 1950s to the 1990s.

The findings from that particular large-scale study were that the average child in the 1980s reported higher levels of anxiety than child psychiatric patients in the 1950s. Talk about an “anxious generation.” Published in 2000, Dr. Twenge wrote in the abstract:

“Correlations with social indices (e.g., divorce rates, crime rates) suggest that decreases in social connectedness and increases in environmental dangers may be responsible for the rise in anxiety. Economic factors, however, seem to play little role.”

A Graph Off!

Exploring today’s age of anxiety, the keynote presentation followed a similar trend I’ve noticed of late when constructing an argument of a youth mental health crisis. Graphs, graphs, and more graphs. And I’ll be sharing some graphs, too. A graph-off, if you will! For example, Dr. Twenge’s friend, Jonathan Haidt, wrote a bestseller I’ve written about previously that contained 30+ graphs illustrating how (and proposing an argument for why) youth mental health fell off a cliff in 2010.

Trends somewhat unrelated to youth mental health (or maybe related) are also used to illustrate that something is going on with kids these days. Alcohol intake? Kids having sex? Going on a date? Leaving the house on their own? Down, down, down. We’ve got graphs for that, too. The idea here is that almost everything is worse for kids these days . . . except that since 2021, lots have been reversing. But let’s look at some of the graphs.

Do kids even grow up anymore?

I agree with Derek Thompson that it’s “mostly cringe for middle aged people to gawk at general changes in younger generations.” If there is an anti-socialization of children, however, where did this come from, and how? Many graphs were cited as supporting this during the keynote address. Yikes. Do teens these days do much of . . . anything?

The graph above suggests youth in 2020 go out with friends about one time less per week than kids in 1976. One…less…time. That’s a mighty steep drop in the illustration to subtract the number one.

The Gen X Archetype

Dr. Twenge’s keynote also included pictures of Gen X teenagers. The pictures depicted young kids smoking, some holding bottles of liquor, and others images of kids at a . . . hold your breath . . . roller rink. This seemed to be used as anecdotal evidence that kids of yesteryear grew up faster and did way more cool stuff.

Dr. Twenge argued kids in the 80s were different. They appeared to look older. Dressed a bit more seductively. Maybe “too” seductively. They were dating, drinking, and doing normal teenage things, like the roller skating and the dancing.

Of course, the adults of those days were thrilled by teenagers' behavior. Jokes. Youth drinking, crime, pregnancy, and violence were up. The adults were not thrilled. Youth also committed more serious offenses at a younger age.

Then take a look at this article from October 6, 1980.

“But in another sense, the pressures on the schools today are unique. For better or worse, educators agree, children today have been raised differently than their parents. One child in five now lives with only one parent and the influences on children include television programs and commercials, magazines and the pervasive drug culture as well as families and teachers.

Whether this is good or bad is a matter of intense debate.

“We have a rising incidence of teenage pregnancy, veneral disease, truancy assaults on teachers and drug and alcohol abuse. Those are facts. It’s up to the public to judge whether that constitutes a youth problem,” says Terry Herndon, executive director of the National Education Association.

On the other hand, Gallup surveys of teen-age attitudes turn up evidence that youthful values may not have changed as much as some adults imagine. These show that a majority of teenagers fear violence at school, oppose legalized marijuana, say they watch too much television and would like more homework.”

So the adults were telling these kids that television will rot their brains, and the kids agreed? In the 1980s, the kids... wanted more homework? Who wants more homework? Oppose legalizing marijuana? Don’t really like living in fear of violence all that much? What’s wrong with these kids from the 1980s? Well, they were truants, drug addicts, glue sniffers, and getting pregnant.

The Kids These Days Effect

This resembles the classic “kids these days effect.” The adults tell us that something has changed and that things were better in the good old days. The problem with this logic is A) you have to find the good old days when adults liked teenagers (Socrates hated kids, so clock back to the year zero and start counting backward), and B) you have to throw away your own recollection that this is exactly how your parents talked about you.

While watching the keynote address, I was caught off-guard by graphs about declines in teenage sex and drinking, which the Washington Post in the 1980s reportedly cited as a chief concern. In Australia, the Kevin Rudd government spent $50 million twice to curb binge drinking. Maybe a real social policy win, actually?

The Death of the Playground

In the presentation, there were also pictures of playgrounds. This is part of the Haidt, Twenge, and co. argument I’m not entirely against. Playgrounds are so boring these days, and many outdoor programs have become so risk-averse that one might even ask, what’s the point?

I’m working with an outdoor educator in Sydney at the moment, and here are some recent rules.

1. Blanket bans on swimming.

2. Campfires were banned (rightly so in some places due to the risk of wildfires).

3. Then campfires were brought back, but with a 2-4-meter (6-13-foot) rope laid around the campfire as a safety barrier.

4. Crocs…the cheap foam-like shoe you can bedazzle with jibbitz, not the animal…banned. Don’t believe me? Watch this. Read this. Those shoes are apparently unsafe and disruptive.

5. One school allowed students to wade in the water. Knee-deep only. With a lifejacket on.

Here is a picture of the Monash playground in South Australia in the 1970s. How awesome would that have been? And yes, how hot would that metal be on a summer day? Dr. Twenge and I agree on that.

But things “do” change, and a historical perspective helps. Jane Addams, that mother of professional social work, wrote, “We are unprepared to realize the impulse of youth toward social pleasure and adventure, taking it for granted that this instigating, irresistible desire can be choked off by mere negation.” That was, again, 1903. We were already messing up freedom of play, freedom to disengage, and adventurous recreation more than 120 years ago.

I’m all for that argument. But attributing reductions in play, freedom, or roaming to technology, like smartphones or social media, misses the bigger argument that and I argued for in Kids These Days. This all goes back to the way adults (of any generation . . . not that generations are particularly meaningful or objective lines in the sand) think about and, subsequently, talk about kids. Then comes the interference and intervention. All from an ideology that there must be something wrong with the kids these days, of any day.

Maybe the anxious generation and the age of anxiety was, well, always? Hence using a title that is repeated. Is it the “closing” of the American mind? Or the “coddling” of the American mind? Or the “canceling” of the American mind?

Let’s go back to the 1940s again. That was the “Age of Anxiety” and the “Anxious Generation.”

The Other Anxious Generation

In The Anxious Generation - the original one from 1949 - Wallace Stegner wrote about older adults’ tendency to portray postwar youth as lazy, irresponsible, and disengaged. Kurt Hahn, one of the founders of Outward Bound, called this spectatoritis. But Stegner’s case was that young adults had inherited circumstances that made anxiety a rational response. Postwar youth were said to lack the rebellious energy of the previous generation. Maybe right so. In the Atlantic in 1951, Oscar Handlin wrote that postwar youth were “yearning for security.”

Stegner’s “anxious generation” was a postwar cohort concerned with collective survival. This also relates well to Twenge’s age of anxiety in the 1980s/1990s, relating to Cold War fears and reductions in social connection. So it appears we’ve been anxiety hustling for decades, if not generations.

How could every age or generation be the anxious one?

While I don’t agree with all of Stegner’s writing from the 1940s, there is one quote I do really agree with:

Be More Like Me

At the end of the keynote, which did receive positive feedback, so maybe I’m the weirdo, Dr. Twenge said that children should be doing the kinds of things Generation X children did. Yes, some of the appeal is obvious. Children were supervised less, spent more time outdoors, were only really glued to television screens and the cinema, and experienced more independence.

But as a frame for youth mental health, “go back to how we were raised” is historically selective and clinically unhelpful. Their outcomes were worse!

In the spirit of things, let me use some graphs to explain. I’ll use some Australian data from where this conference took place.

Nostalgia and Romanticizing

For males, aged 15-25, there was no worse decade to have been born than the 60s and 70s, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. While we don’t have the full picture of the data for those born in the 1980s and 1990s, it’s still lower than those who could be described as Gen X (Born 1965 to 1980).

Australian girls fare a bit differently for those born in the 2000s, with slightly higher rates than for girls born in the 1990s. Those rates, which did increase after 2010, are dropping, thankfully. For women born in the 60s and 70s, however, suicide rates experience another jump after turning 30.

So while Gen X drank more, dated more, and were granted access to awesome, risky playgrounds, their outcomes weren’t that great. Adults weren’t happy with them then. Much like adults aren’t happy with what the kids are doing today.

When & Where

North America and Australia are interesting case studies for the argument about youth mental health being impacted by social media. In The Anxious Generation, Haidt argued that non-youth self-report data should quiet his critics ( and I hope to have an opinion piece on more of this published shortly). Emergency room visits and suicide rates are more objective than teens telling us they’re sad or unhappy, Haidt wrote.

If social media spread everywhere and “caused” an epidemic of mental illness. What happened in the European Union? What caused the drop in youth suicide in North America in the mid-1990s? What spurred a decrease in Northern Europe from the early 2000s, only to subtly increase? These are interesting questions, and the graph below is from a 2024 study in The Lancet that uses the World Health Organization’s mortality database.

For me, the public narrative about social media, kids these days, youth mental health, and technology simply far outweighs the evidence. I was told during my undergraduate degree, master's, and PhD that we live in “evidence-based times.” I’m also told to teach that stuff to people. Do we? Or do we live in hyperbolic-based times?

A selective memory of childhood

Nostalgia bias is our tendency to remember the past as better, simpler, or healthier than it was. A good example is that the best music that ever existed is the music you listened to during your high school years.

For example, in this study:

Participants (N = 470; ages 18 to 82 years) were shown the titles and artists of 111 popular songs that had featured in the charts between 1950 and 2015 and rated the degree to which they had autobiographical memories associated with each song, as well as the degree to which they were familiar with and liked the song. We found a reminiscence bump in adolescence (peaking around age 14) for both ratings of the autobiographical salience of songs featured in the charts during that period and the familiarity of these songs.

If technology is really the problem plaguing today’s youth. Why aren’t we looking further back than Gen X? What about the 1860s and the days of Henry David Thoreau? He liked to read and write. While he didn’t drink much alcohol, he loved the woods and strove to live simply.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end. -Henry David Thoreau

Shit! He also hated technology!

Our adult nostalgia bias filters out the everyday exceptions to the youth problems we could find every day, great outcomes, and the distress that was normalized during our youth. Nostalgia bias preserves some memory of freedom. We rode our bikes until the street lights came on. We played outside in the dirt, building up our immune systems. We could talk to our neighbors. Adults couldn’t track us down, and there was no need for self-surveillance.

This, however, confuses an autobiographical, self-report memory with population-level data.

Was Gen X (Maybe) The [Phone-Free] Anxious Generation?

In the United States, suicide rates among adolescents and young adults rose in the latter half of the twentieth century. CDC data showed that rates among teens and young adults increased dramatically from 1950 to 1990, while suicide among 10–14-year-olds increased 121% and among 15–19-year-olds 27% between 1980 and 1992.

Teenage pregnancy was substantially higher among Gen Xers. Again, in the U.S., the birth rate among females aged 15–19 reached 61.8 live births per 1,000 in 1991, compared with a record low of 13.1 per 1,000 in 2023. That’s a decline of 79%.

Alcohol use among U.S. adolescents also fell markedly. In 2016, 55.6% of 12th-grade students reported alcohol use in the past year, compared with approximately 75% in 1997. Heavy episodic drinking, as defined in Monitoring the Future as consuming five or more drinks in a row at least once in the previous two weeks, fell from about 35% for high-school seniors in 1998 to 16% in 2016.

Violence, too, was not that great in the early 1990s. In 1991, 42.5% of U.S. high-school students reported having been in a physical fight in the previous year, and 26.1% had reported carrying a weapon. Both of those rates subsequently fell. That might actually be due to a helpful policy-level interventions (or not), such as banning lead from gasoline and paints. The violent-victimization rate for 12–17-year-olds fell 85% between 1993 and 2022.

Let’s look at lead:

I don’t mean any of this suggests adolescence was harder then or easier now. Those narratives prove really unhelpful and are the cheap literary device Stegner described. I do want to say that simple, seemingly linear narratives that teens were healthier, happier, and better off when they lived like Gen X children without social media, smartphones, or EdTech cannot withstand much scrutiny.

Some Common Sense

In the Washington Post article cited above, I read a great passage. Whenever you finish writing a book titled “Kids These Days,” you do realize how much research you could have added to the book. I remain proud of the book. I learned a lot. But here is also a friendly reminder from 1980:

In Ober’s view, the adult world’s perception of youth and of schools has been skewed by “a deep-seated dislike of youth that has grown up in our society in the last 30 years.”

“The groups we demean the most in our society are the poor, the black, the female and the young,” he goes on. “The community exploits youth but it doesn’t really like youth. And there are more youth today - that’s part of the problem. The biggest problem isn’t the schools but the second-class citizenry of young people that has grown to tragically large proportions.”

Talk about hitting the nail on the head. I am left wondering if we stopped viewing teenage behavior as pathology, negative deviance, and as being at odds with how you grew up. Those were different - not better - times.

Kids these days don’t belong to you. They belong to the future.

Let’s give them the chance to grow up free of the kids these days effect. Might be worth a shot?

This year, we have 15 (!!!) presentations from 14-18 September. We’re about a month away today, and so far we have 2,052 registrations from 21 countries: 🇦🇺🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇺🇸🇹🇷🇫🇷🇨🇦🇮🇪🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🇳🇿🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇮🇱🇪🇸🇹🇭🇱🇻🇮🇹🇵🇭🇵🇰🇸🇪🇨🇭🇦🇹🇿🇦

Register for Social Sciences Week Here

What is Social Sciences Week?

In 2021, I heard of a small but growing grassroots movement in Australia called Social Sciences Week. This was launched in 2017 by Professor Dan Woodman from the University of Melbourne, “to bring social science research into public conversation.” Other institutions got on board, and the annual week in September grew into something quite special.

When I learned about the idea in 2021, I volunteered to deliver a webinar on outdoor therapies and to share my passion for opening the counseling room door. While my university helped promote the week, as did many others, I had more than 500 registrations for a one-hour talk on a fairly niche topic. It was a cool experience, and I decided to start viewing the week as an opportunity to have a free-form online “conference” of sorts. But a conference with no pressure and only one mission: To Share Everything.

Our Outdoor Therapy Center for Research and Practice website has grown each year, and it now offers more than 100 hours of absolutely free content.

But here’s the catch:

• They’re totally free. Register here.

• It’s all online from the comfort of your home or office!

• If you want to skip scrolling past this bullet point, download the program here.

• You’re not signing up for a mailing list. Once it’s over, it’s over.

• If you can’t attend the live Zoom recording, I’ll send you the recording.

• The speakers are amazing scholars and therapeutic practitioners whom I get to work with and call my friends.

• We talk about outdoor therapy stuff a lot of the time, but also lean into a lot more.

• You can register for ALL or SOME of the presentations.

Learn more about the presentations below.

Register for Free Here

Spotlight Presentations

This year I wanted to highlight two of my more recent connections and Substack superstars. If you’ve subscribed to Unscripted, you’ll probably already know them.

Presenter:

Overview: Over the last decade, widespread concern that social media is harming young people, and the recurring cycles of moral panic that often accompany new technologies, have been growing. But is this really new? Drawing on the available evidence, Dr Chris Ferguson will explore why alarming narratives about youth and media gain traction, and how they shape public opinion and policy responses, including social media bans. This webinar is a critical reflection on the evidence behind these claims, as well as the broader social and cultural forces that sustain them.

About Chris: Christopher Ferguson holds a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Central Florida. He has clinical experience, particularly in working with offender and juvenile justice populations, as well as conducting evaluations for child protective services. In 2013, he was awarded a Distinguished Early Career Professional Award from Division 46 (media psychology and technology) of the American Psychological Association. In 2025, he was awarded the Hand Award for Research, Creative, and Professional Activity at Stetson. In addition to his academic work, he has published a historical mystery novel, Suicide Kings; a gothic horror novel, The Secrets of Grimoire Manor; and the non-fiction books How Madness Shaped History and Catastrophe: How Psychology Explains Why Good People Make Bad Situations Worse. Chris also writes regularly on his Substack. He lives in the Orlando area with his wife and son.

Presenter:

Overview: Ana Lund will share the three neuroscience myths that live rent-free in your brain and in your textbooks and why they need an eviction notice. Attendees will explore how these misconceptions arise, why they endure, and the consequences they have for therapeutic practice and human understanding. Rather than dismissing neuroscience, Lund advocates for a more thoughtful, evidence-informed integration of neuroscience into social and therapeutic contexts.

About Ana: Ana Lund is an integrative psychotherapist with a foundation in Transactional Analysis and a member of BACP (British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy). Ana holds a PhD in science and has spent a number of years working in a science lab. Ana is passionate about bridging the gap between neuroscience and psychotherapy. She is always thinking about ways to leverage the latest neuroscience insights into effective psychotherapy practice to help clients lead happier, more fulfilling lives. Through Ana’s popular “Neuroscience & Psychotherapy” writing and international teaching, Ana helps therapists use robust brain science in everyday practice while challenging oversimplified “neurobollocks” and maintaining a deeply relational focus. Ana enjoys connecting with fellow therapists through informal discussions, workshops, constructive debates on social media, and her blog. She also spends a lot of time learning and understanding the relevant neuroscience and connecting the two worlds.

More Presentations

Presenters: Will Dobud (that’s me) &

Overview: Outdoor therapies encompass a range of practices, from nature-based therapy and surf therapy to equine-assisted approaches. In practice, these outdoor approaches are growing fast, yet its evidence base hasn’t always kept pace. This webinar draws on more than two decades of research to share key lessons about what we know, and what we still need to learn, about outdoor therapies in research and practice. We explore the role of therapeutic factors, the importance of client voice, ethics, the diverse pathways clients take toward change, and the shift from anecdote to accountable, data-driven practice. Social science disciplines, such as social work, psychology, health sociology, and education, offer clues needed to build a rigorous and meaningful evidence base for the field. Join us to explore what social science research has already revealed, and where it can take outdoor therapy next.

About Will: Will Dobud, PhD, MSW is a social work clinician and researcher working on innovative treatment programs integrating outdoor therapeutic experiences, and an advocate for youth impacted by the United States’ troubled-teen industry. He is a co-author of Solution-Focused Practice in Outdoor Therapy and Outdoor Therapies. Will is from the Washington, DC, area. Will is also the co-author of the award-winning 2025 book, Kids These Days: Understanding and Supporting Youth Mental Health.

About Nevin: Nevin Harper, PhD, is a Professor in the Faculty of Health at the University of Victoria, and a Registered Clinical Counsellor with over 30 years’ experience leading groups and individuals through transformative outdoor experiences. He is a co-author of Nature-Based Therapy and Outdoor Therapies. Nevin lives on Vancouver Island, Canada. Nevin is also the co-author of the award-winning 2025 book, Kids These Days: Understanding and Supporting Youth Mental Health.

Presenter: Andi Dickmeyer

Overview: Traditional therapy has often been built around ways of connecting that don’t suit everyone, and many men find it difficult to open up while sitting face-to-face. This talk discusses the experiences of 11 men who participated in walk-and-talk therapy sessions in a randomised pilot study at the University of Newcastle. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we’ve found that the informal approach and physical movement gave men a culturally familiar entry into therapy through reshaping the therapeutic relationship, lowering the barrier to showing up to therapy, and making it easier to be open and vulnerable once they did. In addition, walk-and-talk therapy created well-being momentum that continued beyond the session. The therapeutic container of walk-and-talk therapy was not necessarily suitable for everyone. Finally, nature itself was an active therapeutic agent in the process. These findings suggest walk-and-talk therapy is a valid option that may better fit men’s preferred ways of connecting.

About Andi: Andi Dickmeyer is a psychologist and PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle, investigating outdoor therapy interventions for men with low mood. Andi has explored the intersection of nature connection and mental health through outdoor therapy practices, including adventure therapy, wilderness therapy, forest bathing, nature art, and guided solo practices internationally through a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship from the United States. With a background spanning community, inpatient, and outdoor mental health settings in Australia and the United States, Andi is passionate about supporting individuals to (re)connect—with themselves, others, and nature.

Presenter: Unda Avota

Overview: Adventure therapy often uses challenging activities as a pathway for personal growth. However, participants - and sometimes facilitators - can unintentionally confuse the task of a certain activity with the therapeutic goal. This presentation explores how cultural values, such as perseverance, achievement, resilience, and “never giving up” can overshadow participants’ individual therapeutic intentions. Using a real case from an international university programme, we will examine how well-intentioned support can become subtle pressure, preventing participants from recognising their own boundaries, needs, and authentic success. The session invites practitioners to rethink how we frame activities and how we continually reconnect participants with their personal goals throughout the therapeutic process.

About Unda: Unda Avota is an occupational therapist, social worker, lecturer at Riga Stradins University, adventure therapy practitioner, and chairwoman of the board of the Adventure Therapy Latvia association. Unda’s practice integrates adventure therapy methods into the Social Rehabilitation and Support Program for Riga Youth “SUPPORT”, leading seminars for future occupational therapists and organising adventure therapy programs for seniors, young people, and representatives of helping professions. Unda believes that therapeutic change should not only happen in the office, but by experiencing life in all its glory! For Unda, the words “adventure” and “therapy” go hand in hand, and she tries to bring that to life in her practice.

Presenter: (Dr Graham Pringle)

Overview: If a young person returns more compliant, polite or settled, has the intervention genuinely helped, or simply produced obedience? This webinar introduces an ecological model of psychological development to examine why good outcomes do not necessarily indicate good practice. Revisiting critiques of coercive wilderness therapy, Australian boot camps and related interventions, we examine how lasting wellbeing develops through experiences that strengthen agency, relationships and a healthy sense of self, while the opposite happens if we seek compliance. The session explores the ethical and practical implications for adventure therapy and the wider helping professions, asking whether we have sometimes mistaken behavioural change for psychological healing. “It worked” has never been enough to justify what we do with the intention of healing. Lobotomies worked too, if calm patients was all you wanted. This presentation should help look for and eliminate potential harms in our interventions.

About Graham: Dr Graham Pringle (PhD Griffith University 2024) has experience in Residential and Foster Care, Outdoor Education, Adventure-Based Youth Work and Adult Training. He is a director of the International Society for the Study or Trauma and Dissociation, Outdoors Queensland, and Youth Flourish Outdoors, a friend of Outdoor Therapy Centre for Research and Practice and a casual academic with Charles Sturt University. Graham has studied widely and holds postgraduate and undergraduate qualifications in adventure-based youth work, child and family interventions, teaching and psychology. He is currently studying for a Master of Social Work degree. Graham has spent over 20 years pursuing adventure as therapy for adolescents. He and his wife live in Queensland and enjoy camping. His favourite outdoor pursuits are bushwalking and canoeing.

Presenter: Mache Treviño Gonzalez

Overview: Around the world, Outdoor Therapy practices have been challenging us to question some of our deepest assumptions about healing. Who is recognised as a legitimate facilitator of change? Why are some places considered therapeutic while others are not? What makes a practice worthy of trust? This session is an invitation to creatively rethink the opportunities for therapeutic practice: we will visit different perspectives, listen from varied experiences, connect research findings, and share critical reflections in this collective exploration of where healing resides.

About the Presenter

About Mache: Maria Jose (Mache) Treviño Gonzalez is passionate about outdoor experiential learning with a focus on social change. Currently a Lecturer in Outdoor Adventure Education at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and an international consultant for community projects, Mache is dedicated to creating engaging learning environments that invite you to expand the horizons of outdoor practice, building stronger connections between academic research, professional practice, and community development.

Presenter: Daniel Cavanaugh & Will Dobud (me again)

Overview: This webinar examines an evolving conceptualisation of how adventure therapy facilitates change across diverse practice settings, informed by prior scholarship in the field. It presents a synthesised model of key mechanisms of change, emphasising experiential processes that may shape client outcomes. The presentation explores how these mechanisms intersect with practitioner training and program design. Recent findings on the preparation of adventure therapy providers are outlined, including core competencies, professional pathways, and emerging standards. Critical gaps in the current evidence base are identified, especially concerning training quality, implementation fidelity, and the translation of theory into practice. Finally, the webinar proposes priority areas for future research and conceptual refinement to strengthen adventure therapy as an ethically robust, evidence‑informed intervention.

About Daniel: Dr Daniel Cavanaugh earned his MSW and PhD in Social Work from Michigan State University and has held faculty roles at Washington State University and the University of Washington. A clinical social worker, Daniel has substantial experience serving youth and families in community mental health, school, and adventure therapy settings. His research focuses on mental illness prevention, LGBTQ+ equity, and outdoor therapies. He directs the Wild Hearts program for at-risk youth and co-hosts the Outdoor Therapy Collective Podcast. He is active in the Association for Experiential Education and its accreditation standards review team.

Presenter: Kane Abbott

Overview: This presentation addresses the “missing middle” in mental healthcare - the gap for young people whose needs are not adequately met by traditional services. We introduce the Human Nature Program, a nature-based therapeutic model that delivers therapy and mentoring outside conventional settings. Drawing on the evaluation of Human Nature by Charles Sturt University, we present evidence of significant positive impacts on participants’ mental health and wellbeing. By combining these findings with powerful stories from the field told by Human Nature mentors, we show how this innovative approach can help bridge a critical service gap.

About Kane: From chasing goannas in the remote Central Australian desert to leading a dynamic team in the Northern Rivers, my journey has been shaped by a deep commitment to connecting with people. My early career in out-of-home care showed me the lasting effects of adversity and the importance of meeting people where they are. Now, as Clinical Manager and Accredited Mental Health Social Worker at Human Nature, I am passionate about building trust and reducing barriers so that young people can access the mental health support that works for them. My goal is to walk alongside others and support meaningful change through genuine connection and compassionate, person-centred practice. I am grateful for the opportunity to lead a team of dedicated mental health professionals who share this vision.

Presenter: Heidi Shingler

Overview: Outdoor learning and outdoor adventure therapies, like all therapeutic approaches, are shaped by ethical dilemmas. However, unlike many therapies, these dilemmas unfold in dynamic and unpredictable environments where challenge, uncertainty, and risk are often integral to the experience. Rather than offering simple answers, this talk explores how ethical principles can help practitioners recognise and navigate these tensions. Using a familiar fairy tale as a narrative guide, we consider how beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and other ethical principles support everyday ethical decision-making. We examine how practitioners and organisations are required to justify not only how their interventions prevent harm and respond to crisis, but also the theoretical and mechanistic foundations through which they are intended to promote wellbeing and uphold client dignity.

About Heidi: Heidi Shingler has worked for the University of the Highlands and Islands (Scotland) since 2018 to establish the Adventure Therapy undergraduate modules and Post Graduate Certificate in Outdoor and Adventure Therapeutic Practice.

Heidi’s prior work included a blend of outdoor education, expedition work and therapeutic work. She has enjoyed many adventures and journeys working by land and sea with groups and individuals. Heidi’s passion for the outdoors developed at a young age and evolved into a career by gaining NGBs (ML, RCI, CWI, CWDI, LNT-Master Educator, BCU-Coach), pursuing university education, and working in the field. As an Integrative Humanistic counsellor, Heidi’s work spans a range of indoor and outdoor contexts, blending the outdoors and therapy. She is dedicated to furthering the field of adventure therapy through research, training, education, and the establishment of an established network in the UK.

As a Leave No Trace Master Educator, Heidi works collaboratively to deliver Leave No Trace trainer courses and awareness workshops across the UK for outdoor education providers, Mountain Training Association Members, and Universities, providing practical and ethical education for sustainable recreational behaviour in the outdoors.

Presenter: Paul Graham

Overview: Walking in virtual forests introduces the use of the video game Minecraft to complete the Tree of Life narrative therapy process and discusses new possibilities for practice that the medium creates. This process can be done at the individual level, but it also creates new opportunities to connect with others in digital spaces. For workers who aren’t as familiar with digital spaces, this practice offers a great opportunity for younger generations to assume the role of the expert and share their knowledge.

About Paul: Paul Graham, MSW, is a social worker and current PhD candidate with the University of Tasmania. Paul holds master’s degrees in narrative therapy and family studies and was awarded a post-graduate medal from Charles Sturt University. Paul’s research interests include how technology interacts with therapy, tattoos as meaning-making, and professional identity formation for social workers. As a casual academic, Paul is focused on creating dynamic classrooms and fostering environments where students push themselves to their full potential.

Presenter: Carla van Laar

Overview: Why is it so hard to sustain something we know is good for us, and what might happen if we designed the conditions differently?

How might rhythm, shared practice and accessibility reshape the way we engage in everyday creativity?

We know that regular creative engagement is linked with improved wellbeing, yet many people struggle to maintain a creative practice amidst the demands of everyday life. This presentation shares the story of Creative Flow Open Studio, a simple experiment that began with one question: what happens if we make just thirty minutes of creative practice part of each weekday? After beginning as a personal experiment, Creative Flow has grown into a shared online practice where people create alongside one another from homes, studios and outdoor spaces across Australia. Participants will be invited to experience a brief demonstration of the practice while exploring how shared intention, creativity, body doubling, outdoor practice, digital connection and collective rhythm might contribute to a new way of thinking about creativity as an accessible and sustainable, everyday health behaviour.

About Carla: Dr Carla van Laar is an artist, Creative and Experiential Therapist, clinical counsellor, supervisor, educator and researcher based on Boon Wurrung Country in regional Victoria. For more than three decades, she has worked across community, education, health and independent practice, exploring the relationships between creativity, wellbeing, social connection and healing. Her work brings together creative practice, counselling, research and public engagement, with a particular interest in Creative Health and the role of everyday creativity in supporting human flourishing. She is Convenor of the College of Creative and Experiential Therapies within PACFA and the founder of Creative Flow Open Studio, an online weekday creative practice exploring what happens when creativity weaves into the rhythm of everyday life.

Presenter: Cian Brown

Overview: Whether recreational or therapeutic, the process of meaning-making is an inherent part of the human experience. From an existential-heuristic lens, this presentation will explore the stories and adventure activities clients have found purposeful and insightful for their existence and how they view the world.

About Cian: Cian Brown, PhD is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Supervisor (LPC-S) in Oklahoma and Supervisor (LPC-S) in Arkansas, Nationally Certified Counselor (NCC), Certified Clinical Adventure Therapist (CCAT), and Board Certified in Neurofeedback, Fellow (BCN-Fellow) with a Ph.D. in Counselor Education & Supervision from the University of Arkansas specializing in Adventure Therapy. He received his M.S. in Statistics and Analytics with a concentration in Educational Statistics and Psychometrics from the University of Arkansas, his M.S. in Counseling from the University of North Texas specializing in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and his B.S. in Psychology from Texas A&M University. Dr. Brown has worked in a variety of clinical settings such as community non-profit agencies, hospitals and schools prior to joining the University of Oklahoma in 2021. He has additional training as a NOLS Wilderness First Responder (WFR).

Presenter:

Overview: Outdoor programs are often described as naturally engaging, therapeutic, or transformative. Yet being outside does not automatically create participation, safety or meaningful change. Outdoor experiences can reproduce the same adult agendas found in classrooms, services and other institutional settings: predetermined outcomes, tightly managed activities, compulsory reflection and pressure to demonstrate growth.

This presentation explores what the outdoors can make possible when practitioners loosen their grip on the planned outcome without abandoning safety, boundaries or duty of care. Drawing on adventure therapy, youth work and relational practice, it argues that the value of outdoor work is not simply found in challenge, risk or activity. It is found in the different conditions the outdoors can create for relationship, agency and participation.

Using a Fun, Safe, Useful practitioner check-in, the presentation examines how practitioners can notice adult agenda, respond to young people’s feedback and adapt experiences in the moment. It also challenges the assumption that every activity requires a formal debrief, suggesting that meaning is more likely to emerge through relationship than through forced reflection.

Ultimately, the outdoors does not transform young people. It creates possibilities. What happens next depends largely on what adults do with the power they hold.

About Doug: Doug Moczynski works therapeutically with young people and families and tries to inspire other grown-ups to do the same.

His career began in the outdoors, where he developed technical skills across a suspicious number of adventure activities and became something of a Swiss Army knife of outdoor facilitation; although usually with an actual bush knife, a PFD whistle and a risk assessment close at hand.

For almost two decades, Doug has worked across outdoor education, youth work, out-of-home care, leaving care, disability, youth justice, family violence and therapeutic services. This includes 12.5 years coordinating wilderness programs for young people with complex trauma histories and five years running Gippsland Adventure Therapy, a service supporting young people and families to connect, heal and share some joy through adventure.

Doug now works in the family violence sector, bringing a relational, trauma-aware and accountability-focused lens to work with adults, young people and families. His practice blends relational youth work, trauma-aware care, outdoor facilitation and Feedback-Informed Treatment. He is currently completing a Bachelor of Social Work and continues exploring how outdoor spaces can create more room for agency, connection and meaningful participation.

Presenter: Josh Heins, Kat Sharp, & Will Dobud (me again but not really, just at the end)

Overview: This evolving presentation explores how critical reflection is central to both social work practice and could become essential in outdoor education and therapy. To be more effective, critical reflection should focus on the street level, working closely with those with the most at stake. As the final presentation in the outdoor therapy series, this presentation will provide an additional closing reflection about Social Sciences Week 2026.

About Josh: Josh Heins, BSW (Hons) is a social worker and career outdoor educator. Josh completed his honours thesis with Charles Sturt University, where he explored social work values, skills, and knowledge in relation to outdoor education. Josh is a casual academic with Charles Sturt University and teaches across Social Work Theory and Practice Subjects.

About Kat: Kat Sharp, MSW, has worked with children, young people and families, facilitated groups, co-led adventure therapy expeditions, dabbled in policy, and supported victims of crime. Kat is a passionate educator, facilitator and explorer. Her record for Australian states/territories with concurrent active working with children’s checks is 4. In her spare time, you can probably find Kat on a bike or in the bush.

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Ben and Carrie were Marriage and Family Therapy students in California when they started their popular podcast. They realized something most of us trained in psychotherapy know but don’t often talk much about: we don’t really get any good training in what to do when things go wrong in the consulting room. I would add that we also don’t do a very good job training folks in what matters most.

Ben and I (along with ) actually did a large study (unpublished but still in the works) a few years ago where we surveyed 400 pre-licensed therapists in the US. More than 80% of them were surprised by the findings in some of the most widely cited psychotherapy studies and our most replicated findings. Most shared that they didn’t learn about these findings in their graduate school training. Pretty shocking. And with a cruel sense of humor, hilariously remarkable.

So that brings me to this piece. About how getting it wrong is going to happen and sometimes that’s ok. Doing nothing about it is not. To address it, we need to build a system around our practice to make sure we’re operationalizing what we know about evidence-based practice and how we can become better therapists for those we serve.

So Much for the Magic Wand

Of course, some of the data differs based on which study we’re citing, but let’s look at some of our field’s most replicated findings. In 1993, the largest review of dropout rates found around 47% of adults seeking psychotherapy dropped out prematurely. Checks notes. That’s almost half. A more recent meta-analysis from 2012 provides a more conservative estimate that 1 in every 5 clients in therapy will disengage prematurely.

Then there’s the one-and-done issue. 20-50% of clients who start therapy attend only one session, and an estimated 35-40% leave by the third session. More than 65% end treatment before the 10th session. The irony is not lost on me when I read psychotherapists online arguing their outcomes would be better if clients experienced more robust, long-term, intense, introspective therapy. Some advocates for particular schools of therapy claim their therapy would outperform CBT if we just had longer clinical trials. Let’s get the average client to session 10 first, because that’s certainly not happening. So the data doesn’t bode well for the idea that there is a hidden collection of magic wand therapists out there who are somehow protected from this data. But let’s look at the clients who, against our best efforts to discourage their engagement, stick with it!

Roughly 10% of clients experience reliable deterioration during psychotherapy. 1 in 10. And we’re absolutely brutal at identifying which clients those are. More on that below. It’s not surprising when only about 6% of our clinical trials comparing psychotherapy outcomes even report on deterioration rates. Not really a problem we care all that much about. If 10% are getting worse in our care, roughly half will show significant improvement and the rest will show little to no change.

The Professionalization Paradox

In our survey, we asked prelicensed therapists to rate what percentage of their clients get better in their care. They estimated 58%. A slight overestimate but pretty close. We then asked them to estimate the same percentage but in five years’ time. That number went up to 75.22%. When asked what contributes to their effectiveness and predicted improvement, they reported supervision, continuing education, seeking personal therapy, and implementing what they learned in graduate school. The issue is: Basically none of those things are shown to improve your clinical effectiveness.

Of course, some of the people we surveyed could truly be a supershrink. But the truth is, we know very little about what creates a highly effective therapist. In fact, we know a lot more about what doesn’t. In and colleagues’ 2015 study (and an APA Most Valuable Paper MVP), there is a finding to support this:

“Therapist characteristics (e.g., years of experience, gender, age, profession, highest qualification, caseload, degree of theoretical integration) did not significantly predict client-reported outcomes.”

That’s quite a finding. Writing from the American context, you need to get a qualification, learn some method, obtain continuing education units, pay for licensure and professional membership, and virtually none of that will make you a better therapist. In fact, in our largest longitudinal study of therapists’ outcomes, there was another kick in the guts:

“Therapists achieved outcomes comparable with benchmarks from clinical trials. However, a very small but statistically significant change in outcome was detected indicating that on the whole, therapists' patient prepost d tended to diminish as experience (time or cases) increases.”

So, you’re probably getting worse with experience. Still probably comparable with the benchmarks, but your slow deterioration to average has begun. That study did, however, find more experienced therapists showed slight improvements in preventing early termination in therapy. But not better outcomes.

So as psychotherapy training becomes more expensive, licensure becomes a bigger pain in the ass, and most continuing education is boring, costly, and statistically useless, we have a paradox. Therapists want to be helpful for their clients and to deliver positive outcomes. For the last two decades, there have been some really helpful ideas for how to do this. But it’s going to take practice. Deliberate practice.

A Short, Unscripted History

The idea of deliberate practice didn’t start in psychotherapy. The ideas came from looking at people who get paid to be excellent at something really hard: concert violinists, chess grandmasters, elite athletes, surgeons. In the early 1990s, the late Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues studied what actually separated the best from the rest. It wasn’t talent, genes, or even the total hours spent performing a certain task (just like therapy). What mattered most was the quality of the practice. Individualized training activities designed by a coach to improve specific aspects of your performance through repetition and successive refinement of specific skills. We have to watch the tape to isolate specific areas of performance, slow it down, get specific negative feedback, adjust, and do it again until it sticks.

Fast-forward to the mid-2000s. Scott Miller and colleagues had already been tracking therapist outcomes and noticing something we all definitely already know: some therapists consistently got better results than others, and it had nothing to do with the model they claimed to use. The “supershrinks” weren’t more charismatic or better trained in the traditional sense. They just attended a better online professional development course, wrote more books about it, and were more trauma-informed than the rest…jokes.

When Miller stumbled on Ericsson’s work (apparently via a Fortune magazine article on a plane), he realized that the psychotherapy profession spent too much time looking inside the box. We kept measuring the same thing and trying to find the answers in the counseling room. We needed to look at what happened elsewhere, and in 2007, they started writing about deliberate practice in psychotherapy for the first time. Empirical studies followed. Top performers spent significantly more time outside of sessions working on specific skills to address limitations to their results as a therapist. Not reading another book. Not attending another workshop. Targeted, feedback-driven, and often uncomfortable practice.

As the ideas about deliberate practice have grown. There is a lot of growing confusion. Practicing the miracle question in a mirror is not really deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is not learning a model. Deliberate practice comes after all of that. Deliberate practice is purposeful and tailored to you based on evidence from your current practice.

What Practice Actually Is (and Isn’t)

Like our survey with prelicensed therapists…and we need to finish writing up those findings because the qualitative data is also pretty amazing!…it’s common for therapists to believe they have gotten better with experience since graduating, obtaining their prelicensed hours, spending time in supervision, and reading all those books they store in their office.

In medicine and therapy, we call our work a “practice.” The roots of the term can be traced back to Latin and Greek terms, though licensing and regulation started to determine who could practice certain medical procedures. What they really meant was who could perform the procedure.

For instance, if you needed surgery in the 1300s, you might go to the Barbers’ Company in London for some bloodletting or a tooth extraction because that’s what barbers could practice. I mean, perform. In the 1540s, Henry VIII united barbers and surgeons into the Company of Barber-Surgeons. So you could get a haircut and a pulled tooth, but barbers now couldn’t perform major surgeries. Still, it was not until 1745 that surgeons demanded to be separate from barbers.

This is a weird historical route to take, but also reading about Ambroise Paré is quite interesting. Paré (1510-1590) was a famous French barber-surgeon who became a royal surgeon for four kings of France. He’s sometimes referred to as the “father of modern surgery,” as he built a system around him to emphasize empirical observation, attempts to be gentler while cutting your hair and removing bullets on the battlefield, and reducing patient suffering. Probably while making them look better with a close shave.

In the dictionary, practice has two definitions. The first is “the clinical scope of work we do every day.” So if you’re seeing clients day in and day out, sure, that’s a practice. The second definition is “to be professionally engaged in” or “to do or perform often, customarily, or habitually.” This second definition invites opportunities to “train by repeated exercises” to hopefully improve at something.

For purposes of this piece, we need to separate these two definitions of practice. The first definition is much more linked to performing a professional task. The second is about practicing something.

Consider a musician. They don’t practice scales or their timing on stage while performing. Even though music is their craft and their practice, you don’t practice on stage in front of an audience. As a drummer, no one wants to watch me practice. It’s repetitive, sometimes slow, and sometimes you won’t even really understand what I’m practicing.

So when you’re with a client or running a group, you’re performing. What you do outside of seeing clients might be practice, but you need to build a system to make that happen. Here’s another thing about practice: it should really push you beyond your comfort zone. You should be challenged. You should know when you’re practicing because it’s hard. If you’re comfortable while practicing, newsflash, you’re not practicing. You need to be stretched.

Deliberate practice is not “reflecting on your work.” It’s not even traditional supervision. And it is definitely not just seeing more clients until you get “experienced.” It’s what you do after you’ve hit your stride in your work. In other words, when you get automatic at something.

Automaticity

Automaticity is the ability to perform a skill or process with little or no conscious effort or attention after extensive repetition and practice. Automaticity describes how learned behaviors become habitual response patterns, much like driving a car or riding a bicycle. When you first start driving, it’s exhausting as you have to think actively about what’s happening all around you. After a few years, you can actually drive to work and say to yourself, “I don’t even remember driving there.” And how weird is it to drive a rental or someone else’s car until it becomes automatic?

Similarly, when traveling, counting money in a different currency is exhausting. You have to do exchange rate arithmetic and try to figure out which coin or note means what.

So when it comes to skill acquisition, automaticity helps us by freeing cognitive resources for other tasks. In psychotherapy, therapists naturally develop automaticity through years of seeing clients. They master the administration of certain techniques; maybe they have perfected how they introduce themselves to a new client, discuss boundaries, or respond to common presentations, and their responses become fluent and effortless. While this efficiency is valuable and necessary for managing the complexity of real-time sessions, there is an obvious downside. Once skills become automatic or autonomous, we grow less sensitive to feedback and more resistant to change. Routine clinical experience alone therefore tends to reinforce existing habits - whether effective or suboptimal - leading many therapists to plateau rather than improve over time. So outcomes deteriorating throughout one’s career isn’t actually all that surprising.

Unlike ordinary practice that produces automaticity, deliberate practice must be highly structured. We must identify a specific skill. We can do this by collecting outcome data and even video recording your sessions with real clients (I won’t get into that here because it’s been written about extensively elsewhere). We can’t do this with select clients; we should do this with all of them. We then get help in setting clear goals just beyond our current ability, engaging in focused, repetitive rehearsal (often via role-play simulations or recorded-session review outside of actual sessions), and incorporating immediate guidance from a coach or supervisor.

Without this intentional process, therapists can stay stuck in automatic patterns unlikely to improve their performance throughout their career. Deliberate practice keeps skills flexible and improvable, bridges the gap between theoretical knowledge and real-world performance, and helps us to move beyond our arrested development.

The goal is successive refinement and to combat your own automaticity. You really want to become discomfirmed in the process. Really kick yourself with a dose of humble pie over and over again so you know you can always have room for improvement. For me, and I’m a bit of a weirdo about this stuff, this has helped my sustainability. Seriously, I’m not afraid to ask for help with stuck cases, and I love leaning into what I can get better at. Just like in music, I know I’m a good drummer. But I don’t need to walk around thinking I’m the best drummer. When I deliberately practice a brand new skill, I’m excited about using it. And it’s hard to break old patterns or things I practiced poorly. It’s all about embracing the beginner’s mindset.

Two Simple Activities You Can Try This Week

Activity 1: I am Clueless
This activity is borrowed from Scott Miller and Daryl Chow and colleagues’ The Field Guide to Better Results. I like encouraging students to do this activity as well. Here’s what to do.

1. Pick 10 clients on your caseload (or a more manageable number if you see fewer clients) at random who you’ve seen at least twice but not more than five times.

2. Before the next session with each of these clients, write down what you believe their goals to be. Consider if the clients’ goals have changed since the start of your work together.

3. When the client comes to the session, say something like, “Let’s take a second and revisit what you hope to accomplish here. Pretend that I have no idea about your goals for psychotherapy. What would you say your goals are?”

4. Write down the client’s response next to where you made your prediction.

5. Keep doing this activity until you’ve recorded this with 30 clients.

6. Systematically go through your version of the clients’ goals and their invited response. Where is there agreement? Disagreement? Any other noticeable trends based on client information (mandated clients, gender identity, age, individual clients, couples, or families)? Which clients had the most divergence from what you wrote down?

Activity 2: Who Are You

Here’s another activity from the Field Guide we adapted with our small non-profit. We love to do this activity in a group and invite students on their internship to participate.

1. Before going home for the day after seeing clients, open a Word document and write down a little bit about each session you experienced as challenging.

2. Identify the client (in a way you feel is most appropriate) and describe what you thought was challenging and your “gut” reaction at the time of the session. Then write down your interpersonal response to the challenging scenario. Don’t write too much. Don’t spend more than 20 minutes a day doing this. But yes, actually spend 20 minutes.

3. Provide a rating (1 to 5) next to what you wrote based on different Facilitative Interpersonal Skills (Empathy, warmth, hopefulness, positive regard, capacity to repair relationships, verbal fluency, etc.).

4. After a month of sticking with this daily activity, review what you’ve written. Read over everything for 20 minutes. Ask yourself, “What were my gut reactions over time?” “Are there common ways you responded to particular clients or situations?” “What themes or similarities pop up (e.g., certain types of clients, presenting problems, your automatic response, etc.)?” “Which of your interpersonal skills suffered the most in these situations?”

What you’re doing here is an audit of challenging situations by capturing them the day they occur. If we don’t capture them, you're less and less likely to remember what happened. When you view them after a month, you may get inspired to take a creative action and start practicing a new way of responding based on the inquiry you’ve just done. You might share this activity with a supervisor who could help read over your daily reflections.

Why This Matters More Than Another Model

We’ve spent decades chasing the perfect intervention while mostly ignoring the person delivering it. Therapist effects are real, but they’re a nuisance to those trying to sell the best packaged therapy model. Some of us help more people get better, more of the time. But a lot of us are also average, with outcomes starting to decline due to our own unknown automaticity. And the research keeps telling us that the ones who keep improving are the ones who treat their own performance the way a serious musician treats theirs. We need to get routine feedback to isolate the hard parts. Once we find the uncomfortable areas of our work, we need to develop plans to practice it deliberately.

Before wrapping this up, I know there is a lot of therapist resistance to these ideas. “I tried it, but it didn’t work” is a common one. Or even better, we tried to monitor client outcomes, but clients were just lying on the measures. I’ll help you with this reframe. The client didn’t lie to a piece of paper. They lied to you. Sounds like something in the alliance you could work on so clients feel safe enough that they don’t have to lie to you. Don’t like 90% of clients lie to their therapist too?

We’re also really busy. Clinical work day in and day out is already emotionally expensive (Hint: That’s why automaticity feels so good). The field has trained us to believe that improvement comes from acquiring more knowledge or more letters after our names. Deliberate practice is a lot less glamorous, more painful, and more personal: the discipline of noticing what isn’t working in your hands, and then doing the unsexy work of changing it.

Do you want your therapist to be someone who has fine-tuned their chops through dedication, hard work, and persistent attention to detail? Or the one attending the online CEUs?

"Because sometimes what heart know, head forget." -Mr. Myagi

The workday ends. It’s 5:30 pm, and you have a problem. You’re hungry. Blood sugar is low, and you’ve had a huge day. You call a friend or your partner and ask if they’d like to meet you at a restaurant near your office. It’s a cozy Italian restaurant, and you read some online reviews to make sure they’re evidence-based and licensed so you can trust the chef and staff know what they’re doing. Some negative reviews, but mostly positive.

When you and your buddy walk in the door, the front-of-house asks, “How can I help?”

“Could we please have a table for two?” you respond.

“Why?” they ask.

“We’re pretty hungry,” you respond again.

“Ok, hold on.” The front-of-house pulls out a clipboard with some sheets of paper attached to it.

“How long have you been hungry? Can you describe the intensity of the hunger? What did your mother used to cook for you? Is this hunger related to your relationship with your parents? Do you have a favorite phallic-shaped vegetable? Have you experienced any adverse childhood hunger-related experiences?”

You receive a battery of questions to assess the chief complaint in your life: your hunger. Following the 60-minute assessment, the front-of-house invites you to return next week, same time, and the chef will read over their case notes related to your hunger and prepare a meal plan to solve this problem once and for all.

You leave the restaurant with a way better understanding of your hunger, but now you’re hangry.

Is it really any wonder the modal number of sessions in therapy is one?

And no, this doesn’t mean single-session therapy is the answer. That’s like single blind date relationships (I guess some people are into that sort of stuff), but I’ve always found that after an awesome first date, I usually like to go on a second one if the person opposite me is keen.

The Hunt for Deficits

When one of us walks into a therapist’s office - like the restaurant example above - the hunt begins.

While working across schools, residential programs, intensive outpatients, and in private practice for the last two decades, this question comes with almost every referral: What’s the Disability? The Disorder? The Diagnosis? What Deficits are present? Which Deficiencies need correcting? Has there been Delinquency? I will use some examples about youth here, but I think the same applies for working adults and a range of populations.

My Latest Book: Kids These Days

My friend called these the Killer D’s. I believe that’s from his book, The First Kiss. Worth the read.

They are not imaginary, of course. Diagnoses can help people access services. Disabilities deserve recognition and accommodation, rightly so. People’s everyday Difficulties should not be minimized. I’ve also written previously about how Demoralization can be a useful frame for starting a therapeutic relationship with a new person.

But when the Killer D’s become a therapist’s primary field of vision, our value and worth as therapists becomes about what’s wrong with people. “I work with [INSERT PROBLEM NARRATIVE OR IDENTITY TERMS RELATED TO CLINICAL POPULATIONS].

Remember, for every story of hardship is a story of survival. Once we start searching for pathology, we tend to become very good at finding it. A young person’s behavior becomes evidence. Their reluctance to come to therapy becomes resistance. Their anger is some sort of dysregulation - not an adequate response to the uncooperative schooling system or other bullshit we ask kids to do without meaning.

Silence becomes another symptom to record. On that note, and not joking, in the famous Rosenhan study, hospital staff pathologized the note-taking of pseudopatients (patients with no mental illness) as “writing behavior,” interpreting it as a symptom of mental illness. If we want to find the problem we’re looking for, we’ll find it. That’s for sure. Looking at you, trauma.

Soon, many people’s files contain a remarkably detailed account of everything that is wrong with them. The trouble is that people rarely experience connection through being categorized, itemized, standardized, and trapped into ideological boxes. Yes, I acknowledge that many people can experience a sense of euphoria when finally gaining some sense of what is leaving them demoralized.

The Labeled Life

Clinical language has an easy way of traveling into classrooms, family conversations, and the stories young people tell about themselves. No longer is the problem, like hunger, something that can be treated effectively. It’s who the person is. One hungry individual. Forever. “

Watch out for Uncle Billy, he’s the hungry one.”

A description intended to secure support can become an identity. We saw this in the last USA presidential election when more than 70% of youth reported in survey data that their mental health labels are important to their identity. Yet, we know from the evidence that the longer young people use a mental health label as part of their identity, the less likely we are to see an increase in self-esteem. And yes, self-esteem can be a bit overrated and outdated with empty statements about “boosting” your self-esteem.

I don’t want to make an argument against naming problems. I want to take a second to craft a brief assertion against mistaking the name for the whole person.

and I wrote about the importance of seeing young people in context (environmental and cultural) rather than treating them as collections of symptoms. Behavior also makes more sense when we understand the environments, relationships, expectations, and experiences surrounding it. A problem-focused lens can reveal genuine suffering, but it also risks camouflaging the whole person behind the suffering.

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A Crucial Vantage Point

This is where the Crucial C’s offer another vantage point. I found the Crucial C’s in a small parenting book my mother mailed me for a birthday one year. The book was A Parent’s Guide to Understanding and Motivating Children, from the Raising Kids Who Can series. The Crucial C’s came back to me when reading Daryl’s writing about the Killer D’s.

The Crucial C’s ask us what this young person is Capable of? This may be a bit of a controversial take, but I don’t think a lot of people change all that much in psychotherapy. I think they start to see the world a bit differently

Where do they feel that they Count? And can we facilitate experiences that make them feel like they matter? Like they’re Crew, not passengers - as we wrote in Kids These Days.

What are they Curious about? Can you make our work together something that fosters more Curiosity? Maybe that’s Curiosity related to learning more about themselves and their social quirks or coping skills, or about something new they want to keep getting better at.

Where is social Connectedness in their life? After all, every therapist knows social connectedness is the cornerstone of health and well-being. Therapy doesn’t work without an alliance anyway. If that Connectedness is missing in their life, is the therapy amplifying that feeling of Disconnection, or inviting further Connection?

When have they shown Courage, even if their Courage does not look especially orderly or restorative? Are there exceptions to the problems bringing them to therapy worth further investigation? After all, no one with an anger problem is angry 24/7. Maybe there’s more to learn.

I have a few youth on my caseload at the moment who, despite some problematic behavior in the eyes of their parents and the schooling systems, go to protests on their weekends to speak up about the environment and Indigenous land rights. I say that’s pretty cool. Certainly a bit cooler than myself at 16, who only cared about skateboarding, the drumset, and marijuana.

These questions produce new information for us to work with.

Consider when teenagers are described as “non-compliant” with or “resistant” to therapy. I’ve always thought to myself, non-compliant or resistant to what exactly? Or who? The answer is…me and what I’m offering. They’re resistant to what I’m doing, so that’s on me to go back to our connection and fix ruptures in our alliance. Resistance isn’t a characteristic of a person. You have to be resistant to something.

The Spirit of Adventure in Therapy

The Killer D’s focus our attention on what is wrong with one’s motivation, attitude, or incapacity for self-regulation. That pays our bills and helps us to write books to boost our platforms about how we work with more Distressed, Difficult, Deficient, Diseased, and Dangerous clients than anyone else. Makes us feel better about getting paid to sit in weird, isolated offices behind closed doors and talk to people.

The Crucial C’s asks what deserves people’s attention, and when they have persisted despite all the odds. I don’t believe this is just semantics. It moves us from “How do we fix this person?” toward “What conditions allow this person to come alive?”

It also makes room for surprise. That’s the real adventure of psychotherapy. The best part of my job.

Adventure is a philosophy of believing that no matter what we do together there will be unknown outcomes. That’s why I’m comfortable acting like an idiot. I don’t need to know what’s going to happen next. I actually feel liberated to sit and believe…with all of my being…that the person across from me can solve all of their problems with or without me. I just get to be an observer of what happens next.

And if we’re meeting one hour per week, I am under no illusion that I am really going to change their entire existence for the remaining 167 hours of the week.

Hidden in Plain Sight

Many adolescents are described as the most difficult of clients to engage with in therapy. Obviously, they often don’t want to be there. They might have better things to do. Their parents or the courts usually drag them by the ears to our couch and, while pointing at the child, say, “Hey, fix my kid.” Then when that doesn’t work, they shop for a new therapist. Talk about couch surfing. That trademark goes to .

A young person who says almost nothing in the consulting room may become animated while talking about fishing, clothing, gaming, music, mechanics, animals, a best friend or younger sibling. One client about a decade ago loved reptiles and particularly snakes. In Adelaide, South Australia, I offered to take him on a hike and see if we could find a snake. I thought, “What’s the risk? We’ll never find a snake.”

Of course, a near six-foot Brown Snake came from the bushes in our first 100 steps onto the trail. Yes, that can kill you. But the adventure! We didn’t touch it.

Then I imagined the headlines, “American social worker in Australia has 15-year-old killed by the second-most toxic snake in the world.” Dodged that bullet.

Reframing Restance

Someone described as lacking confidence can demonstrate considerable courage simply by turning up to the appointment with a strange adult who has been assigned to help them. A child said to have poor social skills may be the person holding a fractured family together.

Imagine the fourteen-year-old referred for school refusal, anxiety, and a lack of engagement. In the office, every question receives a shrug. There’s a lack of eye contact, and maybe they throw some colorful swear words in your direction. Been there. From one vantage point, this confirms the referral. This kid is clearly avoidant, oppositional, and unmotivated.

Just a reminder, Benjamin Franklin left school at age 10 to work at his father’s shop. George Washington finished around age 11 and went on to teach himself about land surveying. Alexander Hamilton (thanks for organizing the national debt) grew up in extreme poverty in the Caribbean and was self-taught as a young clerk. Hamilton did return to formal studies later in life.

Back to Franklin for a second. Outside of school, Franklin detailed how he learned to write:

“With this view, I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try’d to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand.”

Talk about striving for a sense of mastery.

Maybe we should ask more youth what they do when they’re not at school. Is it possible that they have been helping an uncle or aunty restore an old motorbike? Can they explain the engine in astonishing detail? Have they learned something through trial, error, and - if they haven’t been banned yet - by watching several YouTube videos? Where can they tolerate frustration for hours when the work matters?

Suddenly, the clinical picture has more depth. School remains difficult. Anxiety didn’t vanish. But Deficits and Disorder is no longer the only plausible story. Here, the Crucial C’s of Capability, Curiosity, Connection, and Courage hide in plain sight.

Rather than asking how to make him comply with environments in which they feel useless, we can ask how those settings may invite increased purpose, agency, Competence, and trusted relationships. None of this is to ignore distress. As we all know, distress likes company. And I mean good company.

The Person You Choose to See

Therapy becomes thinner when suffering is the only thing allowed to enter the room. Connection expands when the therapist is interested not only in what has happened to their client, but what matters to them, what they know, and where their life has not always been conquered by the problem (hunger…). Questions then become Curious invitations to learn more about the whole person across from you.

The Crucial C’s also require something of therapists. We have to tolerate not being the most interesting or important person in the change process. We aren’t, anyway. We may have to follow people’s Curiosity rather than our plan. We may need to recognize Capability before others believe in it themselves, without turning that capability into another demand for further compliance (compliance is lower-cased in this piece, on purpose).

This is harder than following a treatment manual or administering a therapy model with perfection. It asks us to remain open. To be a bit adventurous. Isn’t that why we’re in the work anyway?

As Daryl has also taught me, I should try more often to try to be disconfirmed. If the referral says “aggressive,” we will readily notice clenched fists and a raised voice. But will we also notice any restraint? If the diagnosis says “attention deficit,” will we notice the subjects that hold attention completely and remain super hyperactive? What if the client has no idea what these terms even mean, really? After all, have we ever met two people with “depression” living in their lives and it looks exactly the same for them? Of course not.

Good therapy does not require us to romanticize harmful behavior. Courage can also be misdirected. Connection can form around dangerous activities making a lot of problematic behavior harder to intervene with. Capability might be used destructively. Our job is not to apply a positive label where a negative one used to be. We have to develop a fuller, more useful account of the person and the possibilities available to them.

A deficit may explain why support is needed. A Capability may show us how that support will work. Perhaps the most consequential question in youth psychotherapy is not “What disorder does this young person have?” but “What does my way of seeing them invite them to become?”

If we search only for the Killer D’s, we may find a case requiring management and compliance. If we also search for the Crucial C’s, we may find a person worth knowing more deeply. Being known is where the work begins.

Linus Pauling, for example, was a two-time Nobel laureate and was genuinely one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. He became convinced in his later career that megadoses of Vitamin C would cure cancer and the common cold. No matter how much contrary evidence mounted, he selectively cited supportive studies (as many of us do), dismissed negative findings, and co-authored papers increasingly rejected by mainstream journals. His public stature meant the idea persisted for decades despite the evidence. The more celebrated you are, the more confirmation bias costs everyone.

It’s at this stage of one’s career that we require epistemic courage, or we risk becoming a leader with many followers, playing the Pied Piper and leading them with a deeply compelling story evidence no longer supports, if it ever really did.

The Pied Piper is a fitting metaphor because the danger is not simply that a persuasive figure leads people somewhere. It is that a frightened and worried community is willing to follow a simple, emotionally satisfying story without demanding enough evidence to determine if we’re going in the right direction. Now, I understand why parents and educators are concerned about technology and social media. New technology scares many of us, and adult humans are far more resistant to change than we think. So, while reading this, I hope you understand that I’m approaching this purely from the perspective of how we can remain evidence-based in our decisions about social media and smartphones.

In the case of the Pied Piper, children’s well-being has become a moral currency that makes dissent feel irresponsible. Policymakers and concerned adults follow the tune of a technological moral panic, and the tragedy of the Piper is also a warning about consequences: once a community hands over its judgment to a compelling narrator, it may not notice what has been lost until much later.

The Anxious Generation

I want to be generous here, because I think Jonathan Haidt cares about kids. The Anxious Generation told a persuasive story that resonated with many adults. But many clever tricks were implemented to help massage shaky science into rhetoric. The first trick was labeling an entire generation. This happened before with the coddling of the American mind. Everyone was coddled, and then everyone got anxious. Smartphones and social media played a role in both of those stories.

I use the word “story” here - or “narrative” - because Haidt is a great storyteller. Graphs help you to tell a story (more on that below). So do pictures of children playing on less risk-averse playgrounds from back in the day. For example, here is a 1970s-era playground in South Australia. Look at all those kids playing outside doing dangerous things! Not an iPhone in sight! Where did this childhood go?

I’ve spent this year being the guest on dozens of podcasts, radio shows, and small local news TV spots promoting my latest book, Kids These Days. Every interviewer eventually comes back to Haidt and the smartphones. He has created a collective consciousness that social media is harming children, and politicians are leaping to take the cheap political win. The problem is, there have been and will be real consequences to legislating a bullshit narrative. One of the most common findings I’ve heard from parenting coaches and therapists is that The Anxious Generation has had one clear result: parents are increasingly anxious.

Last week, I was quoted in Australia’s Daily Advertiser discussing the social media bans now that we’re over six months into this. Unfortunately, the full article is behind a paywall. You can read the first line of the article in the screenshot below and get an idea of my feelings about the bans.

Later that day, I saw a post on X/Twitter from Jonathan Haidt. He wrote, “The Australia social media law is off to a good start.” He then told a joke, as follows:

“As Lao Tzu said long ago: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. But if that first step is hard, then you should quit.”

Actually, I think Lao Tsu only said the first part. The second sentence was added by all those who are saying the Australia law has failed because the first step did not bring them to the final destination.”

First, the ban has not worked and is no longer viewed all that favorably. Even Australia’s eSafety Commissioner acknowledged such (again more on that below). It was a shoddy political gesture, drafted in just over a week, that is now mostly considered a waste of time and emotional energy. I spent last week in schools, where kids laughed at the ban, and teachers said, “No one cares anymore.” Nearly 80% of kids are still on social media, and recent research “found the more young people are impacted by the ban, the more likely they are to report they are getting less news and having less opportunity to discuss news and the issues that matter to them.” In Australia, knowledge of civics has reached a 20-year low, so not accessing the news is a problem. Additionally, many disability advocacy and human rights groups remain opposed to legislated bans that restrict freedom to information and communication. So despite what the data shows, Haidt claims things are off to a “good start,” and we’re wrong to oppose the ban just because it’s “hard.” But this wasn’t data-driven from the start.

Caring about children and being right about the cause of their suffering are two different things. And when you’ve been the intellectual engine behind Australia’s world-first social media ban, the UK’s similar ban, the phone-free schools movement, and more, it matters what you do next.

First, let’s look at the data informing all of this.

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On Getting It Wrong from the Start

When you stack up what the systematic reviews and meta-analyses actually say, the picture is far more complicated - and far less alarming - than Haidt’s central argument. And we now have so many meta-analyses and reviews that we've probably done enough research to really start settling this discussion. After all, the meta-analysis was invented to settle scientific debates, if that’s ever really possible. A meta-analysis is the study of studies. The difficulty with this discussion, when it’s brought to the Today Show (no matter what country you’re in), where you get 1-2 minutes to share your talking points, is that the data doesn’t care about our feelings surrounding social media and youth mental health. I’ll examine a few.

A 2020 meta-analysis across twelve studies found only a small correlation (r = .11) between adolescent social media use and depressive symptoms, with extraordinarily high heterogeneity (I² = 95%) across those studies, indicating that something other than social media itself was driving the variation in findings. These are all statistical numbers that are challenging to interpret when not all of us are statistical geniuses, myself included.

To provide a crude metaphor, a correlation of 0.11 is like being blindfolded in a helicopter and trying to predict the exact elevation of the landscape directly beneath you. Your method for predicting this altitude is to toss a coin. Every time it lands on “heads”, you guess the ground is slightly higher; every time it lands on “tails”, you guess it’s slightly lower. Mathematically, a coin flip gives you a tiny fraction of a percentage of predictable accuracy, but in practice, you are essentially just guessing. A correlation of r = 0.11 shows certain variables are technically linked by the thinnest thread, but that link is entirely useless for making meaningful predictions in the real world. To be cruder, this is the square root of fuck all.

A larger 2022 meta-analysis collected data from 226 studies from over 275,000 people found that general social media use had essentially no association with combined well-being (r = .01, non-significant), with only small significant effects for anxiety (r = .13) and depression (r = .12). The authors described these effects as modest and heavily moderated by research methods, geography, and type of use.

Now we get to the review of the reviews. A 2026 umbrella review synthesizing 72 reviews and 20 meta-analyses published between 2021 and 2025 found that general social media use showed “weak and inconsistent associations” with both well-being and ill-being, while only problematic social media use - a fundamentally different construct - was consistently linked to poorer mental health outcomes. In other words, what the evidence actually supports is a targeted concern about compulsive use in a subset of young people, not a blanket case for banning all under-16s from platforms. The distinction between use and problematic use is not a minor methodological quibble.

Consider, too, my colleague ’s meta-analysis. Dr. Ferguson, a psychologist who has researched moral panics about technology for decades, racking up more than 34,000 citations, found “Evidence from correlational and longitudinal studies has been inconsistent, with effect sizes weak at best.” This is similar to basically what everyone else has found.

How did Haidt and colleagues find something that was totally different from the experts?

Haidt, along with his colleague Zachary Rusch, responded to Dr. Ferguson’s meta-analysis in an article titled “Why Ferguson’s Meta-Analysis Should Not Be Used to Inform Debates on Social Media’s Impact on Depression and Anxiety: A Commentary.” Voicing methodological issues and a lot of statistical jibberish, Rusch and Haidt conclude that Ferguson’s “paper does not constitute a valid meta-analysis and should not be used to inform scientific, public, or legal debates on social media and adolescent mental health.”

Regardless of squabbles between researchers and philosophers, there is a fundamental issue here. The data to support the fear-mongering relating to social media “causing” anything just isn’t there. You’ll understand why I share this story about people challenging the methods rather than the meaning or implications of Dr. Ferguson’s findings.

To warrant the legislative blunt instruments, Haidt and our governments require data. That data isn’t there, and doubling down on a narrative with virtually no strong supporting evidence (in fact, the data goes the other way) isn't a good practice. Researchers know that claiming causation against correlations isn’t right. That’s the researcher’s original sin. Claiming causations against the smallest correlations is even more concerning. But this story of social media causing harm has always been about how the narrative is sold, and illustrated.

The Veil of Science

A few weeks ago, I also tried to show how graphs are being used to sell loads of bullshit. Take this graph below. You’ll see the Y-Axis (the up-and-down part) measures Life Satisfaction, and the X-Axis (the left-to-right part) measures time spent using different levels of online media. For girls, life satisfaction seems to drop off a cliff the longer they use various forms of online media.

However, in the cited study, Life Satisfaction was measured on a scale of 0 to 10, not 5.8 to 7.6 as the graph represented. Who would even choose to count from 5.8 to 7.6? I redesigned the graph below to show what it should really look like if the researchers hadn’t intentionally designed it to sell the narrative.

The largest drop is about 6%. So now, there really aren’t alarming findings here, but that didn’t get the clicks. The original illustration helps to sell a narrative. That is dishonest, and that’s the problem. Also, why was the original graph shared conveniently in a vertical 4:5 format? I’ll tell you. So it could be shared on social media. Yes, social media is the place where the anti-social media debate is crafted and sold.

A well-documented phenomenon in data presentation (called y-axis truncation) is starting a graph's vertical axis at a nonzero value, making even modest changes appear catastrophic. A 2021 empirical study across five experiments found that truncated y-axes cause viewers to interpret differences as far more significant than they actually are. The "truncation effect.” We can all fall for it. In the 2021 study, 83.5% of participants were susceptible, including PhD candidates in quantitative disciplines.

The Anxious Generation knew this trick very well. The book is basically a series of graphs that look to have been designed in Microsoft Word. Writing in Nature, psychologist Candice Odgers, who has studied adolescent mental health and digital technology for twenty years, observed that Haidt’s graphs showing digital technology use and mental health problems "rising together" are the kind she draws on the first day of her graduate statistics class to show students how easy it is to construct a causal story from two unrelated trend lines.

Watch Candice Odgers' Recent TED Talk

A few days ago, shared the below image to show how correlational sensationalist data is used. It’s helpful for wrapping our heads around what is happening.

Now imagine spinning the X Wheel of Causes (on the left) and landing on “Smartphones.” Then you spin the Y Wheel of Outcomes (on the right) and land on Birthrate Decline. You could ask yourself, what would smartphones have to do with birthrates? Well, according to some graphs, everything.

You can see how this narrative is intentionally constructed. Smartphones are bad and cause just about every concerning outcome of our time. Fertility rates have been declining since the early 1800s. But that’s inconvenient for the narrative.

Haidt has also conducted some narrative voodoo with suicide rates, which did actually go up around the time of social media and front-facing cameras. But if you zoom out from only looking at 2010 to today, you can see the mid-2000s were actually a historic low for youth suicide. The kids in the late 1980s and early 1990s had far worse outcomes than the so-called anxious generation. This is cherry picking under the guise of science to try to strengthen the narrative.

Another analysis by Jen Lumanlan, M.S., M.Ed., noted that when Haidt describes “dramatic increases” in school alienation worldwide, he is referring to 0.2-point changes on a 4-point scale. These changes only look alarming when the graph's axis is zoomed in tight enough to make them fill the frame. The graphs used to sell this story are a form of visual rhetoric, and when combined with a compelling narrative and a receptive audience of parents who are concerned about their kids and new technology, they become illustrated fear-mongering on a new level.

Belief Perseverance

Belief perseverance is the intellectual version of painting yourself into a corner. Once caught out, some will double down even further, convincing themselves or others that they were right all along. The louder they get, even in the face of direct, opposing evidence, the stronger the cognitive bias becomes. This is the part that totally astounds me.

In Coddling, Haidt and his co-author, Greg Lukianoff, described nine common cognitive biases impacting our American society. One of them was “labeling.” Like calling all the kids the Anxious Generation. They warned us about labeling large groups of people. Lukainoff, a champion of open inquiry and freedom of speech, opposes the government restrictions and age-verification rules favored by his former co-author. Let’s add belief perseverance as another cognitive bias.

The idea is that once a person has publicly committed to a claim, the cost of being wrong shifts from epistemic (am I right?) to social (what happens to me if I admit I was wrong?). The stronger the public commitment, the thicker the paint on the floor, and the more trapped you become. Researchers have documented this under many names: confirmation bias, sunk cost fallacy, the backfire effect. We see it in politics constantly. We also see it in science.

Wilson and Kelling introduced Broken Windows Theory in a 1982 Atlantic article - not a peer-reviewed study, worth noting - arguing that visible signs of disorder signal that an area is ungoverned, inviting more serious crime. This is, of course, bullshit, but it was a compelling narrative. New York City adopted it aggressively in the 1990s, crime fell (most likely due to the latency effect of removing lead from paint and gasoline), and the theory became gospel. It spread globally. Careers, departments, and entire criminological frameworks were built on it. Researchers eventually documented that the causal evidence was never really there. Crime fell in cities that didn't adopt the approach at similar rates. A 2005 study found “no support for a simple first-order disorder-crime relationship as hypothesized by Wilson and Kelling.” But by then, the theory was institutionalized. Politically, operationally, and reputationally, the sunk cost was enormous. Admitting the foundation was shaky meant acknowledging that the harms it caused, disproportionately affecting communities of color, may not have been justified by the evidence. As noted above, the advocates’ response was to question the critics' methodology and to ignore the range of existing evidence challenging the very heart of the narrative. The data went one way. The narrative the other. Sounds familiar, right?

The trouble with painting yourself into a corner isn’t stubbornness. This approach masquerades as a misleading and unevidenced narrative of conviction. From the outside, it can look like someone who really believes in something important and pulls at the heartstrings of parents and educators. There must be a meaningful difference between holding a position because the evidence demands it and holding a position because your identity is fused to it.

When the Commissioner Knows This Wasn’t Going to Work Out Well

Australia’s Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 came into force on December 10, 2025. No matter how Haidt has joked about the ban, three months into the ban, research from the University of Newcastle surveying 408 adolescents found “insufficient evidence to conclude that the act of parliament had any effects on social media use among adolescents aged 12 to 16.” By June 2026, a Pureprofile study of over 1,000 Australians found that 78% of under-16s were still accessing banned platforms. A Reuters investigation published in July 2026 found that platforms failed to request age verification on any of 50 test accounts that simply declared a birthdate of 16. The researchers who originally advised the government’s own age-assurance trial admitted that circumvention “has become the go-to by young people.” As kids do. That’s what kids have been doing since the invention of social media. Three independent studies and Australia’s own regulator have now confirmed: the ban isn’t working, no matter what Haidt will tell you.

Even Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is “not really keen” on the under-16s social media ban. The Commissioner seemingly agreed with my previous concerns in May/June 2026 that this was drafted “very quickly” and quickly became a “very blunt approach.” AKA, not the way social policy should be enacted.

What I’ve just written asks questions. Will the ban ever work?

To that, I answer that I think there is a more important question: Should there have been a ban at all?

Getting It Wrong Is Human; Staying Wrong Is a Choice.

Getting things wrong is part of doing the science, part of being a researcher, part of being a person.

Beyond dichotomies of right or wrong, there is also agreement or disagreement. And I’m more than happy to be disagreed with, as open inquiry and discussions around disagreement can help find common ground. The history of science is a lengthy, sometimes beautiful story of getting it all wrong and correcting course. The best researchers I know wear reworked ideas like a badge of honor. That’s a true progressive research program. A research agenda that actually goes somewhere.

I believe we have a genuine responsibility to push back when being wrong causes harm or - dare I say it - misinformation. Policymakers around the world are lining up to follow Australia’s model, and bans are spreading to the UK, France, Spain, and beyond. Still, the evidence base they rest on is described by experts as “shaky,” “weak,” and, in places, “unscientific.” This is a call for epistemic courage. It’s okay that we got this wrong. Knowing it’s wrong and doing nothing about it, however, is not cool.

Haidt’s work on freedom of speech and making universities meaningful and educational again should be applauded. Haidt has also used his recent platform to stress the importance of unstructured play, risky play, and many ideas I can get behind. I tend to agree with Haidt about playgrounds, the importance of Dr. Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter’s research, and how things became too safe for people’s own good. Haidt has also been a champion of open inquiry and viewpoint diversity, which this debate badly requires. There are many important areas where Haidt could use his platform to drive societal progress in a useful direction. It must, however, be informed by honest representations of data.

Good-enough evidence doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t care how many books were sold, how many governments were advised, or how strongly some feel about kids’ well-being, or whether you like kids or not. If 78% of under-16s are still on banned platforms, and the research suggests the harms were never as clearly caused by social media as claimed, then there is only one intellectually honest action: update your followers and move on.

The kids, the ones both of us say we care deeply about, deserve to have us admit when we got something wrong and turn our attention back toward what the evidence actually supports: building connection, reducing structural stress, dealing with the schooling system, and giving young people the kind of real-world, embodied, relational experiences that decades of research tell us matter most.

That work is harder and slower than banning an app. It always has been.

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When you go for your clinical supervision, and you start ragging on one of your clients for being resistant, precontemplative, in denial, unmotivated, not ready, etc. Pause.

Take out your phone, and before you start gossiping like you’re at the office water cooler about how defensive and frustrating your client is, set a 90-second timer. That’s all you get. You have 90-seconds to tell your supervisor what the problem is. No navel-gazing allowed.

Why Do We Need Resistance

When we’re stuck in a therapeutic relationship, most attention is directed to the client. It’s their trauma. Or their readiness. Or, for the purposes of this piece, the characteristic of the resistant client. So, why do therapists need this concept of client resistance to stay alive when its death was called for 40+ years ago?

I don’t want to argue that what appears to be resistance doesn’t happen in the consulting room. Some clients push back, avoid, cancel, or disengage. Of course they do. All therapists have learned the hard way that we can’t be everything to everyone. But my question is more pointed than that. Why, after forty years of research consistently pointing elsewhere, do we keep reaching for a label that locates the problem of client engagement squarely inside the client and between their ears from the neck up? What does resistance do for us? It’s a two-way relationship, but the resistance is almost always positioned squarely on the “other.”

I think calling clients resistant does something for us therapists. I believe it’s worth naming.

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Contest or Cooperation?

In 1984, Steve de Shazer published “The Death of Resistance” in the journal Family Process, a paper he reportedly rewrote seventeen times before a journal would touch it. His argument was blunt: resistance is a therapist's construction. When a client doesn’t respond as we expect, we're simply failing to understand their way of cooperating.

De Shazer described this as a Contest model: therapist vs. client, change vs. defense. Instead, he proposed a Cooperation model, where the job is to figure out how this person, in this moment, is trying to engage with the world and work with it rather than against it. After all, I haven’t met too many - or any - clients actively trying to make their life worse.

Again, I am a bit biased by my solution-focused training and reading Steve’s work, but I do have to say his writings on resistance continue to resonate with me. Steve’s paper came out in 1984. While he called for the death of resistance in therapy, resistance is still walking around. In fact, it’s in excellent health.

So Why?

I think psychiatrist David Bates put it plainly: our egos get in the way. When a client doesn’t meet our standards of change or engagement, one explanation is that the trained professional with all the theory and the techniques (that’s you and me) didn’t do enough, didn’t read the room, didn’t construct the safe-enough environment for the “therapy” to work, didn’t find the right way in. That’s an uncomfortable position. Especially when we’re supposed to be the expert.

Another explanation is that the client is actually resistant. That explanation is far more comfortable. It protects us. The model remains intact. It lets us leave supervision feeling like we diagnosed the problem correctly, even if the problem is the person who came for help. How often have we heard in family therapy that we “meet the parent,” we “meet the problem.” What a waste.

People don’t seek therapy primarily because they have a diagnosable, or identifiable, disorder. Nor are the diagnoses backed up by good science, chemically imbalanced brains, or genetic predispositions. In fact, most of that doesn’t matter at all, and none of those factors that third-party payers care about even predict the likelihood of a positive outcome for the client.

Prospective clients pick up the phone, often feeling stuck, hopeless, like failures, powerless to change what needs changing. What therapy offers, across every model and every modality, can be a restoration of hope and the expectation that change is possible. That is the mechanism. Not the technique. The hope.

Consider what it means to call a demoralized person resistant. They took more than an hour off work, maybe paid for public transport, and traveled to your office. They may have also sat on a waitlist for weeks just to fit in with the therapist’s crowded calendar. And then, when they get there, we come to believe they are “unmotivated” because they haven’t engaged the way we wanted them to. As if ignoring their motivation for showing up on time, sitting in your waiting room, should be disregarded. Is it possible that we (the therapist) are, in fact, resistant to them? Yikes.

If we revive ancient concepts of client resistance, we add to it - even if only in the language of our notes, our supervision, our private narrative about the case - by suggesting they’re failing at the one thing they came to do.

The label of resistance is active in the wrong direction.

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The Biggest Variable in the Room

Client strengths, resources, and motivation the person brings through the door account for roughly 40% of the variance in therapy outcomes. The therapist has absolutely zero control over those factors. Zero. The relationship accounts for around 30%. The model and technique? Not even worth this discussion. The person in front of us is doing the work. And the relationship we build with them is second only to that.

If we accept the evidence base, the concept of client resistance doesn’t just fail descriptively. Mathematically, it’s ridiculous. The variable we’re labeling as a problem, statistically speaking, is the most important variable in the room. When we pathologize a client’s way of engaging, we are pathologizing the primary driver of change. This is like calling an engine defective just because we don’t understand how it works.

I’m not picking on therapists. I’m one of them. I think our egos drive a lot of this. Concepts like treatment resistance are often employed to absolve therapists of responsibility for the failure of treatment. This is where I may be a total weirdo about this. I have found that taking the responsibility of “resistance” as a therapist is liberating. It opens doors to a million possibilities. There is one way of looking at things. What happens if I change my thinking and stop blaming the client for being disengaged? What is if start viewing client engagement as vital to the whole damn operation?

Inherited Language

Resistance is a psychoanalytic inheritance. Resistance made some coherent sense inside a model where the therapist’s job was to drag unconscious material into the light, and the patient’s job was to, eventually, stop fighting that. It’s a win-lose process.

While I’m totally agnostic to psychoanalytic or psychodynamic models, I acknowledge that at a macro level, the way “resistance” is thrown around to describe clients has become common to almost all therapy models.

Words matter. What we call something shapes how we see it and informs what we do next. If a client’s hesitation is perceived as resistance, we may push harder or disengage. We win, or the client wins; either way, there will always be one loser. How does this change our approach to being in a deep, real relationship with the person seated across from us?

And yes, disclaimer, I’m being a bit too transactional here.

On Curiosity and Collaboration

So, back to the original question: who do conceptions of client resistance really serve?

I’ll be blunt here. It makes us feel better about ourselves.

But I’m not that blunt a person, and I don't like judging therapists based on anything other than what their clients say about them, so I’m not judging anyone here. I’ve never seen any of you work, so who am I to say what is good work or bad in your office?

But the concept of resistance is not for the client. A demoralized person doesn’t benefit from a label that confirms their failure to engage. A relationship framed as a contest rarely produces the alliance that reveals what matters most. And honestly, I’m not sure it serves us either. Living with the discomfort of our own practice shortcomings is necessary for growth. Resistance helps us skip the discomfort. And in that skipping, we stop learning.

de Shazer called this “a damned nuisance” - taking responsibility for the impasse. But also a relief. Because it gives us somewhere else to look.

The client’s unique way of cooperating is not the problem. Collaboration is inevitable if we look for clues. This is where the work with “resistance” actually begins.

For Your Next Supervision Session

Think of your most “resistant” client. Start the timer. You have 90 seconds to describe what’s wrong with your relationship. It’s not the client. It’s between both of you.

The first option is to do more: drink more water, exercise more, sleep more, light a candle, take a bath, repeat the affirmation, write down what you’re grateful for, and protect your peace.

Or do less: turn off your emails, say no to too many social gatherings, don’t say yes to things you wouldn’t want to do tomorrow, slow down, and take a break from work… you’re doing too much.

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These practices are not the problem. Rest matters (I think?). Recovery matters. But when self-care becomes the default response to exhaustion produced by conditions we did not choose and often cannot escape alone, it starts functioning more like a sedative.

In my university staff lunch room, there are signs about the importance of self-care. Three years ago, I taped a picture of and I over the top of the self-care advice. Today, no one has taken it down. And I don’t even go to that campus anymore. I just heard about it on a call today.

If self-care is really so important to my employer, why does no one seem to actually care? Maybe it’s because we’re missing the mark about what self-care truly means and how it could return to being badass and awesome.

Self-Care Used to Mean Survival

Amid the civil rights struggle, the Black Panther Party built self-care into organized survival programs. That’s right, survival. They had to survive because the environment was unsupportive, traumatic, and horrible. Free breakfast initiatives, community health clinics, and education efforts were implemented. They also practiced martial arts, meditation, and yoga. These were not personal treats or things you did to simply maintain the status quo. They were collective responses to state neglect and active harm, framed as necessary resistance and community power. Audre Lorde later named the deeper stakes: caring for herself was “not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

For people pushed outside reliable systems of care, self-care meant staying alive and remaining organized enough to keep acting together. That meaning changed as the language moved into mainstream culture and professional settings.

When I joined the university system - that is, the largest institution I’ve ever been employed by - one of my directors said before I taught a class, “Make sure to stay hydrated.”

“Why?” I thought to myself.

I knew he meant well, but why does this person who isn’t close to me care about how much water I drink? I’m also the world's thirstiest person, so hydration is never a problem. Maybe he should have said, “Drink less coffee.” Do more, or do less. What was the goal of such a comment? Anything? Or was it just something that was uttered with no real value or meaning? Just the illusion of caring as I got in line and went back to work.

Don’t Change Anything

What was once tied to collective survival and political necessity is today reframed as a personal project and consumer choice. The structural sources of strain, such as dehumanizing work, shrinking public support, and widening inequality, get pushed into the background. The instruction becomes: manage your stress, set your boundaries, take your break. Let me translate this for you: “Don’t Change Anything.” The arrangements that generate the stress stay in place.

When people burn out, the common response is another workshop on resilience, a meditation app, or advice to practice gratitude. I wrote some critical paragraphs in my last book about mindfulness that drew some fair critique. I knew it would. I still do my own sort of practice that could be called mindfulness, but I also know the McDonald's version is a total appropriation of Eastern spiritual traditions dressed up cleverly as “stress reduction.”

We coach people to regulate themselves while demands keep rising and collective support keeps eroding. I don’t think that’s what the Black Panther Party had in mind. Self-care had nothing to do with sustaining nothingness. It was about making change. Structural change.

The underlying question remains unanswered: Why are there conditions that make so many of us unwell in the first place?

You Can’t Self-Care Your Way Out of Bullshit

Painfully uncooperative systems or moronic policy choices leave people depleted. At some point, the question has to shift from “How do I cope?” to “What needs to change so the conditions themselves stop grinding people down?” How can we be our best, and better? When the man kicks you in the guts, we have to figure out how to make a change and come back stronger.

Self-care, maybe worth practicing, prepares us for that shift. This might mean getting enough sleep, movement, nourishment, and genuine connection so we have the clarity and steadiness to name what is unjust and what doesn’t work, and to act on it. The capacity to stay engaged and not withdraw. This could mean speaking up, showing up for neighbors, or organizing with others who face the same pressures. Being the first to follow on someone else’s mission for change is an adventure in itself. And we learn stuff from others. I have found that this grounds us in relationships and communities rather than further isolating us. Work is already hard enough that way.

I’m not advocating for giving up rest or joy. One of my life goals is to live by the following mantra: If it’s not fun, fuck it.

Reclaiming Purpose

Rest is not an escape from the world as it is. It is what allows us to return with clearer eyes, steadier presence, and fierce determination. Joy should not be a denial of the hard parts. It is fuel for staying in the fire when change feels slow.

If the self-care practices we reach for only help us survive another week of the current setup, they are incomplete. If they help us build the energy, clarity, and relational strength to challenge the conditions making so many people stressed, pissed off, and demoralized, then self-care becomes something worth defending. Mainstream self-care has been stripped of its radical, collective roots and turned into a sedative that props up the very systems that leave us exhausted and annoyed. As long as you take care of yourself, the system can continue chugging along, no problem.

Self-care should not keep us quiet enough to maintain what causes the harm in the first place. Self-care is about being the radical change.

A Note for Therapists

If you’re a therapist or educator (or anything adjacent), you’ve most likely been told to manage your vicarious trauma, protect your boundaries, and “fill your cup” so you don’t burn out while holding space for everyone else’s pain and suffering. Most of that advice is well-intentioned. Some of it may prove useful. Too often, however, I find it treats therapists as delicate vessels in need of constant shielding rather than as people whose actual craft can get sharper and more effective over time. Not that they’re ineffective, but how engaged would you be if you knew there were steps to improve your art?

Self-care for therapists should include deliberate practice. And I mean practice. As in practicing. Like what athletes do. It’s the uncomfortable, focused work of getting better at what we do. Actively push yourself, seek better (or even effective) supervision, elicit honest - often negative - feedback, learn new skills, and go for the kind of training that makes you squirm a little. I guess I should do an EMDR training after all. Sigh.

This is another version of self-care that builds capacity instead of just preserving what we already have. It’s the difference between coping with the emotional load of the work and actually increasing our ability to carry it without collapsing or becoming stagnant. When do people stop going to the gym for their New Year’s Resolution? When they plateau. Or when they get bored. Don’t plateau.

Therapists I love engaging with aren’t those who are best at protecting their peace. They’re the ones who keep challenging themselves (and challenging me, too). I love being in relationship with them and bringing them into my community of practice because they challenge me. While I’m told to get a good night’s sleep, they keep me awake. They are curious, lifelong learners who refuse to let their skills stagnate even when the system around them is grinding everyone down. They aren’t protective of anything except change, effectiveness, and deviance.

That kind of deliberate growth is self-care. At least for me. When we get better at our craft, we become harder to take advantage of, more useful to the people we serve (those who we actually work for), and more willing to call it out when the structures we work inside are part of the problem. Self-care that only helps us survive the current setup is incomplete. Self-care that makes us more dangerous to bullshit - and more effective at the work that actually matters - is worth it.

Practice makes better.

Nearly two months ago, I started drafting the below opinion piece, South Australia May Be Pricing Future Social Workers Out of the Profession, with my dear friend and fellow social worker, Kat Sharp. As someone who engages with roughly 1,000 social work students a year, I was concerned how this new legislation (maybe with good intentions?) would impact emerging social workers. So Kat and I got typing away in May.

Like many opinion pieces, this one was not picked up by our news outlets, so I have shared it to my Substack friends based on current events in South Australia. First, I want to provide some background to what we wrote and why we’re deciding to share it today. I have put the background context in block quotes. Our opinion piece follows.

Background

In mid-June 2026, the South Australian Labor government abruptly scrapped plans for a mandatory social worker registration scheme years in the making. The scheme originated from recommendations in the coronial inquest into the 2012 death of four-year-old Chloe Valentine, who died after repeated failures by child protection services despite numerous warnings. Parliament passed the Social Workers Registration Act 2021, established the Social Workers Registration Board (SWRB), and committed $4.7 million to the reform. The Act intended to make South Australia the first Australian jurisdiction to require registration to use the protected title “social worker,” enforce professional standards, continuing professional development, and accountability, particularly in high-stakes areas like child protection, with a planned commencement around mid-2025 (later delayed).

For those reading this outside of Australia, all qualifying social work degrees are already accredited by the Australian Association of Social Workers, and most social work jobs advertise to hire only social workers with qualifying degrees from these accredited programs.

Kat and I were not convinced of the problem this was intending to solve.

Halted

In late June 2026, the government announced it would not proceed with the commencement, citing cost-of-living pressures and an unwillingness to impose new registration fees (estimated at hundreds of dollars) on more than 4,000 social workers and their families in South Australia. Officials, including Child Protection Minister Alice Rolls, argued there was no comparable interstate scheme and that a state-only fee could worsen recruitment and retention challenges in an already stretched workforce.

“What do we want?” “Registration!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”

This weekend, the decision triggered some strong backlash. The Australian Association of Social Workers called it disheartening, and social workers staged rallies outside the Minister’s office.

Protesters shouted, “What do we want?” “Registration!” “When do we want it?” “Now!”

The opposition launched a petition to reverse the “backflip,” while some unions and voices in the domestic violence sector welcomed relief from added costs and bureaucratic red tape.

The SWRB’s preparatory work on standards and professional development remains, but the mandatory registration framework itself has been abandoned for now.

What follows is our opinion piece.

South Australia May Be Pricing Future Social Workers Out of the Profession

Will Dobud & Katherine Sharp

15 June, 2026

“Life cannot be administrated by definite rules and regulations.” -Jane Addams (1910, pp. 96–97)

We understand that this legislation has passed but is not yet implemented, and we urge South Australia and the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW) to seek further clarity and meet with stakeholders before enacting the following policy.

$60,000 and up to three years imprisonment. That will be the damages for calling yourself a “social worker” if you aren’t registered with the Social Workers Registration Board of South Australia, if the Social Workers Registration Act 2021 is realised.

Even if one has completed a social work qualification already accredited by the Australian Association of Social Workers and has registered with that same professional body, currently representing over 14,000+ social workers across Australia (nearly 2,000 of which are already in South Australia), you will not legally be a social worker in South Australia until you are also registered with the Board. This is despite the AASW already offering professional membership, specialised accreditation for social workers, university accreditation, practice standards, codes of ethics, and a pathway to Better Access Mental Health bulk billing for AASW Accredited Mental Health Social Workers.

For organisations that hire Board-unregistered social workers, the penalty ceiling will be $120,000. Anyone hired as a social worker will need their job title changed or pay to become registered. Surely the most cost-effective approach for non-government organisations, already stretched for cash, is to change the position title. This has already occurred in New Zealand, where some organisations have decided to employ non-social workers in traditionally social work roles and to rename job positions.

Additionally, if this Act is commenced, a social worker travelling into South Australia would be cautious to refer to themselves as a social worker as, “If someone knowingly or recklessly uses the title social worker about another person in a way that could reasonably lead others to believe that this person is a social worker, when they are not, then an offence is committed,” according to the Board.

The AASW welcomed South Australia’s legislation, calling this “a great first step towards National Registration.” At a time when South Australia cannot recruit or retain enough social workers to meet demand in child protection, domestic violence, mental health, homelessness, and aged care, the State and Board have chosen to increase the financial burden for prospective social workers. We are left asking what benefit this has for current and emerging social workers and the communities they serve.

The SA Registration Act 2021 was passed on 9 December 2021, with amendments made in June 2025. Currently, there is no fixed commencement date for this Act, allowing time to reconsider potential impacts. If commenced, social work graduates will incur a first-time application processing fee, followed by annual registration fees, or risk further financial penalties (or imprisonment) when seeking employment in the South Australian workforce.

To complete a social work degree, students face university fees, 1,000 hours of workplace learning (often unpaid or inadequately subsidised “employment”), and the opportunity costs of sacrificing full-time work. The average cost of a social work degree ranges from $10,000–$15,000 per year for domestic students in Commonwealth Supported Places (CSP) to $25,000–$45,000+ per year for international students.

In Australia, the average age of a social work student is 29.3, and 86% are female. Anecdotally, we see social work students from diverse social and economic backgrounds. Introducing additional barriers to entry begs the question of who will be excluded from entering the profession. In New Zealand, there have been substantial declines in the number of students enrolling in social work programs since the introduction of a similar registration scheme, with high attrition rates before graduation and upon entry into the workforce.

Social work job vacancies have doubled since the COVID-19 pandemic. If this policy isn’t reconsidered, recent social work graduates will face a new “pay-to-play” scheme to obtain social work employment. Currently, most social work positions require an AASW-qualifying degree and eligibility for AASW membership. The question remains: what will this new registration achieve beyond title protection?

The Board website states, without social work registration, we are “potentially putting vulnerable people at risk.” Historically, claims of public protection far outpace the available data. One only needs to read the exhaustive Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) and the National Boards’ Court and Tribunal Outcomes Table to count the number of times professional registration did not prevent harm to patients of registered psychologists, doctors, and dentists, among other professions. In 2024/25, the Psychology Board of AHPRA reported 2.3% of Australia’s psychologists had notifications lodged against them. 68.7% of those claims were closed, and 2.5% had their registration suspended or cancelled. Registration did not prevent the harm from recurring. Professional registration may help revoke someone’s right to practice only after they have harmed a service user or breached a code of practice.

On all fronts, social workers and human service organisations already adopt risk-mitigation approaches in their work. Employment requirements already include criminal history checks and a plethora of organisational policies to protect service users and adhere to State and National guidelines. At precisely the moment when we should be improving accessibility, reducing barriers to entry into the workforce, and supporting experienced practitioners in enjoying sustainable careers, the State creates another hoop to jump through.

Peak bodies in South Australia support title protection, but cautioned that this legislation, as is, will “reduce the diversity that is necessary to appropriately meet the needs of the community” and “erode” the workforce, as there are “simply not enough qualified social workers” to support the scope presented in the Act. Like us, they have also asked what problem this registration is really hoping to fix.

A cursory search of readily available international evidence should give policymakers pause. The United Kingdom and New Zealand introduced statutory registration with almost identical promises: greater accountability, improved standards, and stronger public trust. Years later, outcomes remain remarkably thin. Multiple studies have found only limited to no empirical support that registration itself improves client outcomes, and there is “only limited empirical evidence as to whether registration does in fact lift the professional standing of social workers or protect consumers from substandard practice.”

In New Zealand, Louise Upston MP wrote in 2024 that social workers are “better respected” since the requirement of professional registration, but “recruitment and retention of social workers continue to be urgent challenges.” In 2019, Social Work England became the third national regulator of social work within seven years. Aspects of this regulation include fitness-to-practise systems, which led to bureaucratic overload and disproportionately targeted social workers. Though social workers made up 27% of the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) total register, they accounted for 51% of cases. 59% of those cases were closed after initial investigation. The HCPC reportedly spent half of their £31M annual income on these fitness-to-practice cases in 2017 alone.

Employers and non-government organisations will need to reshape their workforce decisions around an already competitive, registration-driven tendering process rather than around community need. The commencement of this Act will shift attention away from system reform and toward individual surveillance. As qualified social workers (at least for now), the irony is difficult to ignore. The AASW’s core ethical principles are respect for persons, social justice, and professional integrity, and one has to ask how policies that risk making social work less accessible, less diverse, and less connected adhere to these values.

South Australia has time to reconsider. The delayed implementation date should not be used to fine-tune the registration machinery. It should be used to ask a more fundamental question: What problem are we actually trying to solve?

If the answer is better outcomes for the vulnerable populations social workers serve every day, the research evidence does not support this Act. If the answer is potential workforce collapse, burnout, reduced diversity, and organisational disruption, then mandatory registration is the answer.

If it’s title protection we want, we must restrict it to something more specific than generalist social work practice, as we already do with the Accredited Mental Health Social Worker pathway.

Despite the social sciences’ replicability crisis, our psychotherapy universe does come with some uncomfortable, replicable truths. Let’s look at one of them.

If you wanted to find the most effective therapist for your loved one, you can feel free to ignore their qualifications, level of education, theoretical orientation, years of experience, sex, age, cultural background, caseload size, how distressed their clients are, and basically anything else. You can bypass worrying who their supervisor is, how much supervision they actually get (which also doesn’t improve client outcomes . . . why do we even bother?!), and whether (especially if in the USA) they’ve completed their pre-licensed hours. There is basically nothing we force trainee therapists to do that moves the needle on outcomes - or even appropriate behavior in the counseling room.

Still, despite years of creating new therapies, making training longer and more expensive while politicians complain that we don’t have enough professionals, and constructing new descriptions about why people don’t have genetic predispositions or chemical imbalances anymore, and they’re all traumatized, psychotherapy works, and works really well. Outcomes just haven’t improved for half a century. That’s annoying.

Maybe we’re just thinking about it the wrong way.

I remember one of my first sessions in my private practice over 14 years ago, and believing I was supposed to wear a sweater because that’s what therapists do. I had my degrees on the wall and books on the shelf because that’s also what therapists do. I put on a sweater, and in came a frustrated 17-year-old whose mother grabbed him by the ear and dragged him unwillingly into my office.

“Why the fuck am I wearing a sweater?” I thought. I was uncomfortable and surely looked like an idiot. I was playing a role. It was a performance. It just wasn’t me.

Lots of What I Learned About Therapy Was Backward

I’ve been turning over the new edition of Persuasion and Healing lately. To state my standpoint clearly from the start, the 1993 third edition of this book changed my life. It helped me reconcile a decade of clinical experience from the mid-2010s and gave my doctoral thesis significant meaning. I was finally liberated from the grasp of my psychotherapy training.

Published last year, Julia Frank and Bruce Wampold's revision of Jerome Frank’s classic reminded me of an idea that keeps pulling at me: much of the help we offer is closer to rhetoric and hermeneutics than to pure applied science. Maybe this is really why we can’t get our heads out of the box to really consider how all this shit works. After all, if AI can do it well enough, what does that really say about how we think and talk about therapy? We’ve focused our attention on all things that don’t matter.

By the way, have you booked your professional development training for the year? That’s also not going to make you a better therapist. Sorry.

Restoring Hope

The hard truth is, therapy has little to do with the right technique and more to do with persuading someone, through relationship and language, toward new meanings and restored morale. Not coercion, of course.

One of Frank’s hypotheses is that almost all of our clients arrive experiencing a sense of demoralization. No matter how hard they’ve tried to solve their problems, nothing has worked. Now they have to turn to the head shrink for help, which comes with its own stigma and the general public's oft-held view that psychotherapy is also unlikely to help. This deep sense of powerlessness, or demoralization, is countered by conversations that foster hope. A sense of belief builds that I’m in the right place and this person can help me.

That lens has changed how I think about everyday moments in therapy. During a session, the words we choose and the stories we help surface matter enormously. We all know this. Therapists speak in metaphors all the time. There’s a weight off your shoulders, you’re triggered, gaslighting, or we need to go deeper. Don’t get me started on depth.

Yes, in most of the Western world, psychotherapy is dictated by insurance schemes and third-party payers. There are suits and ties in power who tell us how to think about psychotherapy and the treatments we should provide. We don’t like it, but we all play along. For example, in Kids These Days (which I hear is a pretty cool book getting real about youth mental health), and I wrote about how studies find roughly 90% of clinicians voice real concern about the DSM and the ethics of diagnosis. 90%?! That’s a lot. But we still can’t do anything about it!

The medical model has its grasp on psychotherapy and mental health, that’s for sure. But I stand by that viewing psychotherapy through persuasion and rhetoric is a far more useful framing of psychotherapy as a cultural endeavor than believing in technique, our models, and our socially constructed diagnoses, which we treat as medical disorders despite no real evidence that this lens is useful or improves outcomes.

The Wizard Behind the Curtain

What heals across different therapy approaches is not the unique content of any technique. Change your thinking, change the world. Congratulations, you just mastered CBT. Let’s deconstruct dominant narratives that keep you internalizing your problems, and you’re living in the shadow of Michael White’s narrative therapy at that therapy’s birthplace, the Dulwich Centre.

and I once went unannounced to the Dulwich Centre a few years ago. We were asked to leave. I think we were loitering. The Dulwich Centre is about 5 minutes down the road from my home in Adelaide.

EMDR is a great example of rhetoric and persuasion. And for the record, that background story of EMDR is ridiculous. Bilateral stimulation, REM sleep, a “gift from God.” These are some of the dozens of explanations as to why and how EMDR works. The funny thing is, you can “do” EMDR without the eye movements and be just as effective. What does it really say about the acronym if the E and M…you know, 50% of that acronym, aren’t necessary.

The magic is totally in the performance, which I think makes training therapists and being the trainee quite disconcerting. You’re paying to learn something that, in the scheme of things, doesn’t matter. But the performance does matter. Meaning-making is in the eye of the believer.

The Wizard Behind the Curtain

Jerome Frank’s notion that people seeking help are often demoralized provides a more interesting framing for the endless discussion of how sick or traumatized or mentally ill your clients are. A common experience is feeling powerless to change one's life. Effective therapy persuades them otherwise. The therapist provides a relationship in which the client comes to trust the helper’s competence and care. They come to believe that the degrees on the wall are indicative of this helper’s role as a socially designated healer. Together they adopt a shared rationale, or “myth,” that makes sense of the suffering and points to a way forward. For example, if it’s your thinking that is getting the way. CBT is prescribed. If it’s your unconscious, go ahead and let someone dig around in there and find out.

The procedures - the talking, performance, imagery, or action - emotionally engage the person and offer experiences that support new meanings. The outcome is restored morale. A sense of remoralization. The client begins to view their problems as understandable (you provided the rationale) and themselves as capable of influence. This persuasive process works even when the specific methods differ widely.

This is rhetorical because it uses language, storytelling, and interpersonal influence to shift the client’s assumptive world; the beliefs through which they interpret experience. If you don’t believe me, remove all the books from your office at once and replace the couch you spent weeks choosing with a picnic table, and remove the paintings of plants growing out of rocks. That will get you really asking if your office is truly evidence-based. I actually interviewed someone who told me all about the specific color she painted her office. It was actually very cool and intentional.

Psychotherapy is hermeneutic because it involves re-interpreting the meaning of symptoms and events so they no longer feel overwhelming or meaningless. There’s the therapist’s interpretation, the client’s, and what happens in their social relationship. Frank noted these persuasive processes resemble those in religious healing, shamanism, and even placebo responses in medicine. What therapies share is a context that persuades the person that change is possible. That matters more than what sets them apart.

That is why diverse therapies produce similar results (the famous Dodo bird verdict), and outcomes don’t improve when we create new therapies. And sorry to say, it also doesn’t matter how competent you are in a specific therapy. The specific theory matters less than the persuasive elements that combat demoralization. The relationship, hope and expectancy, and opportunities for new learning and meaning-making account for most of the benefit.

Therapy, at its core, is a persuasive conversation that helps people reclaim agency and hope.

While I’m being snarky and goofy about some of these ideas (I don’t like being told what to do or who to be), you’ll persuade yourself into getting better one client at a time.

“There has been a tendency among both philosophers and psychologists to abstract an entity—call it ‘anger’, ‘love’, ‘grief ’, ‘anxiety’—and to try to study it. But there are angry people, upsetting scenes, sentimental episodes, grieving families and funerals, anxious parents pacing at midnight, and so on. There is a concrete world of contexts and activities. We reify and abstract from that concreteness at our peril.” —Harre´ (1986, p. 4)

For as long as we’ve been doing therapy, we’ve been chasing “depth.” We talk about deep work, deep emotions, deep insight. It’s as if the most meaningful change lives somewhere far below the surface of what clients say, know, and do. But what if this whole depth metaphor is leading us astray?

“Depth” has become one of those words we say without thinking. Of course, no one wants to be a superficial therapist, so we praise deep work, worry when sessions stay on what we think is the surface, and assume that real change must involve digging down into a hidden layer of emotion or meaning. For many of us, this idea of depth shapes what we think therapy is supposed to be.

But what if depth isn’t a clinical reality at all? Is this a metaphor we’ve mistaken for fact?

I had a recent back-and-forth with that inspired me to re-read the 2000 article, "Emotions in Solution-Focused Therapy: A Re‑examination," by Gale Miller and Steve de Shazer. Disclaimer, I’ve written about solution-focused previously, but I’m no purist. I don’t pray at the altar of solution-focused or any other psychotherapy model. I just wrote a book about it. But this is one of those rare papers that responded to some criticism that solution-focused therapists were too much on the surface and ignored emotions. The article challenged the very way we talk and think about emotions in the first place.

Emotions don’t float around inside people waiting to be discovered. They show up in everyday activities, in situations, in language. Context is everything.

Think about crying. A person cries at a funeral, and a person cries while chopping a strong onion. Same physical behavior, completely different meaning. The onion example highlights something we already know: context and shared language give emotion its meaning, not some inner depth we need special tools, degrees, or a specific theoretical orientation to access.

Once you see this, we can start to critically reflect on our approach to therapy and ask, seriously, why we’re digging around like an archeologist looking for something you - the therapist - think is most important. Minecraft therapy. Hey, one of my friends did that!

When I read critiques that depth is better and modern therapy is too shallow or too acronymed, I find myself asking, “Shallow compared to what?” On what scale are we measuring depth? When we say a client has “finally gone deeper,” we’re not reporting a scientific finding. This is professional judgment - an assumption (insert something here about ASS - U - ME) about which parts of the conversation we’ve decided really matter. That’s the therapist’s language game, not a neutral description of a client’s reality. Going deep doesn’t even mean good therapy. Going deep could also suck, re-traumatize, and hurt people. It can be reckless, and the line between careful and careless is always razor-thin.

If I go into a session convinced that the good stuff lives “underneath” what the person is telling me, I’m likely to treat their current stories, preferences, and efforts as less important than whatever I imagine is hidden below the surface. I start naval gazing for trauma that hasn’t been disclosed yet, core beliefs that must be driving behavior, or “deep” emotions that “need to be processed.” In that stance, I can easily miss what the person is already doing to get through the day. Isn’t that also the important stuff?

Over the years, I have really challenged how I see myself as a therapist. I take a very different posture. Instead of trying to drill down, I give space for ordinary details of how the person is living now and how they’d like things to be different. Emotions matter, but they matter as part of lived activity: what are you doing when this shows up, what tells you it’s a problem, what would you notice if things were even slightly better?

We don’t need a theory of “depth” to take emotion seriously. We can treat crying, anger, shame, or joy as things people do in recognizable situations, with recognizable purposes. What if there is no hidden layer we’re obligated to unearth? We might stop wasting people’s time. The focus moves from excavation to collaboration, from insight-as-object to change-as-activity. At least to me, that’s real experiential change.

So, where is the depth in psychotherapy, and does it actually matter? Maybe depth is just the story therapists tell themselves about what counts as serious work. It makes us feel better about ourselves and getting paid for…well, to be honest…talking to people and pretending it’s medicine. Even our health insurance companies do that!

“What kind of talking are you doing with your client?” a health insurance or third-party payer asks.

“Cognitive-behavioral talking,” the therapist responds.

“Perfect. We’ll pay you. Thanks for choosing the right talking.”

You get paid.

A more useful question might be: Is this conversation helping this person build a life that’s even a little more meaningful? If the answer is yes, I’m not sure we need to call it deep or shallow. We might just call it good enough, stop overthinking this stuff, and keep going.

In the wake of the UK’s new social media ban for under-16s, following Australia’s failing policy, where the greatest achievement appears to be making access to the news even more challenging (Australia’s civic knowledge reaches a twenty-year low), I wanted to share a tale about youth engagement from where I grew up.

Lessons from a Hard City

In the 1980s, Washington, D.C. was one of America’s most dangerous cities amid crack epidemics, political cynicism, and urban decay. By 1989, the murder rate was so high that D.C. was not only the political capital of the country, it was the murder capital of the country.

Parents were rightly intimidated by certain neighborhoods in the city, which are today almost completely gentrified, and when they said, “Come home when the streetlights come on,” it was actually for real safety. But kids were allowed to do some things, and what they built remains quite amazing. I write this to give us adults today some time to consider which ingredients were present in this soup du D.C. that made this story even possible.

Incubator for Independence

Like most teens, these youth didn’t wait for permission to build a DIY punk scene that was fiercely youth-led, ethically grounded (for the most part), and supported - only just enough - by adults who knew when to step up and when to get out of the way.

Kids in D.C., of course, faced real threats at the time. Violence, disrepair, and anger grew as the world was stacked against them. Rather than retreating or hiding in a safe space, they wanted something raw and alive. They organized all-ages shows, pressed records on independent labels like Dischord, wrote zines, and formed bands that inventively found traditional adult places to play their music.

But it was hard for kids, as it is today. Imagine a 15-year-old in the UK or Australia trying to promote their new band. How would they do it? Social media, of course. Not anymore! (Just kidding, the ban is not working, but you get the point.)

Available venues were mostly adult-focused or cheesy. Church halls were an option, as long as the kids didn’t trash the joint. Then in 1981, as the hardcore scene exploded, touring and local bands still struggled to find places to play. Located in a Presbyterian church basement near Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant, the Wilson Center stepped in as a crucial incubator.

Sacred Ground

Then came a collision of cultures. While it is legendary in punk history, the Wilson Center basement was also a vital community center for a large migration of Latino immigrants fleeing political violence in El Salvador. The venue eventually banned punk bands due to escalating violence and injuries from the mosh pit. Those damn punks. But at first, the Wilson Center was a place where the mostly white subculture of punk youth interacted with a large group of refugees fleeing political violence from El Salvador.

Luckily, as the scene grew and the kids became more determined to spread their punk ethic, some adults became willing to think outside the box about alcohol and youth-friendly music spaces. Some opened their doors on Sunday afternoons, before dark, so kids could come together and play music while the bars were closed. We needed places the kids could go to play, be creative, connect, and recreate.

At the center was the Ethiopian restaurant and disco club by night, Safari Club, a former corned beef factory turned into a legendary venue. The Safari Club would come to be known as the CBGB’s of D.C. Run-down, windowless, and in a sketchy neighborhood, the Safari Club became sacred ground for matinee hardcore shows where teens from across the spectrum, senators’ kids, activists, graffiti artists, and straight-edge kids packed in together.

What stands out isn’t just the quality of music coming out of D.C. (though Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Fugazi, Dag Nasty, and the harDCore explosion left an indelible mark). Consider how on earth this even happened in the country’s most dangerous city. Would this happen today, even in our safest cities? Some kids today aren’t allowed to walk around the block. Some adults - promoters, venue owners, scene elders - stepped in to create safe-enough containers. They booked the Safari Club, enforced basic boundaries (i.e., “Don’t trash my shit!”), and provided spaces where kids could take risks without total abandonment or overprotection.

Freedom to Become

The environment we create for youth matters more than adults complaining about what’s going on in their own heads or how much fun they’re having. Remember, it’s our favorite adult pastime: complaining about kids having fun. Thank goodness that didn’t stop the D.C. punk movement. Videogames, smartphones, comic books, the list goes on. Youth don’t thrive in sterile safety traps. We need to reconsider if the places we put our children (looking at you, school) are actually a “safe-enough” place for mastery, independence, belonging, and generosity: the Circle of Courage. All of those require some sense of risk - The R Word.

In D.C. punk, kids learned from each other and then developed some ethics through practice. Shows tried to emphasize respect, not being a racist, straight-edge choices for some, and community accountability. They cared for each other. Violence was rare enough inside to grow a youth-driven, do-it-yourself community; the real danger was outside, which made the internal culture a refuge for values.

This is a good example of positive deviance, as we wrote about in Kids These Days. Kids built a culturally diverse network, influenced global hardcore, and sustained a scene through the 90s until the Safari Club’s mysterious end in 1997. They built on their do-it-yourself ethos. They didn’t wait for others to solve the problem. That’s what positive deviance is all about. Deviating from the status quo in a positive direction. These kids just needed space and a few supportive adults. Their angst and determination took care of the rest.

As we wring our hands over youth mental health, and ban things…which is the least punk thing we could do…or wait for governments to save us…also not that punk, the D.C. punk scene offers a fun counter-narrative.

Youth need room to create culture on their terms. Adults: provide the venue, set basic guardrails against real harm, then trust the process. Like a baby learning to walk. Get out of the way, and the blueprint for development is there. Just block off the stairs. As adults, we won’t always like what it looks like, but meet them where they’re at: frustrated, angry, creative, identity forming. Watch what emerges when we stop over-managing and start co-adventuring.

Revolution Summer

In the summer of 1985, D.C. was still reeling from violence, political cynicism, but also a growing hardcore scene. These youth understood the toxicity creeping into their world, but declared a revolution. The scene needed a self-correction. I don’t want to romanticize everything too much. There were issues the scene hoped to address.

Coined by Amy Pickering, a Dischord Records worker and music archivist, “Revolution Summer” was both a call to action and a cultural reset. The early D.C. hardcore scene, powered by bands like Minor Threat and Bad Brains, had brought raw energy and straight-edge ethics. But by the mid-80s, shows were marred by violence, some skinheads, machismo, and directionless aggression. That’s not positive deviance. Instead of walking away or doubling down, the kids innovated.

They pushed music into new territory. The bands became more emotional, experimental, and melodic. Rites of Spring brought greater vulnerability to post-hardcore, giving birth to what would probably be a huge influence on emo. Embrace (Ian MacKaye’s bridge band), Dag Nasty, Beefeater, and others followed. Zines touched on subjects related to feminism (we could write a whole other article about the women of the D.C. punk scene as well), local politics, and personal reflection, and shows became benefit gigs supporting anti-apartheid protests, AIDS awareness, animal rights, and community causes.

Positive Force D.C. emerged as a lasting “activist collective that came from the 1980s D.C. punk and hardcore scene. We seek radical social change, personal growth, and youth empowerment.”

What makes Revolution Summer a powerful lesson is the blend of youth leadership and minimal adult scaffolding. Older adults connected to Dischord and the scene provided resources, such as labels, venues, and distribution, but largely trusted the process. They didn’t impose top-down programs or pathologize the anger.

In a struggling city, the D.C. punk scene was a “safe-enough” space where kids could experiment, confront problems, and build something meaningful. It became a courageous act of community building in a dangerous city. Kids faced real risks outside and internal challenges within their scene, yet they chose ethical evolution: embracing emotional honesty, linking personal expression to political action.

Youth are capable of remarkable things when given room. The D.C. scene proved that. The challenge is recreating the conditions without romanticizing the past or ignoring present realities.

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As a student or early-career psychotherapist, you’ll learn a lot about the varying trainings you get to choose from. One promises scenic psychodynamic outcomes. The CBT express line includes clear, manualized stops for challenging cognitive distortions—the cognitive-behavioral tsunami. The solution-focused train takes you briefly towards your preferred future, and there’s the DBT line with its distress tolerance, radical acceptance, TIPP, and STOP. If you want your eyes to move, you might get on the train to a tennis match, watching a ball fly from one side of the court to the other. Or, cheaper yet, just sit in your car and turn on the windshield wipers.

The point is, therapists have to believe in something.

Therapy “Brands”

After looking over the therapist's roadmap, you have found the way you’re going to work with clients. You chose one of the 1,000 therapy models, or a select few, and you start to believe it. Then, you built your website so that prospective clients can find you, and it describes your practice as eclectic, integrative, holistic, and relational. Surely the general public will be hooked. Being integrative and eclectic means you can cover everything while describing your work in little detail. Kind of like going to the holistic and evidence-based car mechanic, you know, these terms are designed to communicate trust and suggest you’re not one of those rigid practitioners trained to follow the manual. I bought my latest television because it was eclectic, not because it was 4K.

So what do clients expect?

Who knows? Who cares? We’re evidence-based…and holistic!

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But you’ll also have to describe what you’re legally allowed to do. What will the third-party payers actually reimburse your clients for? How many sessions of what type of therapy? Are you actually going to do what the reimburser requires (or lie to them)? Will the client require a diagnosis to get in the door?

I know I had a quiet run-in with the Australian Association of Social Workers around 2012 about wanting to be registered while working outdoors. During the COVID-19 pandemic, they all of a sudden changed their tune, saying that outdoor therapy was now the way to go for safety. We all saw growth in walk-and-talk therapy.

Between Branding and Belief

You might not be a purist of a specific therapy model, but you do need to say something. So, what do you actually do?

Your dentist doesn’t often tell you their “model” or “approach.” Therapists, however, have to. We have to communicate our belief in our work and how our approach is likely to help the client. As William Miller humorously, and jokingly, once said, “There is no one who will be as good at motivational interviewing as I will be…mostly because I helped develop it and really believe in it.” (I’m paraphrasing here; I couldn’t find the exact place where he said this.)

What we struggle to do in our professions is actually helping therapists understand why a certain model - out of the thousands - really spoke to them and why they believe in this approach. And then, how to really sell it to your clients.

Eventually, you have to board one of the trains to somewhere. Not because any single train guarantees arrival at the perfect destination or the perfect conceptualization of the client’s struggles. Doing nothing guarantees nothing changes. That’s called “treatment-as-usual” - a sham comparison group used in comparison trials. Show of hands, who actually describes their work as treatment-as-usual? “Relational counseling” is the placebo. Rogers’ core conditions were the core conditions. You need them before the magic happens. Again, you gotta do something.

Once aboard the CBT, DBT, ACT, SFBT, EMDR, MI, IPT, or - risking the non-acronymed trains, psychodynamic, person-centered, narrative, or psychoanalytic trains, you can look out the window, check the route against where you want to go, and decide at the next station whether to stay on or transfer. That’s the power of choosing a model. They’re all as bullshit as each other with myths that describe human suffering and associated rituals for alleviating suffering.

Therapy Cults

Though I’m suggesting that we need a conceptual model to orient our work, I abhor the cult of the therapy models. EMDR has always creeped me out. I experienced weird “bullying” in the outdoor therapy community when I (and many others) called for us to stop supporting people who were hurting children. That work was ultimately plagiarized. When I wrote a solution-focused book with , it turned out not to be as solution-focused as the congregation would have wanted. No matter how demoralized I am by the “cults” around specific approaches, I love to understand why people choose the train they want to take.

Like a religion, I don’t really care who believes what. I am, however, very passionate about understanding how they came to believe what they believe. And, I am really interested in how/if their beliefs have evolved over time. So I became a solution-focused, outdoor junky, which I’ve written about. I’m under no illusion that being outdoors or solution-focused makes me the therapist I hope to be. Wrote about that too, and got in trouble for it. The research is clear: the models don’t really matter in comparison trials, but a coherent therapy model does for the therapist and client. Talk about a paradox.

Common factors research has long shown that much of what helps clients - the therapeutic alliance, hope and expectancy, client factors, and therapist effects - cuts across specific approaches. Being cognitive-behavioral or an eye-moving technician does not make you more effective. Nor does it if you’re psychodynamic. No model owns the active ingredients. In fact, if you remove eye movements, the miracle question, or thought records from their specific therapy, you can be just as effective.

However, without some shared map of how change happens, therapy risks becoming well-intentioned but directionless. You’re sitting at Central Station having a nice conversation and going nowhere. There’s no reason or purpose for the client to align with your myth and ritual. The narrative and approach of the modality help to increase the client’s experience of hope, or lack thereof.

For a placebo to work, you need to know why you’re taking a pill and what you might expect. When the therapist has no framework to draw on, no consistent way to conceptualize the work, and crucially, no structured way to know if what they’re doing is leading towards a positive outcome, they risk going nowhere fast.

Pick a Therapy Brand and then Seek to be Disconfirmed

Pick your train - your model, your theoretical home - use client feedback to see whether this particular client, on this particular day, is moving in a helpful direction. If the outcomes plateau or deteriorate, don’t double down on ideology. You’re not doing more of the “real psychotherapy” or delivering the manual perfectly. Who cares? Get curious, adapt, or help the client transfer to another line. Or, increase the intensity or change something you can: Who, What, Where, When, and Why? What happens if you change these items based on client feedback? Research consistently shows that this feedback loop improves outcomes, reduces dropout, and helps even the most experienced and rigid clinicians improve.

Some voices warn against therapists becoming overly identified with “therapy brands,” arguing it turns genuine work into marketing or rigid adherence before truly seeing the person. There’s wisdom in the caution against dogma-style packaging of proprietary techniques as revolutionary. But dismissing models entirely throws the baby out with the bathwater. As mentioned earlier, virtually no therapy model has ever been created and then disappeared. Freud’s ideas are more than a century old. Carl Rogers rose to fame in the 1960s. For a thought experiment to show how little psychotherapy has evolved, how comfortable would you be seeing a dentist in the days of Freud? Additionally, if you watched a video (on mute) of a dentist 100 years ago versus today, could you tell the difference? Absolutely! The dentist’s chair would be much more advanced, and the patients would experience much less pain. If we watched psychotherapy 100 years ago versus today, on mute, would we see any real evolution? Maybe eye movements and tapping. Otherwise, it’s all just talking on a couch in a room with books and diplomas.

Side note: the book piece always interested me. Why does a therapist’s office need books? Just to show the client how well-read we are or to communicate that when you’re not in my office, all I’m doing is reading books…at work! It’s a performance.

So, the problem isn’t having an empirically-supported approach; it’s treating any approach as sacred or selling it as a lifestyle product detached from the client’s everyday reality. Dismissing another therapist’s approach or their marketing also lacks evidence to support that your way of doing the work is actually more effective.

The Art of Clinical Commitment Without Ideological Attachment

Allegiance to a particular modality contributes to the very factors that drive change in therapy studies: a therapist who knows what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and what tends to convey hope based on a particular model tends to do more effective work. They really believe it. When therapists don’t believe in what they’re doing, they’re not as effective.

When I started our non-profit in 2012, I was thrilled by our work. None of you could have done what I was doing. I don’t mean that to sound the way it does, but we had a team that so believed in what we were doing. The energy was on fire.

But I can’t do what you do. I bet you’re an amazing EMDR specialist… if you’re even still reading this. I bet you’re a wonderful DBT, CBT, and/or ACT clinician. If you’re psychodynamic, go ahead. I hope you’re wonderful. I believe in all the models equally, as I do with debates over which toothpaste to use or which genre of music is best. Is there such a thing as a bad taste in music?

But if you believe you know what the best and most pure psychotherapy is, I’m not so sure. The best narrative is about why you love the “brand” you love, because you have a brand.

I’m a good punk and rock and roll drummer. I’m not a great jazz drummer. I can play the djembe, and I’ve built African-style drums with youth using goat skins. I’ve played in hardcore bands and quieter bands. I’m not a double bass pedal guy, so I’m not built for your metal band. I know when a drummer, no matter their “brand,” is better than me. I don’t care if their gospel chops are off the charts or if their Bonham triplets are faster or more dynamic than mine. Their style and model are something I can learn from no matter the genre.

Ripping on therapy “brands” while pretending models aren’t important to the work is a silly approach. Yes, all the therapy models have their own levels of hype, but this whole debate requires balance. Therapy outcomes have not improved for more than 50 years, and scholars predicted this in the 1930s. Pretending there is one model everyone should learn - the real psychotherapy - or a utopia we should teach all trainee therapists, ignores the evidence and risks becoming a regressive research program that replicates the same outcomes time and time again, which we already do, all the time.

Those seeking our services don’t benefit from endless platform debates. They engage with those who can explain the journey they’re inviting them on, and who then pay close attention to whether it’s actually helping. Maybe that’s why the tarot card folks are so effective? The therapy model gives us a starting compass, but what we really need is the client feedback, preferably negative, that keeps us honest about the destination.

Back at Central Station, the answer is not to stand there forever doing nothing but talking into the air. Sure, you can critique every train while refusing to board any, but it doesn’t serve clients. Get on one. Learn it well. Believe in it. What Sheldon Kopp taught us was that you actually have no power to change your client anyway, and if you told them that, good luck… unless you’re an epic existentialist. That’s why he wrote, Kill the Buddha.

But if you believe it, that’s the magic. Just don’t believe too much. Don’t think you’re the Buddha and don’t believe in anyone who makes similar claims.

Then use rigorous, routine feedback to check if it’s the right one for the person in front of you. If not, change at the next stop. That’s not branding. That’s responsible, responsive practice.

Yes, adults were still complaining about “modern times,” which remains the adult pastime of blaming youth's ills on new technology and the so-called “speed of life.” Don’t forget, even Henry David Thoreau supposedly ran away to the woods because life in Concord, Massachusetts, was way too fast and modern:

“How little do the most wonderful inventions of modern times detain us. They insult nature. Every machine, or particular application, seems a slight outrage against universal laws.” -Thoreau

But our work…looking at us, social workers, psychologists, educators, parents, etc., wasn’t always about solving every problem from the neck up.

The Bowen Country Club

At the Joseph T. Bowen Country Club, a summer camp established by one of my superheroes, Jane Addams (the mother of professional social work) and her colleagues from Hull-House, thousands of young people from Chicago’s immigrant and working-class neighborhoods spent their summers exploring forests, swimming in lakes, sharing meals, engaging in art and dance classes, solving problems, and living alongside people whose lives looked different from their own.

The camp was intentionally built around diagnoses, treatment manuals, SMART goals, third-party reimbursement, and symptom reduction. I’m joking.

The camp provided many of the conditions that research suggests are essential for well-being: belonging, purpose, responsibility, autonomy, challenge, and meaningful relationships.

Note: Yes, eugenics was also going on. Jane Addams held complex and often contradictory views on the eugenics movement during the Progressive Era. While she championed immigration and civil rights, she also aligned with aspects of eugenics as a tool for social reform. She referred to it as “positive eugenics,” and was an honorary Vice President of the American Social Hygiene Association, which advocated for public health measures, comprehensive sex education, and the prevention of diseases. This differed from “negative eugenics,” which was focused on eliminating and removing certain communities. Addams opposed forced sterilization and the biological demonization of the poor, but viewing positive eugenics as a legitimate “new science” may have helped grant mainstream credibility to a movement that was actively weaponized to dehumanize disabled, poor, and minority populations.

The Bureaucracy of Helping

I have three degrees related to social work, and it was only during my deep dive into my doctoral research, where I leaned on American pragmatism and experiential learning, that I really began to learn about Jane Addams.

First off, I’m an outdoors guy. I’ve worked for a dozen organizations that spouted John Dewey's "learning by doing" quotes, as well as a lot of Thoreau’s complaints about modern life circa the 1860s. As a social worker, I knew who Jane Addams was and the terrible highway in Chicago named after her, but I hardly did any homework on her. We are just told that she was the first and the best. And yes, I’m telling an Americanized version of this story. Addams spent time in the UK and was inspired by the settlement houses there.

Jane Addams described her childhood as “free-ranging.” Today, Free Range Kids is an international movement. It’s all repetition. Nothing new. I still, however, believe there is something important that we reconsider when it comes to mental health and therapeutic interventions, especially with kids.

My early work experiences often involved holding on the phone with health insurance companies, begging for preauthorization at the intensive outpatient program I helped start in Maryland, about 30 minutes up the road from Washington, DC. I had to clarify what was wrong with the child or the family and describe the diagnosis. Then the insurer would tell us how many sessions we could have that month. It was boring as hell.

“This is what social workers do,” I would say to myself. I was doing the real work. Talking to insurance companies. As I reflect back, I wonder why these impactful people weren’t really described in my studies. Addams, after all, was the most famous woman in America when she died in the 1930s. That was not what I was told.

Also, why did no one tell me Addams and Dewey were “intellectual soulmates” from the time they met in 1892? And then, what about William James, Dewey’s mentor, who thought Addams’ writing about Democracy and Social Ethics was the best of their time?

So the mother of professional social work, the father of American psychology, and the guru of experiential education were all connected and testing their ideas? What would they think about today? Well, they’d probably also hate modern technology. They did have their own “kids these days effect,” like many adults. But I do wonder if their approach to intervening would be much less prohibitionist and medicalized, and far more engaging.

There’s a lesson to learn from the Bowen Country Club.

Beyond the Individual

In Kids These Days, and I argued that many of the struggles facing young people today cannot be understood solely through an individual, biomedical, psychological lens. Mental health can be a wicked problem with no one easy, quick-fix, band-aid solution.

Too often, we locate problems within young people while overlooking the social, cultural, and environmental conditions that shape their lives. Context is everything. Additionally, we don’t do positive deviance all that well. Why are some people thriving, against all the odds? We should all ask far more unscripted questions.

Rising rates of anxiety and distress are frequently treated as evidence of individual dysfunction rather than signals that something in the broader ecosystem may be out of balance . . . except school. But Addams, Dewey, and James already knew that compulsory schooling was becoming a huge problem. William James notoriously complained about the institution Harvard University was becoming. Probably in an act of karma, they still named the eyesore of William James Hall in his honor.

They all might find our current - and prioritized - medicalized approach puzzling.

Sympathetic Knowledge

Influenced by the pragmatist tradition, Addams understood human development as occurring through participation in community life. Like Dewey’s thoughts on reforming education (and yes, we’re talking about life more than a century ago), learning wasn’t something delivered solely by experts. Growth emerged through experience, democracy, experimentation, inquiry, reflection, and engagement with the world. Young people did not develop confidence by being protected from uncertainty. Gains were made from encountering challenges, navigating differences, and contributing to something larger than themselves.

They were given a reason to participate.

At the Bowen Country Club, children weren’t passive recipients of care. They were active participants in a democratic community. They learned through shared work, collective, intergenerational play, and everyday interactions. They encountered differences not as problems to manage but as opportunities to expand their understanding of others. Addams described this process as developing “sympathetic knowledge,” the kind of understanding that comes not from observing people at a distance but from living alongside them.

This ideal feels particularly relevant today.

Participation as Prevention

Across much of the Western world, young people are increasingly surrounded by systems designed to monitor, assess, diagnose, and overprotect them. has written about the dangers of self-censorship that comes from this overprotection, monitoring, and prohibitionist approaches.

While often well-intentioned (or not), these systems can unintentionally communicate a troubling message: that young people are fragile, vulnerable, and in need of constant professional or expert oversight. Everyday experiences, such as sadness, uncertainty, social discomfort, and failure, are increasingly interpreted through a diagnostic lens. To get paid, we have to play along with the health insurance game, where a diagnosis is often required just to get in the door. To turn this narrative on its head, is it entirely possible that rising rates of youth mental health disorders are due to more people accessing care that requires a diagnosis? Maybe that’s…a good thing? Or not?

As a result, young people may come to view themselves less as capable participants in life and more as collections of symptoms to be fixed. We’ve written about the limitations of self-identifying with mental health disorder language.

The irony is that in our efforts to help young people, we may sometimes undermine the very capacities we intend to cultivate. Resilience is not developed through avoidance. Confidence also doesn’t tend to emerge from constant reassurance or overprotection. Agency can be threatened when challenge is outsourced to experts.

The lesson I take from the Bowen Country Club is not that mental health services are unnecessary. Rather, care can progress beyond clinical intervention. Young people need opportunities to contribute, take responsibility, experience adventure, build competence, and form meaningful connections with others. They need communities that trust them and engage in real participation. Youth as crew, not passengers.

The Spirit of Social Work

Early settlement workers did not separate themselves from the communities they served. They lived alongside families, shared experiences, and approached social problems through inquiry and therapeutic experiments rather than long lists of assumptions. The goal was not to fix people but to strengthen the conditions that allowed communities to flourish.

Today, as headlines about youth mental health continue to grow, we might ask whether our response has become too narrowly focused on diagnosis and treatment, not focused enough on community. Have we become so preoccupied with identifying risk that we have neglected the importance of opportunity? Have we invested so heavily in therapeutic services that we have overlooked the everyday experiences that help young people develop curiosity, confidence, competence, and connection?

Bowen Country Club offers a powerful reminder that well-being is not only the absence of symptoms. It is the presence of relationships, purpose, belonging, and meaningful participation in community life.

What if our response to youth distress involved creating more places where young people could experience these things? More recreation. Better access to nearby nature. More intergenerational play. More opportunities for shared responsibility and contribution. More spaces where young people are trusted to take risks, solve problems, and shape their environments.

Jane Addams understood something that contemporary youth work and mental health practice sometimes forget: democracy is so much more than a political system. It is a way of living together that starts at home and the community built through participation, mutual responsibility, and shared experience.

If we are serious about supporting our teens, perhaps the question is not how we can provide more treatment. The question is how we can create more communities where youth feel a sense of belonging so they can take risks and really stretch themselves.

That may be one of the most important forms of care we have to offer.

And in seriousness, maybe there is something we could teach all therapists or educators about the legacy of Jane Addams and the Bowen Country Club. In Edward Bordin’s conceptualization of the therapeutic alliance, he wrote:

While I’m observing the resurgence of Freud and psychoanalytic/psychodynamic traditions, maybe we also need to make sure we don’t miss the opportunity to really meet someone where they’re at. You don’t have to stay there.

Or at least we can still dress like the people from the Bowen Country Club.

But something has changed in how we talk about these, and some really stupid policies. We called it the Safety Trap after a discussion with resiliency expert and social worker Dr. Michael Ungar for Kids These Days. Somewhere along the way, in schools, therapy rooms, and parenting-book culture, many of us stopped treating some sense of discomfort as a developmental necessity. And bear with me, I’m not going to write a “Why don’t the kids go outside?” or “Why are they so coddled?” article.

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Think about our contemporary youth mental health discourse: kids are overwhelmed, anxious, emotionally exhausted, and therefore must be protected from stress, challenge, risk (The R-word), and emotional strain at almost any cost. One school in Queensland banned headstands and cartwheels. My home county in Maryland banned baseball, football, and tag during recess.

It’s getting beyond ridiculous. So I want to talk about how we can shift our belief about comfort zones from a kind of silly idea to a really important way to conceptualize learning and development. I’m not saying I want kids to get hurt more often or to experience extreme adversity. I’m going to argue in this piece that we’re missing key developmental opportunities to reflect on lived experience and build better relationships with the young people we care for.

If You Want to Hate Yourself, Watch Yourself Work

In one of my counseling subjects, a student asked me last week if they could re-record a role-play simulation because they had video-recorded what they described as a terrible counseling session. I asked what made it so bad (in front of the class), and he gave me a laundry list of examples. Interrupting the client. Asking stupid questions. Thinking of the next question instead of actively listening, and not following the client’s lead.

Sounded like pretty bad counseling to me… which is, of course, epic! We’ve all done it.

I filmed every session (real ones) with clients who consented from 2017, and we all know what I learned. If you want to hate yourself, watch yourself work. I was definitely “out of my comfort zone,” but I learned a lot, so I loved what this student had to say. Eventually, I loved watching sessions back with my supervisor. The learning and deliberate practice that came from it became… well, comfortable.

“That’s awesome,” I said to the student. “It sounds like you have a lot to work with for your final essay (which is a critical reflection about their recorded counseling session).”

“Or, sure, you can re-record it and try to get those bits more fine-tuned. I’d also write and reflect on that experience. What was it like to do it again?” As a musician, I would never end a practice session without getting better at what I was practicing. Try and try again. Practice makes better.

This student was unintentionally telling me, through their discomfort with their recording, how engaged they were with the subject. They really cared. They wanted to get better, and they could already cite what the evidence tells us are examples of bad therapy. I thought this was a nice interaction to have in front of our students, who often seek perfection, experience evaluation apprehension, or just try to keep progressing through their challenging degree program. And just good grades, which we may hand out somewhat recklessly, and then reply with some pretty stupid policies.

If we look closely, we can see the moments of discomfort and reframe them as opportunities for deep learning. But there is another side to the comfort zone discussion that has grown to support adults complaining that everything is too safe.

You Need to Get Out of Your Comfort Zone!

In our risk society, we also go too far in the other direction, advocating that people need to be made increasingly uncomfortable, chopping firewood like our forefathers, or else they’ll all be too fragile. Over the years, I have started to think that our understanding of comfort zones is misleading. We’ve all heard the quotes.

“You can choose courage or you can choose comfort. You cannot have both.” — Brené Brown

“Life begins at the end of your comfort zone.” —Neale Donald Walsch

“Everything you want in the world is just right outside your comfort zone.” —Jennifer Aniston

There are kernels of truth in each of these quotes. Growing up or getting better at something requires making mistakes, which we must learn from. It’s about the learning. The other week, during a lecture for Outward Bound instructors from all over the world, I was asked about success/failure/defeat, and why kids need success or defeat to learn. My response offered a slightly different perspective.

I responded that it’s kind of like a baby learning to walk. They have to fall, but no one wants them to get hurt. We create a “safe enough” environment by blocking the stairs and power sockets, then sit back and let the learning process unfold. When they fall, we never call it failure or defeat. And you don’t knock or push the developing child over to make them more resilient. That would be cruel. They will experience discomfort on their own as they learn to walk. Step away from the developing child! It’s part of the whole adventure. You don’t need to make them uncomfortable while they’re engaged in deep learning.

The Pedagogy of Discomfort

Back in the late 1990s, educator Megan Boler introduced the idea of a “pedagogy of discomfort.” It remains an under-discussed framework in education today because it confronts something modern culture desperately wants to avoid: the reality that meaningful learning often feels a bit uncomfortable. That’s ok.

This does not mean our role as educators is to deliberately make people uncomfortable. It happens by design, and that’s cool. In other words, don’t be an ass. The pedagogy of discomfort actually tells us to be nicer and maybe a bit braver in our teaching and interactions with those engaged with us.

Boler argued that emotions like fear, guilt, defensiveness, and anger are not obstacles to learning; they are entry points. Discomfort exposes assumptions, which forces reflection. We don’t learn from being uncomfortable. We don’t even learn from experience. We learn from reflecting on experience.

In other words, discomfort is frequently evidence that something important might be happening. Yet modern systems increasingly interpret those same emotions as indicators that something must have gone wrong or something to protect people from. The truth is, if you can do this in a classroom in the context of a real relationship, you can facilitate deeply meaningful learning experiences.

But many teachers are overworked and often don’t have the time or mental space to construct these deep relationships. So keeping the kids in their “comfort zone” becomes the goal. Looking at you, universal social-emotional learning programs.

We’ve created a culture that routinely confuses distress with danger. Anxiety before public speaking becomes pathology. Better medicate it. In fact, it is the youngest child in any classroom that is most likely to be diagnosed with ADHD.

“Seventeen studies covering more than 14 million children – five in the USA, two in Spain and one each in Canada, Finland, Germany, Netherlands, Iceland, Israel, Norway, Sweden, Taiwan and Australia – found it was more common for the youngest children in a classroom to be diagnosed with ADHD and medicated.”

Conflict or discomfort in the classroom might feel like something bad is happening and we might get into the trap pathologizing the distress. “That student is too resistant, not ready, precontemplative, depressed, in denial, unaware.”

As says when we teach together, these are just ideas. Ideas. If you think they’re stupid ideas, the longer you sit with that stupid idea, the better you’ll be able to influence or persuade others to consider how stupid that idea really is. Otherwise, you’ll have to go full Dunning-Kruger and try to convince people that a stupid idea you know very little about is a bad one. That’s the pedagogy of discomfort. To sit with stupid.

Teachers can get stuck when scared of approaching certain topics deemed too controversial and using systems of compliance to prevent dissent. Or we don’t have the time to be in a co-relatioinship with discomfort so we see all of this as at odds to a normal aspect of human development. In trying to protect young people from discomfort, adults may unintentionally be limiting experiences of deep, meaningful learning.

Facilitated Discomfort is Not the Answer

No phones in school. Go chop wood. Kids don’t go outside anymore. The kids are so coddled they don’t go to parties anymore. Kids are so fragile they don’t even drink beer or have sex ← That’s a weird one the adults are on these days.

Where the pedagogy of discomfort helps me to think about today’s version of the kids these days effect, I see the risk of adults wanting to push kids out of their comfort zone. You don’t have to and that’s a risk we shouldn’t take.

Going through puberty in school sucks enough. Hell, school sucks enough on its own. For many, it’s boring and so disconnected from adult life it may be a giant waste of time. In the US, UK, and Australia, the further you get kids from school, like school holidays, suicide and self-harming related visits to the emergency room fall. So I don’t believe we have to make the kids feel uncomfortable, we just need to better co-adventurers.

Take how we’ve tried to reconceptualize comfort zones in our outdoor work. After all, “getting out of your comfort zone” is how many outdoor pursuits are branded.

“The thing about a ‘comfort zone’ is that it sounds, well, just too comfortable – and when you are too comfortable you lose your edge. That’s why I call it a comfort pit, because a pit is somewhere you want to get out of as fast as possible.” –Bear Grylls

A teenager navigating wet conditions on an outdoor education trip, managing group conflict at night around the campfire, using trial and error to figure out the best way to pack their backpack, or learning to tolerate uncertainty requires active participation. Learning to paddle a canoe can be a pain in the ass. There’s nothing you need to do to increase difficulty or discomfort. Some people will embrace the struggle to master a River J Stroke, others may be so disengaged they won’t care.

What these people are developing is evidence. Like I’ve written previously about my and ’s approach to being solution-focused outdoors, reflecting on experience helps us to build evidence about our problem-solving skills and counter evidence to some of the narratives we tell ourselves about who we are.

The pedagogy of discomfort isn’t really about facilitating uncomfortable experiences. and I also described how believing smartphones is making kids fragile leads to remarkably bad ideas, like boot camps. The pedagogy of discomfort, at least for me, teaches me what to do as a therapist, educator, parent, husband. Slow down, give the uncomfortable moment some space to breathe, make sure I didn’t do something wrong (likely), apologize if I did, and allow for people to talk, reflect, and think. It’s to hold space for people to wrestle with different ideas and adventures, and then to figure out what it all means.

Glorifying Suffering

Of course, I don’t don’t mean to glorify suffering or dismiss one’s struggles. There is suffering beyond what happens in classrooms. Some structural inequality, trauma, discrimination, and economic uncertainty is around us. Critics of the resilience discourse are absolutely right to caution against simplistic “just toughen up” narratives. I agree. The pedagogy of discomfort does not endorse cruelty. The goal is not less support. It’s better support. It’s to slow down a bit.

Better support means helping young people move through discomfort rather than organizing entire systems around helping them avoid it. And I’m not claiming this is how the whole Western world is set up. It’s just that we’ve McDonald’s it.

Unfortunately, many adults struggle to tolerate discomfort themselves. As parents, we can rush to rescue children from disappointment. Schools can sanitize difficult conversations at the expense of open inquiry and curiosity. Therapists can sometimes confuse validation and affirmation with therapeutic progress. We’ve become uncomfortable watching young people struggle through something, even briefly, which means we often interrupt a developmental process before it has a chance to flower.

Difficulty is an opportunity for a deeper connection and co-regulation. This provides the safety we’re longing for. Safety is in the relationship, not the curriculum or trigger warning. We don’t have to facilitate the difficulty. Life is difficult on it’s own. I can just be a little more present when we experience it (What does this mean?) and when we see others navigating the world.

Feeling anxious before public speaking may simply mean you care about performing well. Feeling uncomfortable during a challenging conversation may indicate your worldview is being stretched. Experiencing uncertainty in a new environment may be evidence that you are expanding beyond familiar territory. That’s why all therapy is…actually… “adventure” therapy. It’s all a therapeutic adventure. Who knows what’s going to happen? I only grow increasingly uncomfortable when I need to be in control of everything, which is a fictitious way to live.

This is why I love the idea of the pedagogy of discomfort. It reframes discomfort as developmental fuel. Human beings adapt all the time through exposure, reflection, and challenge. Watch kids in unstructured environments. They climb things and negotiate social tension. They take risks, mess it up, recalibrate, and try again. They learn competence experimentation and friction. This is the experiential inquiry.

Emotional Playgrounds

As adults, our role is not to eliminate big feelings. It is to create environments where big feelings can be felt. To do that, we all need secure relationships. This way kids can feel safe enough to embrace, or at least, acknowledge discomfort. Then they can learn more about it later through reflection. The reason we see universal social emotional learning programs leading to increased anxiety is we’re teaching more and more about emotions and not feeling the feelings. We’re teaching regulation to younger and younger children when we should be making space for more co-regulation. That’s the emotional playground Dr. Gordon Neufeld shared with us in Kids These Days.

When I hear some K-Mart slogans about comfort zones, I get a bit weary that this really just means no one is as brave as I am. It sounds a bit like, “Look at me, I’m out of my comfort zone.” The pedagogy of discomfort means we get to ask ourselves, “What are we learning from experience?”

That’s right. Is digital media causing fertility rates to decline? The irony of social media being used to say that social media has doomed society is not lost on me, either.

This was posited in a Financial Times article a few days ago, and when I saw the article starting to make waves I imagined ’s head exploding.

“Oh for goodness sake,” Chris tweeted.

Illustrations Make Bullshit Easier to Sell

Researchers (human beings) get to define the X- and Y-axes and set the parameters of their charts and graphs. They get to Zoom in and Zoom out. They get to crop the timeline to make sure their graphs fit the right narrative.

The good news is, someone did the Zooming out they should have done before publishing this nonsense.

So, to answer whether smartphones are to blame: no.

Unless the smartphone was invented in the early 1800s, along with the kaleidoscope.

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“A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.” -Emerson

Trigger Warning: First off, I’m sorry you have to see me in half a wet suit. I organized this adventure with a great friend, Rick Webb, who lives in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, about 90 minutes, in good traffic, west of Sydney, in the Katoomba area. My friend Unda from Latvia was visiting Australia for the first time so we needed to give Unda a good adventure. Rick brought me a wetsuit wide enough for me, but designed for an adult human, remarkably, somehow, shorter than me. Still… the video is cool, and the story of friends and work is even cooler!

Canyoning in the Blue Mountains

Doors Open

In 2024, and I offered to fill in to teach a social work intensive when there was a dearth of available academics to teach the required 35 hours for one of our intensive subjects at our campus in Port Macquarie, about 4 hours up the coast from Sydney. John and I love an adventure together. We already led all the other intensives, so it would just be another week away from home, spending time in a new place surrounded by 100 or so students.

Future surfer guy John just wanted excuses to surf, probably.

We made it work. John surfed. And we both looked pretty cool to the faculty. I think we won some internal awards or something.

When the dean (whom John and I knew was nearing retirement) sent an internal letter saying how pumped he was about our surfing adventure… ahem…teaching, I took advantage of the awful communication application that is Microsoft Teams, and I called him.

“Can John and I put on a conference on the Port campus?” I asked.

“About what?” he asked.

Uhhh…

“Experiential Practices,” I responded.

“Consider it done.”

I was then scheduled a meeting with our Faculty’s Operations Team, who were simply incredible. You’ll understand why in what follows. They just needed a name and pitch for our event.

We called it the “Experiential Practice Summit.”

Experiential Practice Summit

I won’t lie that AI didn’t help John and me wrestle with what to call this studious idea. We knew we didn’t want to be limited by social work or psychotherapy or be stuck replicating already successful outdoor and adventure therapy conferences.

We had been reading so much about American pragmatism and experiential learning that I knew I wanted Experiential to be front and center. I have attended many experiential conferences, and my understanding of the term has evolved beyond seeing experiential as synonymous with games or activity. I was interested in exploring that.

We didn’t want to say Therapy or Education. We chose Practice. Not the practice your doctor does or what happens when you visit your dentist. We wanted every workshop to provide an opportunity for any attendee to “practice” a skill. To work on something. To get better at it.

Then we got stuck on whether this was a conference, forum, or symposium. I liked symposium – the word ancient Greeks used for a drinking party that follows a banquet. We chose Summit.

You’ll never reach the summit if you’re actually practicing and reflecting on your experience. You can always improve.

The Experiential Practice Summit.

The University liked the idea. But would they like our rules?

Our Rules & Guardrails

1. Professional conferences are too expensive. This must be affordable for our students. We set the price at $115 for students. The University said, “Too expensive,” and they set the price at $95 AUD for our students. For professionals, the three-day Summit was about $165 AUD… that’s about $100 USD. Making money was never more important than providing an experience that students, graduates, and experienced practitioners could attend. We catered some food, bought so much beer, wine, and soda that we had to give it away after the event, and flew in two international speakers, and provided accommodation and travel for those who helped put the event on. And…we made the university money. Professional conferences are too expensive.

2. Make the Extra-Curricular the Curricular. This was something John said to me a few years ago. We kept testing it. If we were to throw (or wing) a conference, let’s reflect on the best parts of any conference. Yes, nothing replaces a good keynote. But I’m sorry to say, anything can replace a good-enough workshop. Nevin and I literally came up with the bones of Kids These Days while swimming in Norway between workshops at an adventure therapy conference. Here were the rules: No matter how long a keynote or workshop was, the break before the next presentation had to last at least half that time. For example, a one-hour keynote needed a 30-minute break. We know there is no real break. People are talking, hanging out, or getting some fresh air.

3. We’d have three international “keynotes” (which became four). We’d budget for flights, and they’d get accommodation. First, we chose the mother of my PhD panel, Susan Mlcek, the Australian and New Zealand 2018 Social Work Educator of the Year. Then we chose …duh. Then one of my dear friends from Latvia, a social worker, occupational therapist, and lecturer, Unda Avota…Wild Card. The University agreed, and flights were booked.

3. Community Dinner. John and I had tested community meals in our teaching with 200-300+ social work students. We budgeted for buying the ingredients and drinks. Then we just left the food out and observed what happened. People could cook if they wanted to. They could clean if they wanted to. They could do nothing if they wanted to. There was never to be an us-or-them. It was everyone’s experience to reflect on.

   

   

4. Camping on Campus. We lost this one. We wanted everyone who attended to pitch a tent and stay on campus. Or they could purchase a room through student accommodation at a higher rate than attending the Summit. We did not get camping approved. But the win we did achieve was insane.

5. Horses! We won this one! And by “we,” I mean the operations team that filled out the 900,000 legal and risk management forms. I reached out to my friends Sue Jakes and Nadine Delaney from Nature Based Therapies Australia. They were keen to bring two horses on campus and run a series of equine-assisted therapy workshops. And yes, the University said OK, thanks to the Operations Team’s incredible diligence with paperwork, legal stuff, and risk. Camping? No. Horses? Yes!

6. Student-Centered. This was most important. So many conferences are all about the organizing committee or the affiliated association. You can always tell who the cool-kids are when you’re at one of those conferences where the organizing committee holds an awards dinner to give awards to their friends on that very same organizing committee. None of that. There was no VIP. We cared more that every workshop was intentionally designed for attendees to learn or practice a “skill” they could take with them into their work.

Work

One of the coolest parts about pulling this off was that this is my job. I ran a bare-bones non-profit from 2012-2020 and built something I remain incredibly proud of. I met wonderful people along the way. In 2020, I was offered a job at the university and took it. “Time for some real adulting,” I thought.

I love research, teaching, and writing, but I love expedition work. During the intense COVID lockdowns in Australia, my wife Renée asked what I wanted for my June birthday. Honestly, I just wanted to work. Give me ten teens, ten backpacks, and sleeping bags, and we’re going on an adventure.

But I found something similar… not a replacement… at the University. When we returned to campus for our teaching intensives (four 5-day intensives a year with hundreds of social work students), I was hooked. I wasn’t super impressed with the curriculum, so I changed it.

At first, all of the students were to go to our rural Wagga Wagga campus in New South Wales. Historically, this is where we held intensives, but history is not a great reason to keep doing things. But hey, I got to hire my friends to help with the teaching. The top of my list was Kat Sharp, who shared many nights outdoors with me on expeditions, working with teens.

Now, we were camping out in a different way. Funny story, one time John let Kat and me crash at the pub hotel where he had a room. There was one double bed. No worries, Kat and I thought, we had shared tents for more than a decade. We shared the bed, each in an individual sleeping bag. When we woke up, we looked at each other and thought, “Yep. That’s where the line is. That was weird.” Kat won the hotel room, and I took my sleeping bag elsewhere. ’s recent post in defense of opposite sex friendships reminded me of that story.

I started to find a similar energy to expedition work. We were away from home, surrounded by people, and intended to engage in something meaningful. John and I invited students to swim in the river, play drums at night, cook together, hold open mic nights, and go to the pub.

As our first COVID cohort of students neared graduation a few years ago, one of them asked, “How can we keep doing this?” - referring to the time together at the intensive schools. John and I kept thinking about hosting a conference for students who wished to remain engaged. But we knew, as employees of a large institution with tons of policies and committees, that it would be nearly impossible.

But when we went to Port Macquarie to run more intensives, we saw an opportunity. Why not continue building a newer community of students in the Port? We did for a year and a half and connected with the active outdoor therapy community there as well. Then our university opened a Sydney campus, and John and I started working there, leaving the Wagga Wagga group to the staff who lived there.

I do miss expedition life, and I’m waiting for the moment I can find the work-life balance to make that world exist again for me. I still do a range of activities and work adjacent to that life, but nothing (for me) replaces an expedition.

The Guide House & the Good Old Days

I have been joking in my writing of late that adults have always complained about modern times, while longing for the “good old days” that never actually existed. Writing this in May 2026, I can tell you, I am still buzzing from the Summit we pulled off in November of last year. The “fake conference,” I like to call it.

There was something about having some of my closest friends and colleagues at an event with super-engaged students and professionals, all “in it” together. We were all “working” and learning.

That week reminded me of when I would live in houses full of people working together. The guide house. I wrote previously about West Virginia and what it was like to be taken under the wing by people who were all interested in working with youth in the outdoors. Nothing could replace it. It had some sort of collective active energy that could not be replicated in a laboratory.

Somehow, in November last year, we managed to capture that same energy. John and slept in swags in a garage. I was air-matressed on the floor with a sleeping bag. Nevin and Unda were “keynote speakers,” so contractually, they had private bedrooms of their own. slept on the balcony. People were sprinkled throughout our Airbnb last November.

That was good old days.

This video is from John’s workshop about “finding your voice.”

Some clients come with pages and pages detailing what was wrong with the child, what professionals were worried about, and everything the teen supposedly couldn’t do.

“Why am I even bothering to read this shit?” I often wondered about some young people with fat file syndrome.

Learn More About My Work Here

About a decade ago, I worked with one of the most troubling cases in South Australia. The child’s life was put entirely in the public view after a government inquiry into the child protection system, which, yes, failed terribly.

Removed from his parents at two, this child was the beneficiary of change after change in state government leadership and a lot of bad practice. For example, one worker - a qualified and licensed graduate and member of his required professional association - cut the heads off the child’s teddy bears when the child misbehaved on an Easter long weekend.

At one point, when attachment therapy was really growing in popularity, the government thought to give the then 12-year-old a wing of the hospital to live by himself in isolation. After all, if he didn’t want to attach because of his diagnosed reactive attachment disorder, then maybe dangling care and attachment like a carrot on a stick would work.

It didn’t.

All the qualifications, experts, and theoretical ideas in the world, and no good outcome. What gives?

The psychologist who oversaw this child’s government-dictated life called me to say that whatever we did wouldn’t work. This motivated my friends (educators, youth workers, and nice people) and me, and we built an amazing team around him.

I was to do the outdoor therapy stuff. I asked the then-18-year-old what he wanted to do, and he said he wanted to be like Bear Grylls. Cool!

“He won’t get in the car with you,” the psychologist said over the phone. “It will trigger his trauma.”

He, however, came to our next session with a printed Google Maps route to the hike he wanted to take. A piece of nearby nature where he had hiked with a youth worker as a pre-teen.

For months, we enjoyed many micro-adventures. He attended this alternative school every day and actually gained some school credit. He interacted with adults and fellow students. Everything was going well.

My frustration with the system and the psychologist grew.

Their favorite words were: can’ts, don’ts, and won’ts.

Wherever a possibility or “experiment” was put on the table, it was shut down.

Note: This story ended terribly. And frustratingly, with courts and more government intervention. As we left the courtroom on our last meeting, the psychologist actually said to me, “I told you this wouldn’t work.”

I was heartbroken. Not only for this young person, who my heart still aches for, but also for how we live in a world surrounded by problem talk.

Discovering “Solution-Something”

In 2008, I attended a National Association of Social Workers full-day training delivered by Matthew Selekman. At the time, my boss offered to pay for my attendance, and it blew my mind. I was a social work student in my early 20s, and everything Matthew articulated felt like he was conveying a language for how I felt about the therapy I wanted to do. He called it solution… uh… something.

I say “something” because it’s stupidly contentious in our community about what is solution-focused or solution-oriented or…who cares! What I learned from Matthew Selekman blew my mind.

That day was a definitive directional shift in my view of psychotherapy and mental health.

I made notes of a few of the assumptions he taught me:

• There is no such thing as an unmotivated client.

• Resistance is not a useful concept.

• Change is inevitable.

• Stay future-focused.

• There are always exceptions to problems.

• Get creative and use adaptable therapeutic “experiments.”

That was the essence of solution talk.

Becoming Experts in What’s Wrong

I return repeatedly to a deceptively simple distinction: problem talk tends to keep problems alive, whereas solution talk helps illuminate existing strengths, capacities, and possibilities for movement. We’re painting a picture of someone who is on the move. Working through something. They aren’t that something.

Problem talk becomes so seductive because it sounds responsible. It sounds clinical and makes us feel smarter. It gives us a sense of expert-itis. That is also true with the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations.

We ask young people to recount symptoms, incidents, setbacks, diagnoses, behavioral concerns, and failures in exquisite detail. We construct elaborate understandings of pathology. We create intervention plans, behavior charts, referral pathways, risk assessments, and monitoring systems. And then we wonder why so many young people don’t come back?

Below is a brief clip from a recent keynote I delivered in Queensland.

To be clear, this is not about denying distress. That would never be a therapist’s or caretaker’s job. Young people today are navigating genuinely complex pressures: social, academic, relational, and economic. Many classrooms and family systems are stretched thin. The struggle is real.

So why, I kept asking, do we keep focusing on what is not working, instead of doing more of what works? Or at least, working with people’s durabilities?

Our professional language has become so saturated with deficit-based narratives that we unintentionally train everyone involved to become experts in what is wrong. The conversation narrows. Possibility shrinks. Hope becomes harder to locate.

Consider 70% of young people in the United States saying that their mental health label is an important part of their identity. That feels so narrow to me, and I’m not claiming I would argue with how someone wants to identify, but I definitely want to know more.

• Are you always depressed?

• Are there times when you were able to resist the urge to self-harm?

• When was the last time you and whoever had a nice time together?

There are clues available to some of these questions.

Focusing relentlessly on problems often generates more problem talk, which in turn strengthens the problem-saturated story.

The Quiet Discipline of Curiosity

Solution talk offers a different orientation. And no, I’m not claiming that if everyone became oriented towards solutions or a hopeful future, then it would become the panacea to worsening or flatlining mental health concerns.

It is not naïve optimism. It is not “positive thinking.” And it is certainly not about handing young people another worksheet camouflaged as empowerment. Rather, it is a disciplined curiosity about moments of competence, however small or fleeting they may appear.

“When has this been even slightly more manageable?”
“What was different then?”
“How did you keep yourself going?”
“What would tell you things were moving in the right direction?”
"What’s gotten better since the last time I saw you?”

These are not inconsequential questions. They reposition young people and adults as active participants in change rather than passive recipients of intervention.

Working on What Works (WOWW)

One of the clearest examples of this within educational settings was the Working on What Works (WOWW) program, developed by Insoo Kim Berg and Lee Shilts.

What makes WOWW so compelling is that it did not operate as another deficit-focused behavior management system targeting “difficult students.” WOWW attempted to shift the classroom's ecology by systematically noticing what was already functioning well.

In the early phase, an observer enters the classroom not to identify disruption, but to notice competence, cooperation, effort, persistence, humor, attentiveness, and small acts of success. Students and teachers then receive specific, genuine feedback about what is working. No over-analysis. No moralizing. Just careful observation of effective behaviors and interactions.

Then, students and educators work together to foster and cultivate more of what works. The class collaboratively identifies goals focused on what they want more of, not less. More collaboration. Smoother transitions. More mutual support. More engagement. The emphasis remains future-oriented and relational rather than punitive and focused solely on a youth’s compliance with the school system.

Eventually, the classroom begins to track progress itself, celebrating progress and refining goals along the way. The observer becomes less and less important. Throughout the process, the central question remains consistent: how do we do more of what already works?

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The Heroism of Youth

In many ways, this mirrors what happens naturally when we give young people meaningful things to do. Like many of you, I’ve observed this in my work in the outdoors. A young person who supposedly “can’t manage conflict” successfully negotiates a disagreement over cooking duties around the campfire. A student labeled “oppositional” demonstrates remarkable leadership during a challenging hike. Instead of dissecting pathology, we become curious about competence.

“How did you pull that off?”
“What helped?”
“How do we create more opportunities for that version of you to emerge?”

The solution is often already present in fragments within the young person’s lived experience. We can always go digging for what’s wrong with people, but digging for what’s already working requires discipline, if not more effort.

I have argued that contemporary systems of care have increasingly defaulted to compliance, diagnosis, and the pathologization of human struggle and distress. Despite the growing number of interventions, labels, and services, population-level outcomes have not improved as many hoped. In some cases, we may actually be undermining what’s going really well by constantly communicating fragility.

The alternative is not less care. It is smarter care.

Care that creates conditions where young people can experience themselves as capable contributors to their own lives. The heroism of youth.

Sometimes practitioners worry that a focus on solutions somehow “ignores the problem,” or is way too surface-level to count as real psychotherapy…whatever that is. I talked about my training in solution-focused therapy in the first chapter of my dissertation, and one reviewer remarked that solution-focused work only leads to Level 1 change. To be honest, what a silly thing to say. I had never heard of Level 1, or 2, or 3 change. What is it?

And nowhere did I say it was better than anything else.

Endless problem analysis risks deepening hopelessness, framing difficulties as fixed and enduring. As a part of one’s identity. Solution talk attempts to expand possibilities by inviting people to notice exceptions, movement, and agency.

So here is the invitation.

Pay attention to language. Notice how often conversations revolve around deficits, risks, symptoms, or behavioral concerns. Ask about a moment that went slightly better. Notice effort instead of only disruption. Offer a genuine observation about competence. Create opportunities for those around you to recognize their own capacity in action.

It may feel deceptively simple.

But in my experience, young people rarely need more adults who can expertly describe their problems. What they need are adults capable of noticing strengths, nurturing possibility, and co-adventuring alongside them as they build lives in a world worth participating in.

That, to me, is the heart of solution talk.

That stuck with me.

Then I read ’s Substack today about teens and how so many adults freak out when kids have sex…and then again when they don’t have sex.

Get the Kids These Days Audiobook

Side note: The audiobook for Kids These Days was recently shortlisted for the One Voice Awards due to Tim Morgan’s narration of the book.

You’ll hear it almost anywhere adults gather: “Kids these days are anxious. Fragile. Glued to their screens. They just can’t cope.”

It’s a compelling story. It’s also an incomplete one. And not one really supported by the data.

Last night, I was having dinner with an economist I met that morning. A chance acquaintance. I hadn’t shared about my book, and he was talking about a book he wrote with his daughter. What a cool thing to do.

We started talking about a lot of the good things about today’s youth and yesterday’s youth.

“Everyone just wants to complain about kids. All the time,” he said.

“And now we’ve got medications and diagnoses to justify the kids these days effect,” I responded.

“What’s the kids these days effect?” he asked.

Another glass of wine, and we solved the world’s problems.

Take a Step Back for a Second

I’ve spent my entire [young] adult life working with teenagers and families. I knew what I wanted to do from 18-years-old. That is, I pushed my love for extended expeditions and my hobbies of paddling things, climbing things, and camping onto all of my clients. I loved working with kids in the outdoors.

And yes, that’s not for everyone.

But it gave me a different vantage point.

The Killer D’s or the Crucial C’s

We love describing people based on what called The Killer D’s: Diagnoses, Deficits, Disabilities, Disorders, Deficiencies.

I loved reading in a parenting book, I cannot remember the name of, about The Crucial C’s: Curiosity, Competence, Capability, and Connection.

Here’s the thing: we can’t medicate disconnection or curiosity. We also can’t label, diss, and gossip about an entire generation of kids and, fingers crossed, hope that they magically become the generation of our dreams.

You don’t cultivate the Crucial C’s through this great mass “fixing.”

Culture of Competence

I co-wrote in a solution-focused book with my friend about what he called a culture of competence. It’s not all that solution-focused classic of a book, but we poured our 50+ years of combined clinical work in the outdoors into a cool project.

We started with something Stephan had mentioned in many of our great conversations. What if, when working with young people, we focused less on the killer D’s and more on facilitating an environment rich with competence and curiosity? That’s called co-adventuring.

Why the “Kids These Days Effect” Leads to Bad, and Really Stupid, Ideas

After finishing that book, I was talking with Nevin in Norway in 2022 - we were also solving all the world’s problems camping during an outdoor therapy conference - about how quickly we, as adults, reach for explanations that locate the problem squarely inside of kids or some new modern technology that all of the kids are using.

There are nicer versions and nastier versions.

For example, our growing understanding of trauma teaches us to treat people with fierce dignity and to be trustworthy and predictable. Hasn’t really worked at a systems level and, like all things, became a bit culty. But hey, is the GOAT in this respect. I also really love reading and . Both are recent Substack connections. I can’t wait to connect with them more.

Then there is the anxious generation version. The notion that the kids are broken and require more adult interference, and oddly, less adult interference, but more adult interference in order to fix what’s going wrong in between their ears.

Then there is the version that helps us play along with othering people, which historically, never works out well. “My client isn’t responding to treatment because of [INSERT TOO MUCH TRAUMA] or [TOO MUCH OF ANYTHING].”

This triggered us to really take a deeper look at what’s going on.

We found research about this. It was the “kids these days effect.” It’s a bias that nudges each generation to view the next as somehow more diminished, less capable, and more seduced by the technologies of “modern life.” Whatever that is.

We remember our own generation as more resilient, more grounded, more capable than it really was. At the same time, we’re especially attuned to shortcomings in areas where we feel confident ourselves.

And get this, our parents preached the same bullshit about us. We always complain about modern times while longing for the good old days that never existed. It’s a generational amnesia.

The result is quite a distortion: the past becomes idealized, the present pathologized. Today, however, we have chemical interventions, some reckless ideas borrowed from the counseling room imposed onto children at a universal level, and social policies rolling out (see core curriculum) that have made things really challenging to the developing child.

When Consequences Matter

The problem is when we apply this lens to youth mental health, consequences do matter.

In a recent keynote address, I discussed how we’ve experimented with so much medication for mental health that, yes, it’s in the fish.

So for a century, we’ve played along with this dominant biomedical mental health narrative that the kids are more fragile, more anxious, more depressed, and we’ve subsequently medicated them. And I’m not anti-medication. I’m pro what works for who.

But at a population level, this ain’t working. How can more people be treated for something - a disease we have no biopsy for - with medicine, and the population numbers keep shocking adults so much that we enact historically ineffective, prohibitionist policies? Fun fact: when we ban phones from schools, referrals to mental health professionals increased.

You Are What You Count

In the West, this means increased access to services reimbursed for by third-party payers who more often than not require a diagnosis to gain access.

Rising reports of distress don’t automatically translate to a generation in decline. We just count this shit way too much. The numbers might actually mean something else: increased awareness, reduced stigma, and a growing willingness among young people to articulate what they’re feeling.

Aren’t those “good” things? Access to mental health services has increased significantly over the last two decades. One in four young Australians has seen a mental health provider.

From UNICEF USA:

In 2022, Congress made significant investments in mental well-being for children and youth through the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act and the Fiscal Year 2023 omnibus appropriations bill: The omnibus appropriations bill included $5.27 billion, an increase of $803.2 million, for mental health research, treatment and prevention.

More treatment —> More prevalence —> With more prevalence —>More Kids These Days Effect.

When we widen the lens, the picture becomes more balanced. Many young people today demonstrate strong capacities for caring, social awareness, and connection. Rates of certain high-risk behaviors have declined. Most youth are, in fact, navigating their worlds with a mix of struggle and resilience that looks remarkably familiar across generations.

So if the narrative of a broken generation doesn’t quite hold, where does that leave us?

Not with a culture of competence. It points us back to us adults and the world we expect youth to fit into. No wonder it’s the youngest child in the classroom who is most likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. Are we medicating immaturity?

Compliance or Competence

The “kids these days” reflex misdiagnoses the problem and shapes our response. We get pulled toward control, correction, and intervention. We become quicker to label, to treat, to manage, to interfere. Normal developmental challenges start to look like disorders. Support starts to look like control and surveillance.

This means we totally ignore child development guru Erik Erikson’s call for adults to deal with their own anxiety first.

What often gets lost is something simpler and harder to measure: connection.

As Bruce said to Nevin, you can’t medicate that.

In the spaces where young people might do well, whether that’s outdoors, in community, in school, or yes, online, there’s a consistent pattern. They’re given room to take meaningful risks. They’re invited into real contribution. They’re met by adults who are present, not just directive. Growth emerges not from carefully engineered interventions, but from lived experience. That is messy, relational, and unscripted.

In the book, we used Kurt Hahn’s old adage to treat youth as crew, not passengers.

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The bias also offers adults an easy exit. If young people are the problem, then our role is to fix them. We don’t have to examine the environments we’ve helped shape, our relationships, help connect our fragmented communities, call out the issues stemming from weapons of mass instruction, and stand up to systems that prioritize efficiency and control over connection.

Children and teens don’t exist in isolation from those systems. They are responding to them. The canary in the coalmine.

None of this minimizes the reality of youth distress. That’s been my job since 2005, and I love working with teenagers.

Anxiety, depression, and self-harm can be serious, and they require thoughtful, compassionate support. I’m glad more of that is available. But we cannot improve access without getting serious about whether we’re going to improve outcomes at the same time. More therapies have not made therapy more effective. And, training takes longer, it’s more expensive, and our accrediting bodies love maintaining the status quo and remain ultimately resistant to progressive change. So, access has improved? But access to what exactly?

More often than not, what young people need isn’t more control or more correction. It’s permission and the ability to wrestle with their environment. That essentially requires more trust. More opportunities to test themselves against the world in ways that feel meaningful and real.

The phrase “kids these days” has endured for centuries because it’s reassuring. It places distance between “us” and “them.” It suggests we would have done better.

But it also prevents clarity.

Every generation has been “these days” to someone else. And every generation has needed adults willing to stand alongside with a mix of humility and responsibility.

I love making videos. It probably stems from my skateboard-kid childhood. I made loads of skateboard videos, and even skated once with PJ Ladd…who, as far as I’m concerned, has the best single indie skateboard part on tape.

I got to skateboard with PJ Ladd one random weekend in Boston. His parts are so good. And, by “got to” … I mean I was in the vicinity of PJ Ladd observing him doing amazing things.

Some of my Fun Videos

Alaska, Vancouver Island with Nevin, Seattle, and Tokyo…and Renée with the Flu
Renée and I in Antarctica
The Maldives with the Kids

Consolidating a Year

Late last year, instead of making a video, I looked through all the photos I'd taken on my phone and put them together. I was never happy with it, as I’m a half lousy video editor. But I was thinking about the importance of capturing key moments with my friends in photos. I've put some wild-card moments below, but I hope you'll join me in celebrating our/your friends.

That process made me reflect on significant moments with important people, and then on key moments and people throughout my life.

None of these adventures would occur without my best friend and partner, Renée. Renée broke her ankle at the start of the year. A freak accident involving a rubbish bin and a curb. Surgery was required. She got the surgery, and we hit the road.

I’ve written about a select few other friends before, but I do want to shout out to a few for the sake of sharing the above silly video!

- We have lots of fun, and call it work!
Kat Sharp - You will see Kat throughout the video, but read about her below. Worst paddler ever. Watch Kat and I work here…and her paddling. Yikes.
Jaz MacDonald - I’ve written about this relationship recently. How lucky.
- Here’s to you, my friend.
- What a year! Loved going to New Zealand with you and planning so many cunning adventures!
- Having you come to Australia to hang out for a week and throw a fun conference was the best!
- At the end of the video, I put a clip from our conversation that really stuck with me and reminded me about the people I get to spend my time with. They are the people I put my phone down for…but also take pictures of? But… at 1:38 in the video, you will see that my supervisor, John, once took me to an Irish-Chinese Bistro. Figure out that cuisine.

What follows are three quick stories about important people in my life, all the result of chance encounters.

Punk Rock

In 2005, I got a job at a skateboard store in Bethesda, Maryland. Quite a nice part of town. I also became a volunteer firefighter at the Rockville and West Lanham Hills Fire Departments. I was still trying to figure out community college.

One day, this dude with Black Flag and Social Distortion tattoos walked into the skate shop. I thought he was a weirdo. He, ultimately, got a job with us. Though I didn’t care about sales numbers, he kicked all our asses. This dude could sell skate shoes.

Not kidding. He won an Xbox for his sales…not that I cared.

During one night shift at the fire station, I heard people talk about Aaron Schumaker. That was the 50-year-old I was skateboarding with in the parking lot out back of the skate shop.

We’d go to the skatepark when he had days off. He’d share paramedic stories and tales of firefighting.

Punk Rock Aaron (as I called him) was one of the most qualified paramedics in Maryland. He was an accidental mentor to so many of us at the skate store.

While I spent empty hours at the fire department skateboarding throughout the engine bays, my ears perked up every time someone brought up Punk Rock’s name.

He came to my 21st birthday to give me a skateboard.

Side note…and not joking, that skateboard store closed and was eventually the place where the Lululemon murder happened.

And here’s a picture of the time Mike Tyson walked into the shop. I could write another gratitude post about Evan and Gu (in the picture), who became lifelong friends.

Paiton and everyone’s name that rhymes with it

After high school, I knew I wanted to work in the outdoors. I also knew I wanted to “help” people…hence joining the fire department and working on the ambulance (as above). My friend Sam and I spent every free moment in West Virginia trying to gain more wilderness therapy experience.

For me, it was honestly the first time I was surrounded by men who spoke of values and being kind contributors to society.

Let me introduce you to Paiton.

Here are Paiton and Sam on my car, riding on the roof in West Virginia. We adventured all the time.

And for the sake of the joke…Paiton worked and lived with…get ready…I’m not joking.

Clayton, Gatan, and Josh…whose last name was Patan.

Don’t believe me?

This is my best friend Sam on the left after a kayak paddle with Clayton.

This is me in the middle, with Gatan on the left. We were about to go via ferrata with a group in West Virginia. On the right is one of my most impactful mentors, Brooke Brody. The year was 2008 or 2009.

I have no picture of Josh.

Sike… I found him on Facebook.

So that’s Paiton, Clayton, Gaton, and Josh (his last name rhymes with all of them)…

My friend Sam - now a clinical psychologist - and I used to go to West Virginia from DC every weekend we could. I don’t want to speak for Sam… who will also never read this… but there were some really important things I (we) learned from these male influences.

First, these guys took us under their wing. They never feared telling us we were acting like idiots. I had never experienced this from anyone in my life.

Second, we felt like “equals.” But, we weren’t. We could not wait to share our friends or partners with these guys. They always had a couch for us to sleep on. If we didn’t clean up after ourselves, we heard about it. That sounds small. But I cannot tell you what it meant to be in a real relationship. I would love to know what they thought about our 20-year-old selves. I wonder what we offered them, if anything? Because they offered us a whole lot.

Third, they often told us they felt proud of us. This was not the way the supposed mentors in my life had behaved. My father had left our family when I was 10 years old. He did a year in jail when I was in 8th grade after his 9th DUI.

I cannot stress enough what Paiton and those with rhyming names mean to me…notwithstanding our distance.

Tyson the Raccoon

In 2008-ish, Paiton moved into a townhouse in Davis, West Virginia. The previous owner had been feeding cat food to the local raccoons. In particular, a mother and baby. After a winter hibernation, the mother didn’t return. But the baby did.

Paiton named the little guy Tyson. He would walk in through a little doggy door. He was awesome. If you’re interested in the science of curiosity, observe a baby raccoon. He was the coolest. The above picture is of me with Tyson.

Kat Sharp

To start, I taught Kat everything she knows. That is not true.

But she does stink at packing her tent on a backpack (see below) and might be the worst canoe paddler I’ve ever seen. But who’s counting?

To me, Kat accidentally taught me the best lesson about being a pretend good-enough supervisor or boss. At least I hope so. I called Kat today to talk about our teaching and realized I wouldn’t get to be with Kat for another few months to test our ideas. That made me sad.

I cannot tell you all what it means to hang out (and/or work) with Kat whenever that opportunity arises!

Kat called me a decade ago, saying she wanted to come back to Australia from the US to complete her MSW internship. I was in. I didn’t know how rich the friendship that one phone call would spark.

When I met Kat, I found a lifelong friend and collaborator with an eye for calling bullshit way better than I could have ever imagined. My conversations with Kat instilled in me the idea of challenging dominant narratives. I was beginning to write about classical feminism, but I never really had the chance to wrestle with these concepts in a “contact sport” with a dear friend. Better yet, we got to debate and push back on ideas together under the stars in remote South Australia, where you can really see the Milky Way.

Kat remains a part of our family and is the best.

More than a decade ago, we held her mid-internship meeting at my dining room table, and the field placement academic asked me whether I felt Kat was appropriately dressed to be a professional social worker.

“Flannel and Vans?” I thought.

We were going mountain biking with clients the second this meeting was over. So maybe kind of appropriate, but less so for biking. Kat would probably need a helmet and knee pads.

I couldn’t wait for that meeting to be over… which is the point of all meetings: for them to end. Kat and I laughed in that person’s face.

When Kat got back to the university later for her usual tutorial, the teacher asked if Kat had a crush on me…

I get it. We’re short and dress similarly, lean politically similarly, and like similar punk bands. But come on, this person did not read the room at all, and it was quite insulting to our professional relationship.

Kat called me and said she gave it back to the teacher.

We had shared tents, cabins, and hotels. We also shared - most importantly - what I consider a wonderful collaboration. A culture of feedback.

How dare someone else - especially someone in a different position of power - impose their power on our collaboration? (And yes, I do actually understand the fears.) Kat turned it back on the academic.

I told Kat to let it go.

She didn’t. She got the apology she deserved. 101 of why I love Kat so much. And she’s a huge pain in the ass. And has boundaries… as a grandparent would. She has an early bedtime. And Kat can see structural issues I would totally miss. The best.

I wish everyone had a friend who could kick your ass while loving you and your family, as my dear friend Kat does.

When I got back from my teaching intensives, my kids asked first, “How is Kat?”

“I’m good, too,” I replied.

“Yeah, but what about Kat?” Bella, the paramedic, said. “How’s our girl?”

You will see Kat in the video above. Kat is one of my favorite partners in crime.

When COVID kicked Australia in the ass, I was hired by the university. The second I could hire staff to help me teach residencies, I picked the best person I’ve ever worked with.

My friend Kat.

I want to add that Kat is one of those friends who, if I can make laugh, I know I made a funny. Those people are the best.

To All My Friends

I love writing about my friends. It’s not only because I like to celebrate them. I learn from and consolidate what I’ve learned every single time I critically reflect on these experiences. I could write thousands of words about everyone here.

The video above is a collection of moments from 2025 that, to me, are rich. They are simply frozen moments and woven together in a weird order. The most beautiful part about it all is that every picture brings me back to each moment, and I think about it a little differently to learn a little more about that moment, that relationship, and myself.

To all my friends.

Love y’all!