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

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

And now she’s presenting at leadership conferences.

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

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

But I digress.

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

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

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

Pay attention.

Peace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who are the people that help you see differently?

Whose life challenges your assumptions?

Who embodies qualities you want to cultivate?

Who makes you more curious?

Who expands your imagination?

Who helps you remember what matters?

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

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

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

Peace.

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

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

The Sprint

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

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

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

· 15 participants maximum

· $699

Message me.

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

I know! Look at me now.

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

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

Let me explain.

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

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

I will be judged

I will be excluded

I will lose status

I will look foolish

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

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

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

What becomes possible if we risk being uncool?

Creativity expands.

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

Realness increases.

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

Learning accelerates.

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

Relationships deepen.

Embarrassment creates opportunities for connection because it reveals our humanity.

Perfection is impressive.
Imperfection is relatable.

Freedom emerges.

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

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

Peace.

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

The Sprint

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

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

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

· 15 participants maximum

· $699

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

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

1. Creativity grows through volume, not preciousness

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

2. Lower the stakes to increase the output

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

3. Attention is the real creative resource

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

4. Ritual matters more than motivation

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

5. The subconscious needs material to work with

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

6. Play is not optional

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

7. Identity can become a creative trap

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

8. Creativity is relational

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

9. Finishing matters more than fantasizing

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

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

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

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

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

Peace.

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

The Sprint

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

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

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

· 15 participants maximum

· $699

The Sprint

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

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

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

· 15 participants maximum

· $699

To Confirm Your Spot

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

· Zelle: 714-767-5862

· Venmo: @Chris-Hoff-4

· Paypal: chrishoffmft@gmail.com

What You’ll Receive Once Confirmed

· Zoom link and logistics

· Pre-work to arrive ready

· Participant workbook covering all three movements

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

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

I hope you’ll be in this one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Peace.

Come be in composition.

Not a conference.
A salon.

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

If you’ve been circling this… this is your moment.

Because once early bird is gone, it’s gone.

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

This is where therapy stops playing it safe.

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

The immediate cause is a policy change most people outside graduate education have never heard of. The federal legislation known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, signed into law in 2025, eliminates the Federal Direct Graduate PLUS Loan for all programs beginning on or after July 1, 2026. That loan program allowed graduate students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance. Its elimination alone would be damaging enough. The compounding injury, though, is how the legislation defines who counts.

The law distinguishes between “professional students” and “graduate students,” with professional students eligible for up to $50,000 per year in federal loans and graduate students capped at $20,500. Marriage and Family Therapy was not included among the 11 professions classified as offering a professional degree. Neither was Clinical Social Work. Neither was Mental Health Counseling. The AAMFT has confirmed this explicitly and is fighting the classification, but the regulatory machinery is already turning. Beginning this July, an MFT student faces a borrowing cap that covers less than half of what most California programs cost annually. There is a telling exception embedded in all of this. Doctoral programs in clinical, school, and counseling psychology were subsequently added to the professional degree list through sustained advocacy by the American Psychological Association, which lobbied for months after the bill passed. PsyD and PhD students can now borrow $50,000 annually. MA-MFT students cannot. The credential that leads most often to private practice and higher earnings got protected. The credential that leads most often to community mental health did not.

Alliant has published a document called Project Evolve that lays out their response with institutional candor I appreciate. They are modeling program and campus viability under the new loan caps and phasing out what they call “smaller branch and satellite campus sites” because those sites cannot sustain enrollment under the new financial realities. Sixty percent of their students are already online, with a projection of 75 percent by 2030. The math is not complicated. When the federal government cuts the borrowing capacity of the population most likely to attend in-person branch campuses in mid-sized cities, those campuses close.

Alliant is not the only institution contracting. Cal State Fullerton’s University Extension part-time counseling program, a CACREP-accredited evening program specifically designed for working professionals, has already closed through Spring 2028. It is worth noting that this happened before the July 1 policy takes effect. The market is reading the pressure before the policy even lands.

I have been sitting with what this actually means, because the policy story and the professional story are different stories and they both are important to tell.

The policy story is about class. Alliant built its identity around training practitioners for underserved communities, recruiting students of color, first-generation graduate students, working adults who needed the flexibility of a regional campus near where they already lived and worked. Grad PLUS was the financial instrument that made that population’s participation in graduate education possible. Its elimination does not affect equally. A student whose family can subsidize a psychology degree, or who attends a program with a robust endowment and institutional scholarship infrastructure, is insulated in ways that the Fresno student working two jobs and commuting to an evening cohort is not. The profession gets smaller and whiter and wealthier, and then continues to be baffled by why it struggles to serve diverse communities.

The professional story is about what we mean by formation. There is a conversation the field has been studiously avoiding for years, accelerated by the pandemic pivot to online education and now pushed past any reasonable deferral by this policy shift. The conversation emerging for me is whether training and formation are the same thing. I don’t think they are.

Training is the transmission of content. Systems theory translates reasonably well to a synchronous Zoom cohort. A recorded session can be submitted for written feedback. The important texts read the same in any timezone. Online programs have demonstrated that training is genuinely portable, and I don’t want to be thoughtless about the real access that portability creates for students who couldn’t otherwise participate at all.

Formation is something different. It is the process by which a person becomes a practitioner, and that process is irreducibly relational and embodied. Formation happens in the hallway after a supervision group. It happens when a supervisor watches you in real time and names something in your line of inquiry before you’ve named it yourself, in the friction of being genuinely seen and challenged by other developing clinicians in the same room. I have watched this process at CFI for over a decade. I have never seen it replicated at a distance with the same fidelity.

The move to online is not neutral. It produces a different kind of practitioner, one trained in the competencies and underexposed to the relational initiation in which those competencies become usable. I imagine the profession does not want to say this out loud because too many programs, good programs with good intentions, have already fully committed to online delivery. Naming the loss feels like an attack on colleagues. The loss is real regardless, and the students who will bear it most heavily are the ones who have no other option.

There is a deeper question buried in all of this about institutional recognition and political power. The 11 professions that made the professional degree list are the ones with longer credentialing histories with the federal government and better-resourced advocacy infrastructure in Washington. Medicine, law, dentistry, pharmacy. The healing professions that have organized longest and most effectively for their own legitimacy. The doctoral psychology outcome makes this concrete. The APA had the resources to fight and got its members protected. The AAMFT did not, and master’s-level MFT students remain under the lower cap. That is not coincidence. It is the predictable result of decades of advocacy infrastructure disparity, and it tells you exactly where relational, systems-focused mental health sits in the hierarchy of what the state values.

The mental health workforce shortage is a documented crisis. The demand for licensed clinicians in California and nationally exceeds the supply by a margin that is not a rounding error. We are not producing enough therapists. We have never produced enough therapists. The damage is not limited to training programs. A federal grant to train 30 new school counselors for high-need districts was terminated after one year instead of five, shutting down a pipeline mid-run. The policy response to the shortage, apparently, is to defund the pipeline at every point of entry. The logic is not merely backward. It is actively destructive.

I don’t have a clean resolution to offer here. Alliant is making rational institutional decisions under irrational policy conditions. The students already enrolled are protected through completion, some of CFI’s included. The students who would have enrolled next year, who would have driven to the Irvine or Fresno campus three evenings a week, who would have become therapists for the communities those campuses were built to serve, are facing something else entirely.

What I know is that the field needs to stop treating this as an administrative problem and start treating it as a political one. The borrowing cap and the exclusion of MFT from the professional degree classification are policy choices, and the closure of branch campuses serving working-class graduate students flows directly from them. The mental health workforce shortage that will deepen as a result is also a choice, made by people who either don’t understand what they are doing or don’t care.

The question the profession has to answer is whether it is going to act like that matters.

Peace.

Looks like its time for an alternative in-person education.

Not a conference.
A salon.

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

If you’ve been circling this… this is your moment.

Because once early bird is gone, it’s gone.

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

This is where therapy stops playing it safe.

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

What Bacon is saying, once you get underneath the academic apparatus, is this: techniques have no inherent power. This is not a philosophical claim. It is an empirical one, grounded in decades of outcome research that the field has systematically failed to absorb. The dodo bird conclusion, that all approaches produce roughly equivalent outcomes, has been replicated so many times and for so long that its continued non-impact on training culture is itself a kind of evidence. Psychologists keep searching for better techniques and more powerful schools of therapy because accepting the alternative would require standing at the edge of something genuinely disorienting. What Bacon calls the Abyss.

The Abyss is not a metaphor, exactly. It is Bacon pointing at what constructed reality is built against, the underlying chaos, mortality, and groundlessness that culture and professional identity exist to manage. Every school of therapy, every diagnostic category, every training framework is partly a structure for keeping the Abyss at bay. Not just for clients but for practitioners. The medical model’s confidence that there is a problem to be correctly identified and treated is as much a defense against the Abyss as it is a clinical tool. If techniques have inherent power, then the practitioner is in control. If they don’t, then you are standing with your client in the presence of something neither of you fully understands, and the only thing you have to offer is who you are. Scary!

This is where Bacon’s framework becomes interesting and difficult. If the person of the therapist is what matters, not their technique, not their theoretical orientation, then the question of how you develop as a practitioner is not a question about skills acquisition. It is a question about formation, and formation is a categorically different kind of project than training.

Bacon is honest about what doesn’t work. Personal therapy, he notes, has been extensively studied as a vehicle for practitioner development, and the research consistently fails to show that it enhances effectiveness. This is uncomfortable to say in a culture where personal therapy is treated as a semi-sacred component of clinical training. But sitting with that finding carefully rather than dismissing it points toward something important. Simple personal growth experiences, even sustained, sincere ones, do not appear to cultivate the quality of presence that actually makes the difference. If personal therapy doesn’t do it, and additional training doesn’t do it, and accumulated experience doesn’t reliably do it either, then what does?

Bacon’s answer is the one that makes the book controversial, and why it tends to travel underground. His answer is Charisma, and it’s not the charisma we might think. He uses the word in its original sense, the Greek charis, meaning grace or gift, not personality or magnetism. What cultivates therapeutic charisma is contact with the Abyss itself. Not talking about it. Not reading about it, but dancing with it. His own formation included years in a yoga ashram in the 1970s, work with Outward Bound, extended engagement with contemplative practice and the phenomenology of religion. These are not additions to clinical training. They are the primary sites of the kind of learning that training cannot provide.

Dancing with the Abyss is a specific practice Bacon outlines, though practice may be too simple a word for what he is describing. Its essence is cultivating awareness of the dialog between the Net (Indra’s net), the constructed reality that holds everything together and gives experience its shape, and the Abyss underneath. Feeling that dialog while working, rather than managing it through the application of technique. The practitioner who is dancing with the Abyss is the one who can be in genuine uncertainty with a client without fleeing into expertise or interpretation. Who knows, from their own experience, that the ground can dissolve and that what comes next is not always terrible. Who has, in Bacon’s language, already encountered the Abyss enough times to be in dialog with it rather than in flight from it.

This idea points what Shunryu Suzuki called beginner’s mind, which Bacon draws on extensively. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few. The expert has learned to see clients through established categories, diagnostic categories, theoretical categories, the category of the presenting problem, and this learning, however sophisticated, forecloses something. It forecloses the present moment. The therapist with beginner’s mind meets the person in front of them without already knowing what that person is. This sounds simple and is, in practice, one of the hardest things a clinician can do, precisely because every training program is organized around installing the expert mind that beginner’s mind requires you to hold lightly.

As an educator and a supervisor what I keep returning to is the pedagogical problem this creates. Bacon is pointing toward something real, something practitioners in this field recognize and hunger for. The CFI therapists who pass his book around are not doing so because they disagree with the dominant training model (better not!). They are doing so because they recognize something in his account that the dominant training model does not give them language for. But recognizing it and cultivating it are different things. I think Bacon is more convincing as a diagnostician than as a teacher of what comes next. He tells you what the practitioner needs to have become. He is less certain about how a supervisory relationship, a training program, a Thursday morning group supervision moves someone in that direction.

This is where the psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips arrives and helps me out. I recently picked up Phillip’s new book The Life You Want. In the chapter called “On Not Being Taught,” Phillips opens with a remark Donald Winnicott once made to his students just before a lecture: “What you get out of me, you will have to pick out of chaos.” Phillips finds this enigmatic and worth taking seriously, because it describes something categorically different from the conventional picture of teaching. It is not that Winnicott was being modest, or that he was performing humility. He was describing his actual offering. The chaos was what he had to give. What people could get out of him was what mattered, and that was different from, maybe even opposed to, what he thought he was giving them or wanted to give them.

Phillips reads this as a different picture of pedagogy altogether. Not transmission from teacher to student, but the provision of something that the student has to actively pick through. As a student you are there to pick things out, he says, which is clearly not quite the same as being there to be taught. The teacher’s job, on this account, is not to know what is being taught. It is to offer something genuinely generative, which may mean genuinely unresolved, genuinely chaotic, and to trust that the other person will find what means something to them. What gets transmitted is not information but aliveness. Not the what but the capacity to be in contact with something that matters.

Phillips brings in Jaques Lacan to make this precise. The function of language, Lacan writes, is not only to inform but to evoke. Something is called up in someone by something that is said, it may be the tone, the idiosyncratic associations, the atmosphere of the speaking, but it is not simply and solely the content of what is said that is at stake. The authority is then in the listener, not the speaker. It is a very unusual, unfamiliar kind of authority, the authority of what has been invoked and evoked in oneself, rather than of what one has been informed.

In this frame, Phillips says, listening is privileged over speaking, and a capacity to be affected is preferred to an ability to understand, remember, and repeat.

It is the clearest description I have found of what Andersen’s four ways of knowing are pointing toward, relational and bodily knowing as modes of being affected rather than modes of understanding, and it arrives from a completely different intellectual tradition. It also, quietly, overturns the entire conventional model of supervision. If the authority resides in the one who is evoked rather than the one who informs, then the supervisor’s job is not to transmit clinical wisdom. It is to offer something generative enough, honest enough, sufficiently in contact with their own chaos, that the supervisee can pick out what means something to them.

This is what I think Bacon is pointing at when he says that only the most powerful life events will be helpful, and that dancing with the Abyss is the primary formation practice. He is describing, from the practitioner’s side, the same condition Phillips is describing from the teaching relationship. The practitioner who has genuinely danced with the Abyss, who has not merely read about groundlessness but has stood in it, been dissolved by it, found that something remained, that practitioner has chaos to offer. Not confusion, not incompetence, but the particular generativity that comes from having been to the edge and returned. And what a supervisee or a trainee or a student can pick out of that chaos is what will form them, in ways that no curriculum could have planned.

What this suggests is not a new training model but a different question about what we are doing when we supervise. The conventional model asks, what does this trainee need to know and how do I transmit it? The model implied by Bacon and Phillips together asks, what do I have to offer that is alive enough, honest enough, sufficiently in contact with genuine uncertainty, that something real can be picked out of it? The supervisor as someone who provides material to dream with, which is how Phillips describes what the analyst offers at their best, rather than someone who provides conclusions to apply.

I have been running a training context for a while now and I am learning to do this. I am taking it more seriously. The pressure I run up against stands in the opposite direction. Institutions reward coherence. Supervision protocols reward clarity. Trainees, especially early in training, want to know what to do, and there is a real pull to give them that because it feels like care and because their anxiety is genuine. But meeting trainee anxiety with premature coherence is, I think, one of the primary ways we train people out of the very capacities they came to us with. We give them expert mind to manage the discomfort of not yet having it. And somewhere in that transaction, the beginner’s mind, the very thing that might have made them excellent, goes underground.

Winnicott’s line is the one I want to close on because it names something I want to try to be in supervision and increasingly believe is the only honest offering available. What you get out of me; you will have to pick out of chaos. Not because I have nothing to teach, but because the most important things cannot be taught in any other way. The chaos is the offering. Formation is learning to pick things out of it. And the work of becoming the kind of practitioner who can hold a genuine encounter, who can be present to another person in their threshold moments, who can dance with the Abyss rather than flee it, that work does not have a curriculum. It has only a series of encounters, some of them in the consulting room and some of them far outside it, from which something slowly gets picked out.

This series will continue. There is more to say.

Peace.

In the spirit of the Abyss, are you ready for an encounter?

Not a conference.
A salon.

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

If you’ve been circling this… this is your moment.

Because once early bird is gone, it’s gone.

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

This is where therapy stops playing it safe.

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

Then I met a mentor who changed the angle of everything. She was a woman of color, a faculty advisor to what was then called the Social Justice Collaborative, a campus collective where I eventually became president, and through her mentorship and the slow work of learning and unlearning that happened in that community, I ran into something my existential framework hadn’t prepared me for. I learned not everyone is equally free to make meaning. The isms, racism, sexism, heterosexism for example, are not psychological obstacles to be reframed. They are structural constraints on what a life can become. That recognition didn’t destroy my interest in meaning-making. It just complicated it in ways I couldn’t ignore. And that complication is what eventually led me to narrative therapy, which took seriously both the stories’ people tell about their lives and the social conditions that determine which stories are available to tell.

What I was responding to, though I didn’t have language for it at the time, was a relational problem. Most of the models I was being exposed to positioned me as an expert standing outside the client’s experience, analyzing it, organizing it, deciding what it meant and what should be done about it. Narrative therapy felt different the first time I encountered it. It was warm where the others were clinical. Invitational where the others were directive. It positioned me not as an expert on the client’s life but as a partner in a conversation about their life and how they wanted to live it. That fit something in me that I couldn’t quite name but recognized immediately. It captured what I loved about existentialism, about meaning making, while attending to the larger social/cultural context of peoples lives. I learned later to say, it fit my world view.

It was later, reading Craig Smith’s account of his own formation as a therapist, drawn from Tom Andersen’s framework of four ways of knowing, that I found words for what I had been responding to all along.

Andersen distinguished between four modes, rational knowing, technical knowing, relational knowing, and bodily knowing. The first two are reflective. They happen after the fact. Rational knowing is your capacity to analyze and theorize. Technical knowing is your repertoire of skills and methods. Both are genuinely useful. Neither of them is available to you in the present tense of an actual encounter with another person. That’s where the other two live. Relational knowing is the felt sense of how to be with this particular person at this particular moment, not a rule applied, but something read and responded to in real time. Bodily knowing is more quiet and earlier than that, the awareness that something significant is happening before you can say what it is or why it matters. Maybe the beginning of resonance.

Smith’s account of his own training was familiar. He describes being captured by theoretical models in graduate school, each one offering a framework that promised to tell him what clients were really saying and doing underneath the surface. For a while this felt like competence. He could perform expertise, hold ambiguous clinical moments at arm’s length with a framework to apply. What he lost in the process was harder to name. His relational skills went underground. What he was experiencing in his body about the person in front of him got filtered out as theoretically irrelevant.

I recognized this. Not because my own training was uniquely bad, it wasn’t, but because the pressures Smith is describing are structural. Graduate programs run on rational and technical knowing because those are the modes that can be taught in a classroom, assessed on an exam, and demonstrated in a practicum evaluation. You can show a supervisor that you used a particular technique correctly. You cannot easily show them that you were genuinely present with another person’s uncertainty without collapsing it prematurely. The former is legible to institutions. The latter is not, which means it tends not to get cultivated, and often gets quietly discouraged.

What this produces, at scale, is clinicians who are technically proficient and relationally guarded. People who have learned to manage the discomfort of genuine encounter by staying slightly ahead of it, filling silence before it can become meaningful, offering interpretations before the client’s meaning has fully arrived, reaching for an intervention when what the moment actually called for was presence. It is worth asking why models like EMDR and IFS have become so dominant in the current moment. I think at least part of the answer is that they provide a script. A sequence to follow, a protocol to execute, a structured path through the session that makes the discomfort of not-knowing manageable. That is not a critique of their effectiveness, it is an observation about what we reach for and why. And I guess therapists are now using AI to drive their sessions. Smith calls theoretical models a lifeline. All of these new tactics are lifelines. Something to hold onto so you don’t have to be fully in the room. That is an honest description, and it is not a personal failure. It is the predictable outcome of training people in the two modes of knowing that can be formally taught while leaving the other two largely to chance.

What makes this a threshold problem rather than just a clinical one is that it isn’t only therapists and coaches who get trained out of their most sensitive instruments. The same logic operates in most professional formation. The person who became a good lawyer, a good manager, a good strategist, learned to lead with analysis and technique because those are the modes institutions can recognize and reward. And somewhere in that process, something went underground. The part of them that knew things before they could say them. The part that registered the relational texture of a room before the meeting started. The part that noticed, in their body, when something was being left unsaid.

Hartmut Rosa would say the world goes mute in part because we have organized ourselves this way. We approach experience through frameworks designed to process it efficiently, and in doing so we gradually lose access to the modes of knowing that made genuine encounter possible in the first place. It is not that rational and technical knowing are bad. It is that when they become the only legitimate forms of knowing, the other two atrophy. And then we wonder why something feels missing.

Andersen’s framework didn’t give me new skills. It gave me permission to take seriously what I had already been noticing. The slight unease when a session felt technically correct but relationally hollow. The moments when I slowed down not because I had a clinical reason to but because something in me knew the client’s meaning hadn’t arrived yet. The sense, sometimes, that something important was happening in my body before I could name it. These were not departures from competence. They were competence of a different order, operating in a way that actually predicts whether therapy helps someone or doesn’t.

The research is unambiguous on this point. The quality of the relationship matters more than the model. We have known this long enough that it has become a kind of background noise, cited and then set aside. But if Andersen is right about the four ways of knowing, then the question the research is really asking is not which technique produces the best outcomes. It is whether the therapist, or the coach, or the consultant, or the leader, is actually available to genuine encounter. Whether enough of their relational and bodily knowing is still accessible, or whether it has been so thoroughly filtered out by professional formation that what they are offering is competent technique in a relational container they cannot fully inhabit.

Which opens a question I don’t think the field has seriously reckoned with. If the modes of knowing that matter most are relational and bodily, present-tense, available only from inside the encounter, then how do you cultivate them? Not as a value to endorse, but as an actual practice. What does formation look like that goes in that direction rather than away from it?

That is what the third piece is about. And there is one writer/therapist who has named it more honestly than anyone else I have encountered. More soon.

Peace.

Only 37 Early Bird tickets left.

Not a conference.
A salon.

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

If you’ve been circling this… this is your moment.

Because once early bird is gone, it’s gone.

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

This is where therapy stops playing it safe.

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

I notice this most when I realize I have stopped being surprised. And I mean that in a particular way, not surprised by good news, but surprised in the deeper sense. Caught off guard by something that reaches through my sleepwalking and genuinely shifts the angle of my thinking. I run a counseling center, host a podcast, write, consult, teach. There is no shortage of input. And yet somewhere in the accumulation of it, the world started feeling like a hall of mirrors. I keep encountering my own expectations looking back at me.

This is not depression, exactly. It is something more ambient than that, and in some ways more insidious because it doesn’t announce itself as a problem. You can be functionally quite successful and still be living inside it. You can be busy, productive, well-regarded, genuinely trying. And the world still goes quiet.

I have been sitting with Hartmut Rosa’s Resonance for the past few weeks, and it has done what the best books do, made something I already sort of knew suddenly legible. Rosa is a German sociologist working in the tradition of critical theory, and his argument is not complicated in the way academic arguments usually are. It is complicated in the way that true things are complicated, which is that you understand it immediately and then spend a long time figuring out what it means for how you live. That is where I am now.

His argument is that the central pathology of modern life is not unhappiness. It is not overwork or inequality or alienation in the classic Marxist sense, though he doesn’t dismiss any of that. It is that the world has gone mute. We move through it faster and faster, acquiring more, optimizing every available surface, managing risk, maximizing outcomes. And the world stops speaking to us. Not because there is nothing left to say, but because we have organized our relationship to it in a way that forecloses genuine encounter. We approach experience as something to be controlled and processed rather than as something that might address us, might reach through our arrangements and change us in ways we did not plan for.

Resonance is the name he gives to the opposite condition. Not happiness, not satisfaction, not flow in the pop-psychology sense. Resonance is the experience of genuine encounter. Of being addressed by something outside yourself, a person, a work of art, an idea, a landscape, a crisis, and finding that you are different afterward. Not adjusted. Changed. The world spoke and you were moved and you can’t quite go back to the version of yourself that existed before it spoke.

The crucial thing Rosa insists on, and the thing that has been sitting with me since I read it, is that resonance cannot be produced. This is not a minor caveat. It is the whole argument. The logic of modern life is the logic of optimization. If something is good, we should be able to get more of it by trying harder, investing more, refining our methods. Resonance is structurally unavailable to that logic. The moment you are pursuing it as an outcome, you have already foreclosed it. You can create conditions. You can cultivate a certain kind of orientation. (My Zen teacher calls it making ourselves “accident prone.”) Unfortunately you cannot manufacture genuine encounter, and the attempt to do so produces what Rosa calls echo rather than resonance, the amplified return of what you already believed, the warmth of being confirmed rather than the discomfort of being genuinely met.

I want to sit with that distinction for a moment because I think it names something many of us in the dangerous stories community already know from the inside. The difference between an experience that confirmed what we already believed about ourselves and an experience that actually reached into us and rearranged something. The retreat that felt profound but left us essentially unchanged. The relationship that felt deep but was mostly mutual recognition. The practice that became another optimization project. Echo is not nothing. It can feel very good. But it is not the thing.

The people who tend to find their way into the Dangerous Stories orbit are, in my experience, people who have started to feel the difference. Something happened, a loss, a transition, a slow accumulation of wrongness, a sudden collapse of a story they had been living inside, and the echo chamber stopped being sufficient. The world they had been moving through efficiently and successfully stopped speaking to them, or started speaking in a language they didn’t recognize, or said something they weren’t prepared to hear. And they are now somewhere between the old orientation and whatever comes next. Which is exactly the threshold the DS Community names, the old story no longer fits and the new one isn’t written yet.

Rosa would say that the muting of the world is not an accident of individual psychology. It is the predictable result of a civilization organized around acceleration and optimization. The speed alone tends to outrun our capacity for genuine encounter. When you are moving fast enough, everything reduces to information to be processed. The world becomes a set of problems to be solved rather than a conversation to be entered. And what gets lost in that reduction is exactly what most of us, if we are honest, are actually hungry for.

I don’t think the answer is to slow down in some simple sense, as though the problem were merely pace. Rosa isn’t romanticizing stillness or pre-modern life. His argument is more structural than that. What he is pointing toward is a different relationship to experience, one that holds the possibility of being addressed rather than just acquiring. One that tolerates the uncertainty of not knowing in advance what an encounter will ask of you.

What that looks like in practice, and who has been thinking carefully about how to cultivate it, is what the next two pieces will take up. But I want to name something before we get there.

The people I find most compelling, the ones whose presence in a room feels genuinely different, are not people who have achieved resonance as a permanent state. They are people who have learned to recognize the muting when it happens and to take it seriously as information. Who treat the exhaustion of a world gone quiet not as a personal failure to be managed but as a signal that something in their orientation has closed down. The capacity to notice that, and to want something different, is itself a kind of aliveness. It matters. It might even be where this begins.

Peace.

That’s the feeling. That’s what I’ve been holding.

I didn’t have language for what I was angry about. I just knew it was real, it was large, and the world kept telling me it wasn’t appropriate. Here was a band telling the world to go fuck itself, and somehow that felt like the most honest thing I had ever heard. That moment didn’t just give me music. It gave me a model.

John Cameron Mitchell, the playwright and filmmaker who gave us Hedwig and the Angry Inch, recently issued what I can only call a punk directive, “Your homework is to stop cancelling each other, find out about punk, and get laid while you’re at it.”

It landed on me big time.

I believe Mitchell isn’t being nostalgic. He’s being diagnostic. He’s pointing at something we’ve lost, or maybe something we never fully claimed, about how to build culture, make art, and fight for things that matter. But before we can take his instruction seriously, we have to remember what punk actually was. Before the mythology calcified. Before the violence arrived.

The part that gets written out of the history is that early punk, and anybody that was there would tell you, was the most inclusive room in the building. It was queer, mixed, plural, and genuinely strange. It wasn’t a unified style or a political platform. It was a collision of people who didn’t fit anywhere else finding each other in the same room. The early scene was cross-racial by necessity and by genuine affinity. It was a working-class story, a dispossessed story, and it understood that it needed everyone who had been told they didn’t belong. The fashion worked the same way. Gender was being actively played with, not just tolerated. Punk gave you permission to be an assemblage, to pull from everywhere, to refuse the stable identity that the mainstream required of you.

The violence came later. The skinheads arrived and began the work of narrowing the scene, hardening it, turning its outsider energy toward the most vulnerable rather than toward power. That’s a story as old as any movement. The radical opens a door, and then someone shows up to guard it. But the original door was wide open. Nobody checked your credentials. The bands were playing something unexpected. Your sexuality was your own business and your art was your only passport. That’s the room Mitchell is asking us to remember. And that’s the room worth rebuilding.

What I took from punk, and what I’ve carried ever since, is that coalition doesn’t get built through shared agreement on aesthetics or ideology. It gets built through a shared commitment to something real.

The Clash played reggae and collaborated across race and genre because Joe Strummer cared whether you showed up and whether you meant it, not whether you fit a category. Bad Religion were writing songs about philosophy, religion and environmental collapse, and they didn’t try to resolve the contradiction between being intellectuals and playing in a punk band. They just played the songs. X sounded like nothing else in Los Angeles because Exene Cervenka and John Doe weren’t trying to sound like anything else. Their voices didn’t resolve into prettiness. They collided and made something stranger and more honest than prettiness could have produced. None of these bands were playing by the rules of their scene, and none of them were policing each other’s methods.

That’s the lesson that has stayed with me the longest.

When punk said anyone can do this, it wasn’t lowering the bar. It was demolishing the whole structure of permission. You don’t wait to be discovered. You don’t wait for the institution to validate you. You press the seven-inch yourself, book the hall yourself, make the zine on the photocopier at the library and pass it out at the show.

When I look back at everything I’ve built, I can trace every thread back to that bedroom in 1979. California Family Institute didn’t start with a business plan or a grant. It started with a conviction that the mental health system wasn’t built for the people who needed it most, and that waiting for permission to do it differently meant waiting forever. That’s not an organizational philosophy. That’s punk logic.

An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping, the book I co-edited with my colleagues at Thick Press, is a zine that got a spine. It was built on the same premise as every photocopied manifesto passed hand to hand at a show, that knowledge belongs to the people doing the work, not just the institutions credentialing them. The actual zines came along the way too, rough-edged and self-distributed, made because something needed saying and there was no official channel that wanted to say it.

The OC Art Blog started as an act of stubbornness. Orange County’s arts scene deserved critical attention it wasn’t getting from the institutions that were supposed to provide it. So I provided it myself. The same move, the same impulse, the same refusal to wait for the right platform before opening your mouth about things that matter.

And now Dangerous Stories Studio. A salon, a conference, a laboratory for the kind of conversations that don’t fit inside a clinical hour or an academic paper. A room where therapists and artists and activists and troublemakers sit together because the problems we’re facing don’t respect professional boundaries, and neither did punk.

None of these things are the same. But they all have the same DNA. DIY isn’t a phase you grow out of. It’s a practice you deepen. The zine becomes the book becomes the institute becomes the salon, but the gesture is identical every time, something needs to exist that doesn’t exist yet, and I am not going to wait for someone else to make it.

Richard’s older brother put the needle down. I’ve been pressing play ever since.

Mitchell’s third instruction, the one about getting laid, is not a throwaway joke. It’s the most countercultural line in the directive.

Punk was physical. It was sweaty and loud and it put bodies in rooms together. The pit wasn’t only violence. It was contact. It was people finding out they could take up space, could fall and be caught, could press against something and feel it press back. We have built an activism and an art culture and a therapeutic culture that increasingly lives in our heads, in our documents and threads and critical frameworks. All of which I love and participate in. But the body doesn’t keep the score, the body keeps the revolution. You have to show up. You have to be in the room. You have to let yourself be changed by the proximity of other people who are also trying to feel something real.

I am still, in some essential sense, the thirteen-year-old in Richard’s bedroom, hearing for the first time that the feeling I’d been managing and minimizing and apologizing for was not a problem to be solved. It was a signal. It was the beginning of a map. Punk didn’t teach me to be angry. It taught me that my anger knew something, and that art made with your own hands, offered in coalition with people who disagree with you on everything except the basic commitment to telling the truth, distributed outside the channels that require you to be palatable, is how that knowledge gets into the world.

The original room was wide open. Anyone could walk through the door. Nobody asked who you slept with or what you were supposed to be.

We know how to build that room. We’ve done it before.

Stop cancelling each other. Find out about punk. The rest will follow.

Peace.

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New video up at the CFI Patreon Page.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that passes for wisdom in our time. It shows up in the knowing smirk at anyone who seems too earnest, in the reflex to deflate any genuine enthusiasm before it can be disappointed, in the cultural habit of treating sincerity as a form of naivety and commitment as something only the unaware would attempt. We call this sophistication. We call it realism. Tillich would have called it something closer to spiritual cowardice.

In The Courage to Be, published in 1952, Tillich set out to name what he saw as the defining psychological and spiritual crisis of the modern West. His diagnosis was not depression, not alienation in the Marxist sense, not even the death of God as a simple cultural fact. His diagnosis was the failure of courage in the face of what he called ontological anxiety, the anxiety that belongs not to individuals with particular pathologies but to every human being who is awake enough to recognize the fragility of their own existence. Tillich argued that this anxiety cannot be cured, cannot be reasoned away, and cannot be managed into submission. It can only be met with courage or fled from in increasingly elaborate ways. Modern cynicism, he suggested, is one of the most seductive of those flights.

To understand why Tillich’s account of cynicism carries such weight, it helps to understand where it differs from its ancient predecessor. The Cynics of ancient Greece, figures like Diogenes of Sinope, were not nihilists. They were, in their strange and often theatrical way, idealists. Their rejection of conventional life, of wealth, reputation, status, and social performance, was not a refusal of value but an insistence on a different kind of value. The Cynic’s mockery of the powerful was in service of a claim that these things you have organized your life around are false, and I will demonstrate that by living without them. The ancient Cynic had the courage to reject false meaning in the name of something truer. Their bite had direction. It was aimed at pretension in defense of something real.

Modern cynicism has lost that direction entirely. What Tillich observed, and what Peter Sloterdijk later sharpened into one of the more useful philosophical distinctions of the twentieth century, is that the contemporary cynic is not affirming anything. The modern cynic does not reject false values in the name of real ones. They reject the entire project of valuing as such. This is what Sloterdijk meant when he described modern cynicism as enlightened false consciousness, the cynic knows the game is rigged, and plays along anyway, having concluded that caring too much about anything is a form of gullibility. The sophistication of this position is precisely what makes it so dangerous. It feels like clear-eyed realism. It presents itself as having done the hard intellectual work of seeing through illusion. But what it has actually accomplished is a preemptive strike against the self.

Here is the process Tillich helps us see. Ontological anxiety, the anxiety of meaninglessness and emptiness, is among the most unbearable forms of human suffering. It is not the ordinary anxiety of a difficult situation that might resolve. It is the anxiety of wondering whether anything, including one’s own existence, has genuine weight or significance. Every human being encounters this at some point. The question is what we do with it. Tillich describes the common response as a narrowing, the person collapses the size of their world so that there is less surface area for the anxiety to touch (been there done that). They invest less, risk less, feel less, in the hope that smaller exposure means smaller vulnerability.

Cynicism is this narrowing dressed in intellectual clothing. It is the managed shrinkage of the soul given the vocabulary of critique. By preemptively mocking meaning, the cynic ensures that the loss of meaning cannot devastate them. By treating all genuine commitment as naive, they guarantee they will never have to experience genuine disillusionment. This is not freedom. It is self-administered anesthesia. And like all anesthesia, it numbs indiscriminately, taking with it not only the pain of potential loss but the experience of being genuinely alive.

What makes this a loop rather than simply a condition is that the cynical stance actively reproduces the conditions that justify it. If you maintain ironic distance from everything that might matter, nothing meaningful happens in your life. The absence of meaningful experience then serves as evidence that meaning was always a con, which deepens the ironic distance, which ensures that nothing meaningful will happen next, and so on. The cynic is not simply wrong about the world. They are constructing a world that confirms their wrongness, and calling the confirmation proof. Mark Fisher understood this when he described reflexive impotence as a defining feature of late capitalist culture, the widespread feeling that things are broken, combined with the equally widespread feeling that nothing can be done, which together produce a paralysis that makes nothing being done feel inevitable. Tillich’s genius is to locate this dynamic not primarily in political economy but in the structure of human experience itself. The loop is not just cultural. It is existential.

This is where the therapeutic stakes come into focus. The client who has embraced cynicism is among the most difficult presentations in clinical work, not because they are resistant, but because their stories are intellectually coherent and often partially accurate. They are frequently right about the specific objects of their cynicism. Institutions do fail. People do disappoint. Idealism has historically been weaponized. The therapist who simply argues for optimism in the face of genuine cynicism is going to lose, and probably should. The problem is not that the cynical client is wrong. The problem is that they have built an epistemology designed to make being right feel safe, and being moved feel impossible.

What Tillich opens up, and what connects his project to the best of narrative therapy, is a different question entirely. He makes a quiet but profound observation that you cannot be anxious about meaninglessness unless meaning already matters to you. The dread of emptiness presupposes a knowledge of fullness. The fear that nothing matters is only coherent if something matters enough to generate that fear. This is the hidden structure inside every cynical position, that it’s not actually the absence of care, but the presence of care that has been forced underground by repeated injury. The cynicism is a scar tissue response. It is trying to protect something that has been hurt too many times.

In narrative therapy, this as the absent but implicit, the idea that within every problem story, there is a counter-story that has been suppressed but not destroyed. The very existence of the problem presupposes values and commitments that the problem is experienced as violating. A person cannot be cynical about love without having wanted love. They cannot be cynical about justice without having believed in it enough to be betrayed. The cynicism points at the shape of something that once mattered and still does, however buried under the scar tissue it may be.

This shifts the therapeutic work considerably. The task is not to argue the cynic out of their cynicism, and it is certainly not to treat the cynicism as a symptom to be managed. The task is to listen into it. What does this particular cynicism protect? What got hurt badly enough that this level of defense seemed necessary? What shape does the absent commitment take, the one that is visible only in the outline left by its apparent abandonment? When a client says nothing means anything, the narrative therapist’s ear tilts toward the implicit positive, nothing means anything to what? When a client says everyone eventually leaves, the question underneath is what did connection once mean to you, and what would it have to look like to feel safe again?

Tillich would say that underneath the narrowed world of the cynic, there is still a person that wants to be. The impulse toward existence, toward meaning, toward connection, does not dissolve. It goes quiet, or it goes underground, or it expresses itself in the backwards grammar of bitterness and preemptive detachment. But the courage to be is still in there, waiting for the conditions under which it might feel less suicidal to show itself.

The therapeutic relationship, at its best, can be one of those conditions. Not because the therapist provides answers to the question of meaning. Tillich was clear that no external authority can do that work for anyone. But because the relationship itself enacts something. It demonstrates, through sustained and non-collusive presence, that genuine engagement is possible without necessarily ending in devastation. It slows down the loop long enough for the person to notice what is driving it. It asks, with real curiosity and without agenda, what the anxiety of meaninglessness is actually pointing toward.

This is what Tillich meant by the courage to be, not the absence of anxiety, but the willingness to keep affirming one’s own existence in the face of it. Not the achievement of certainty, but the practice of showing up anyway. For the cynic, this courage has to begin somewhere small. It usually begins with the willingness to notice that the cynicism is itself a form of caring, that you cannot protect yourself from the loss of something you have never wanted. That recognition, quiet as it is, is already a turning. It is already the beginning of following the anxiety all the way back to the self that generated it.

Tillich wrote The Courage to Be in the wake of two world wars and the full emergence of what he called the anxiety of meaninglessness as the dominant spiritual condition of the twentieth century. He was writing about the cultural moment he was in. He could not have anticipated how deeply that moment would calcify, how thoroughly the ironic distance would become not just a personal defense but the ambient atmosphere of an entire era. But his diagnosis is, if anything, sharper now. The loop has been institutionalized. The cynicism has been productized. We are swimming in a culture that has made a virtue of not caring too much, and then wondering why nothing feels like it matters.

The counter to this is not enthusiasm, not naivety, not a return to any uncomplicated faith. The counter, as Tillich understood it, is a very specific and costly form of courage, the willingness to keep affirming meaning in full knowledge of its fragility, to keep caring in full knowledge that caring makes you vulnerable, to keep showing up to your own life even when there is no guarantee it will hold. That is the courage to be. And for those of us who have spent any real time in the cynic’s posture, myself included, that is not a small thing to ask. It is probably the hardest thing there is.

Peace.

Something Different Is Opening.

Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon isn’t about learning more techniques.
It’s about questioning the ones we’ve been given.

It’s about stepping out of the familiar language of therapy and into something more honest, more uncertain, more alive.

Early Bird Tickets are now available.

Only 39 remain.

At some point, you either stay where it’s safe…
or you step into the conversation.

The first blind spot: more male therapists doesn’t fix ideology.

The assumption embedded in this argument is that a male therapist, by virtue of being male, will naturally offer men something different, something less pathologizing, more affirming, more attuned to the particular texture of masculine suffering. Maybe. But there is a rather large elephant in the room here, many male therapists have fully internalized the same patriarchal frameworks that are making men miserable in the first place.

The therapy room is not a neutral space. It is a culturally constructed one, and the dominant models of psychological health, what counts as growth, what counts as dysfunction, what the “work” looks like, were not developed in a vacuum. They carry assumptions. About emotionality and its value. About dependency and its shame. About what a self is and how it should be organized.

R.W. Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity helps name what’s happening here. In Masculinities (1995), Connell described the culturally dominant form of manhood not as a fixed trait but as a relational achievement, one that requires the ongoing suppression of vulnerability, tenderness, and dependency in order to maintain its legitimacy. The crucial point is that this script doesn’t dissolve in a graduate program. It gets laundered through clinical language. When male therapists train within dominant psychological frameworks without interrogating them, they don’t bring liberation into the room. They bring the same house rules with a different face, now dressed in attachment theory and DSM codes, etc.

I’ve sat in and done enough clinical trainings to know that a man with an LMFT after his name can be just as committed to emotional stoicism, just as uncomfortable with relational vulnerability, just as quick to reframe men’s pain as a problem of individual pathology rather than structural harm, as anyone else. Representation without critical consciousness is just demographic reshuffling.

The second blind spot: men don’t actually want male therapists.

I want to start with a hunch. I can’t prove it yet, and I’m not sure the research exists to prove it, but I’ve held it long enough that it feels worth naming out loud. My hunch is this, when a man is genuinely seeking change, when something in him is looking for a way out of the trap rather than a more comfortable position inside it, he is less likely to seek a male therapist. Not more.

Here’s the logic underneath it. Patriarchy is not primarily about how men appear before women. It is about how men appear before other men. The performance of masculinity, its maintenance, its policing, its quiet daily enforcement, happens most urgently in male spaces. The locker room. The work meeting. The group chat. The sidewalk. Sure, women are witnesses to masculine performance, but men are its primary audience and its primary judges. Which means that for a man who actually wants to drop the performance, who is exhausted by it, who is starting to sense that something important has been lost to it, another man in the room is not necessarily a relief. He is the audience the performance was always for.

If n=1 counts for anything, that has been my experience. And it has been the experience of enough men I’ve spoken with and sat with professionally that I’ve stopped treating it as coincidence.

I hold this as a hunch, not a finding. But it orients what follows..

Because what the article doesn’t say, probably because it complicates the clean narrative, when researchers actually study men’s preferences, the picture is far more ambiguous than the “guys need other guys” framing would suggest. In a study of more than 2,000 men published in Counselling Psychology Quarterly, the majority, 60 percent, had no gender preference at all, of those who did, preference was split roughly evenly between male and female therapists. A significant portion actively preferred a woman.

But before we treat that data as the answer, we need to ask whether preference is the right variable to be measuring at all.

The study captures what men say they want. It cannot capture what men need, what would actually move them, or what the therapeutic encounter would have to look like to reach the men who never show up in a study because they never show up to therapy. Decades of psychotherapy outcome research consistently point to the therapeutic alliance, trust, empathy, collaborative engagement, as the strongest predictor of whether therapy works. Preference satisfaction and therapeutic efficacy are not the same variable. Running them together lets the article make a clinical argument out of consumer preference data.

There is something more structurally important to name here as well. Men’s stated preferences are not transparent windows into their needs. They are cultural artifacts, shaped by the same patriarchal norms that created the crisis in the first place. As bell hooks argued in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004), patriarchy does not just oppress women, it demands that men sacrifice their emotional lives as the price of masculine legitimacy. That sacrifice shows up everywhere, including in how men answer surveys about who they want to talk to.

Which means that when men report feeling more comfortable with a male therapist, we should pause before reading that as evidence those therapists serve them better. Comfort in therapy is an ambiguous signal. The literature is full of cautions about too much comfort, collusion with gender power practices, failure to challenge the narrative a client walks in with, the absence of productive friction. What might “comfort with a male therapist” actually be describing? Possibly this, I don’t have to worry about how my masculinity is being evaluated here. I can maintain my familiar performance without being disturbed. That isn’t a therapeutic advantage. That’s gendered power finding a co-signer.

And the finding that men felt less judged by male therapists is the most under-read data point in the entire article. Men fearing judgment from female therapists, for their attitudes toward women, for their behavior in relationships, for the full texture of their masculinity, is not an argument for gender matching. It is a description of how patriarchy generates a specific species of shame that men manage by avoiding female evaluation. Routing men away from that discomfort doesn’t address the shame. It accommodates it. It designs the therapeutic architecture around the wound rather than toward it.

There is finally an absent population problem the article cannot see past. The men in any preference study are men who sought therapy and formed opinions about it. They are already engaged. The men the mental health crisis is most urgently about, the ones not showing up, the ones dying by suicide, the ones locked inside addiction and isolation, are not in the dataset. Designing a system around the preferences of men already in the room tells us almost nothing about what would actually reach the men who never come through the door.

The question is not what men say they want. It is whether we build services that accommodate the adaptations patriarchy has produced in men, or challenge the practices patriarchy requires. The article chooses accommodation and calls it a solution. More male therapists does not dissolve the problem. It runs directly into it.

And then there is Dr. Ellenberg.

The article quotes Daniel Ellenberg, a past president of the Society for the Psychology of Men and Masculinities at the APA, offering this as an example of what’s wrong with the field’s gender imbalance: “If you have women grad students who tell guys to ‘just shut up, you’ve talked long enough,’ a 24-year-old guy will be like, ‘What? I’m responsible for that?’”

Sit with that for a moment.

A senior figure in the psychology of men, someone whose entire professional identity is organized around understanding how gender shapes men’s experience, uses his platform in a national newspaper to express sympathy for a young man being asked to share conversational space. The implicit message, men’s discomfort with being interrupted, challenged, or held accountable in a classroom is a clinical recruitment problem, not a growth edge.

This is precisely what I mean when I say more male therapists isn’t the answer. Because this is a male therapist. A credentialed, institutionally recognized, APA-affiliated one. And what he is modeling, in plain sight, is the very dynamic that makes therapy so difficult for men to actually use, the idea that discomfort with accountability is something to be protected rather than examined. That masculine fragility and male insecurity, when it shows up in professional training contexts, deserves a workaround rather than a reckoning.

And then there is Dr. Zakalik.

If the Ellenberg quote shows us masculine fragility being protected, the next quote in the article shows us the ideology underneath it made fully explicit.

Michael Zakalik, a clinical psychologist based in Seattle, argues that a male clinician can “lower the threshold for exposure” for male clients, and that simply seeing an emotionally fluent adult man can itself be a therapeutic intervention. So far, so reasonable. But then comes the reveal, the value of male therapists, he says, is that they normalize the therapeutic experience “without necessarily feminizing it.”

Without. Feminizing. It.

There it is. Buried in a single subordinate clause, the entire architecture of the problem the article refuses to name. Emotional fluency, vulnerability, the willingness to be known, these are coded in this framing as inherently feminine. Things that require a male ambassador to make them safe for male consumption. Things that, left to their own devices, would contaminate masculine identity with something dangerously other.

This is not a critique of therapy’s gender imbalance. This is a reproduction of it. The implicit logic is that men need emotional access laundered through maleness because emotion itself, unmediated, unguarded, arriving through a female body or a feminized space, is threatening to masculine selfhood. Zakalik is not challenging that premise. He is building his clinical rationale on top of it.

This is where bell hooks becomes indispensable again. In The Will to Change, hooks identifies exactly this move, the attempt to make patriarchy more survivable for men without dismantling what makes it lethal. The therapeutic goal, in this framing, is not to help men grieve what patriarchy has taken from them. It is to help them access a slightly wider emotional register while keeping the foundational story, that femininity is something to be managed and contained, completely intact.

“Emotionally fluent adult man” is a genuinely valuable thing to model. But if the reason it’s valuable is that it keeps the feminine at arm’s length, then we are not expanding men’s emotional lives. We are just building a more comfortable cell.

Ellenberg protects men from accountability. Zakalik protects them from femininity. Together they demonstrate that the problem is not a shortage of male therapists. It is a shortage of male therapists willing to actually reckon with what they’re carrying. Connell maps the structure that produces this, hooks names the human cost of leaving it intact. Both point toward the same conclusion, you cannot solve a problem of critical-consciousness by hiring more male therapists.

The actual uphill battle.

The real work, and it is uphill, genuinely uphill, is not demographic. It is ideological. It is convincing men, and the institutions that serve them, and the therapists who sit across from them, that patriarchy does not only harm women. It deforms men too. It cuts them off from themselves. It makes intimacy feel like a liability and stoicism feel like survival. It narrows the range of acceptable feeling until a man’s emotional life becomes a series of locked rooms.

More male therapists trained in the same frameworks, operating within the same cultural logics, will not open those rooms. What opens them is a clinical culture willing to name the harm, not as an indictment of men, but as an honest account of what the water has been doing to all of us. That requires male therapists, yes. But more urgently, it requires critically conscious ones, practitioners who understand that doing the work means going upstream, not just staffing more male therapists.

The elephant in the room is not the gender breakdown in graduate programs. It is that we keep designing solutions for men’s mental health that leave patriarchy entirely intact. And then we wonder why men keep drowning.

Peace.

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I will admit that it has not always felt this way. For years, whenever a trainee at my clinic came to me frustrated after a fellow student or teacher had remarked, with some feigned authority, that narrative therapy was not a “depth” psychology, something in me would immediately eye-roll. The implication was never quite stated directly but it was always there, that only psychoanalysis, psychodynamic work, or one of the Jungian traditions was doing the real thing. That narrative therapy was somehow working at the surface. That we were, at best, rearranging language while the serious practitioners descended into the actual territory of the human soul. Yeah, that would piss me off.

But I have been sitting with that reaction long enough to get curious about it. And what I find underneath the irritation is not vindication. It is something more like recognition. Because the people making that argument are not wrong that something is at stake. They are pointing at a real hunger, a real need, something that the acceleration of contemporary life and the arrival of AI-assisted therapy have made newly urgent. I think, when I am being honest, that we are on the same team. We are just working from very different maps of the territory.

Something is happening in the therapy world that deserves attention. As the pace of life accelerates and AI-assisted mental health tools move from the margins to the mainstream, a counter-movement has gathered force. It speaks in serious tones about going “Deep.” It promises access to the real self, the layered self, the self that can only be reached by someone willing to descend with you. Depth psychology, in its many contemporary forms, has become the humanist’s answer to a culture that moves too fast and now, apparently, to a technology that cannot feel.

I want to take this seriously, because the anxiety driving it is real. We are living inside what Byung-Chul Han calls the burnout society, a social arrangement organized around positivity, acceleration, and the elimination of friction. Everything is optimized. Everything is efficient. Sitting with something slow and complicated has become a minor act of resistance. So when therapists and coaches and wellness practitioners reach for the language of depth, they are naming something important. They are refusing the logic of the quick fix. That refusal matters.

However, the story of depth is still a story. And like every story, it carries a particular architecture, produces particular effects, and leaves certain things unexamined. My interest here is not in debunking depth. It is in understanding what kind of story it is, what it makes possible, and what it quietly forecloses.

The dominant metaphor of depth psychology is archaeological. There is bedrock. There is sediment. Somewhere below the surface of daily consciousness lives the real self, layered and buried, waiting to be excavated. The therapeutic relationship becomes an expedition. You need a skilled guide because the terrain is treacherous. You need to go down before you can come back up changed. This is a compelling story. It produces the feeling of seriousness, of earned transformation, of finally getting to what actually matters.

But narrative therapy starts from a different place entirely. Michael White, drawing on Gregory Bateson and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, argued that the self is not a thing to be discovered but a story being told and retold across time, relationship, and context. There is no pre-linguistic, pre-storied self waiting in the vault. What we call identity is always already an interpretation, a particular account of experience assembled under particular cultural conditions. This is not a cynical claim. It is a liberating one. If the self is storied, then the story can be revised, thickened, and re-authored. Nothing is fixed in place by the weight of what lies beneath.

From this vantage point, what depth practitioners are actually pointing at when they describe profound therapeutic work is not excavation. It is something White called thickening. Thick description, a concept he borrowed from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, refers to accounts of human life that are richly contextual, relationally situated, and attentive to the texture of meaning-making. A thin account flattens experience into a single explanatory story. A thick account holds complexity, contradiction, and multiplicity. When therapy feels deep, what is often happening is that the story is getting thicker. More of life is coming into view. Events that were isolated become connected. Experiences that were nameless find language. That is a real and valuable process. The architecture underneath it, however, is lateral rather than vertical. It is a movement outward into relationship and context, not downward into a buried interior.

This distinction matters more than it might first appear. The spatial metaphor you use to organize therapeutic work shapes who you hold responsible for suffering. If truth lives inside, then so does the cause of pain. The deeper you go into the psyche, the more the world recedes as a site of analysis. Depression becomes an interior condition rather than a response to unlivable circumstances. Anxiety becomes a depth problem rather than a reasonable reaction to precarity, isolation, or structural injustice. I am not saying that inner life is unimportant. I am saying that the architecture of depth quietly privatizes suffering in ways that can leave people more alone, not less.

There is a second paradox worth naming. Depth culture promises intimacy but the process is often profoundly solitary. Shadow work, inner child work, many somatic modalities, and much of the integrative depth tradition are structured as individual pilgrimages into interior terrain. The therapist holds the torch. The client descends. But being guided into your own interior is not the same as being genuinely witnessed by a community. Narrative therapy has always argued that identity is constituted in the presence of others, that we become ourselves in relationship and not merely inside ourselves. What looks like depth work may actually be a very sophisticated and well-intentioned form of self-enclosure.

This brings us to AI therapy, which is where the stakes become most visible. The anxiety about AI in the therapy room is often articulated as a concern about depth. Can AI really go there with you? Does it lack the interiority required to accompany someone into the difficult places? These are real questions. But I think they reveal something we should sit with more carefully. If what we mean by depth is empathic attunement, sustained attention, the capacity to reflect feeling back accurately, and the absence of judgment, then AI already does much of that and will continue to improve at it. The protests feel genuine but they are sometimes fuzzy about what they are actually protecting.

What narrative therapy would say is this, the problem with AI therapy is not that it is too shallow. The problem is that it cannot be a genuine witness. It cannot hold a story in cultural context the way a human can. It cannot bring the weight of a shared world to the act of listening. It cannot co-author a story with you in the way that requires someone to be genuinely changed by the encounter. The limitation is not a deficit of interiority. It is a deficit of genuine co-presence and cultural situatedness. That is a more precise critique, and I think it is a more honest one.

I also want to name something about the market dimension of this. We are living inside what I have been calling The Great Dispersion, the process by which therapeutic language migrates out of clinical contexts and into ambient culture, spreading fast and thin across wellness brands, self-help platforms, and coaching offerings. Depth has become particularly valuable real estate in this landscape. It signals seriousness. It promises the opposite of the surface. Go deep enough and you will find something that all the productivity optimization in the world cannot give you. I understand the appeal of that promise. But depth as brand positioning can reproduce the very problem it claims to solve. You can sell someone a very intensive, very expensive, very interior journey that leaves them holding all of their problems as personal failures, just with better language for them.

None of this means we should abandon what depth practitioners are genuinely good at, which is slowing things down, creating conditions for serious reflection, attending to what has been unsaid and unwitnessed. Those are real skills. Narrative therapy honors them. What it asks, however, is that we change the architecture. Stop organizing the work around a buried interior that needs to be excavated by a specialist. Start organizing it around a story that is being told in relationship to a cultural landscape, a story that can be witnessed, extended, complicated, and re-authored in community with others.

In a moment of acceleration, the radical move is not to go deeper into the self. It is to thicken the story you are telling about who you are and how you came to be here. That is a slower and more honest project than most depth frameworks will admit. It requires other people. It requires attending to the world, not just the interior. And it asks the therapist to be a witness rather than a guide into private terrain.

The myth of the interior is not that inner life is unreal. It is that the answers are in there waiting to be found. They are not. They are made, slowly, in the company of others, with the texture of a lived life woven carefully back into view. That is depth enough for me.

Peace.

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“The idea of community is without doubt the liberal equivalent of the conservative notion of ‘family values’ — neither exists in contemporary culture, and both are grounded in political fantasy.”

It struck a nerve. People agreed, pushed back. What it named, I think, was a tension many of us are carrying but haven’t quite found the language for and, how can we be critical of community when so many people are suffering from its absence?

That tension brought me to a panel at the hosted by the Taos Institute and Mercy University, a conversation about togetherness, belonging, and what it actually takes to be with each other across difference and power. I want to share some of what I’ve been thinking, for those who weren’t in the room.

First I have to say I had a genuinely great time. There’s something about being in a room with people who have spent their lives thinking seriously about relationship, dialogue, and what it means to co-create worlds together that makes you feel like the right conversation is finally happening. I got to be alongside some of my absolute favorites, Saliha Bava, Ken Gergen, Harlene Anderson, and Sheila McNamee, people whose thinking has shaped mine in ways I’m still discovering. The conversations in the hallways, over meals, in the in-between spaces of the schedule were as rich as anything on the stage. Maybe richer. That’s usually how it goes.

The Problem With Community

Let me start by saying something potentially unpopular, I think the word community is doing a lot of work it can’t actually do. Community, as it’s usually invoked, promises warmth. Shared language. Mutual recognition. A place where you are known and held. And sometimes, genuinely, beautifully, it delivers that. I don’t want to dismiss it.

But community has challenges. When it gets idealized, it becomes a gatekeeping structure. It starts asking, Are you enough like us? Do you share our values, our language, our wound, our politics? Have you earned your place here? The more tightly a community holds its identity, the more it tends to surveil the borders of belonging. Arturo Escobar calls this one-world worlding, the process by which a single worldview gets imposed as default reality, flattening plurality into conformity. Even well-intentioned communities can end up reproducing monocultures of belief and behavior. They demand consensus where something messier, more honest, might be needed.

What’s the alternative? Not isolation. Not radical individualism. Rather something I’ve started calling coalitional imagination.

From Community to Coalition

A coalition assumes difference from the start. It doesn’t ask you to be the same, it asks you to identify shared stakes. Bruno Latour would call these matters of concern: not who we are, but what we’re facing together, and what we’re willing to do.

This is the move I’ve been calling coalitional imagination, the capacity to align with others around shared stakes without requiring shared identity as the entry fee.

Somer Saleh the facilitator asked me at the symposium how I actually stay in difficult conversations, the ones where worldview, politics, or values are genuinely in conflict. I gave the most honest answer I had.

I’ve been participating in 12-step meetings regularly for a long time. And in all honesty, some of the people I sit with in those rooms are on the complete opposite end of the political spectrum from me. We would not agree on much if you put us in a debate. We might not choose each other as friends in any conventional sense. But I know, I know it in my body, that if I called any one of them at two in the morning in a moment of genuine crisis, they would come. No questions. No conditions. They would show up.

That knowing has done something to my thinking that no amount of theory could quite accomplish. Because what we share in those rooms isn’t identity. It isn’t values, in the political sense. It isn’t even worldview. What we share is precarity. A common vulnerability. The lived knowledge that we are not sufficient unto ourselves, that we need each other, that the night gets long and none of us should be alone in it.

That is a coalition. Not a community in the idealized sense, we don’t all think the same or want the same things. But we have skin in the same game. And it turns out that shared precarity is one of the most powerful coalition builders there is. More powerful, in my experience, than shared identity. More durable than shared values. Because it’s not abstract. It’s the two a.m. phone call. It’s who actually comes.

Judith Butler gives this a philosophical spine. She argues, especially in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, that coalition requires us to move our identity claims to the background. Not abandon them. But loosen our grip on them as the organizing principle. When we assemble across difference, what comes to the foreground is something more basic, our shared precarity, our mutual exposure to the same systems. The question stops being who are we? and becomes what are we facing, and what are we willing to do together?

That’s not erasure of identity. That’s strategy. That’s what allows genuinely different people to actually act together.

Community and the Commons Are Not the Same Thing

One of the distinctions I kept returning to on the panel is one I think we need more of in therapeutic and social practice conversations, community and the commons are different, and they require different skills.

Community is built on resemblance, shared history, shared language, shared world. Its skills are cultural fluency, loyalty, tolerance of proximity, conflict resolution within a shared normative frame.

The commons is built on shared stewardship, tending what we hold together: land, air, institutions, futures, practices of care. You don’t have to agree on who you are to jointly tend what you share. The commons is pluriversal. Many worlds coexisting and collaborating without collapsing into one.

The skills the commons requires are different, coalitional thinking, negotiation without consensus, the capacity to identify shared stakes across genuine difference, and, crucially, the tolerance of incompleteness. You will never fully know the people you share the commons with. That’s not a failure. That’s the condition.

This brings me to Glissant.

The Archipelago

Édouard Glissant, the Martinican poet and philosopher, offers an image I keep returning to and shared on the panel, the archipelago.

An archipelago is a grouping of islands. Discrete. Distinct. Separated by sea. And yet constituting a single formation. Each island is fully itself; none is reducible to the others; and their relationship is real without requiring merger. This is Glissant’s counter to what he calls root thinking, the idea that identity, culture, and community must be grounded in a single deep unmovable origin. Root thinking demands purity and produces exclusion. The archipelago refuses this. The islands don’t need a land bridge. The sea is already the connection.

I didn’t have the time to share about this on the panel but Glissant goes further with a concept that I think is essential to any honest conversation about togetherness across power differences, opacity. He argues that we have the right to be opaque, not fully knowable, not fully translatable, and that genuine relation must honor this. The demand for transparency, for full legibility, is a colonial demand. Even well-meaning communities reproduce it: explain yourself, be understandable to us, let us see all of you. Opacity says no. You can be in relation with someone whose depths you will never fully reach, and that is not a failure of connection. It is the condition of genuine encounter.

I can feel at one with another without claiming to understand him, without wanting to reduce him to the scale of my transparency. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation

That sentence might be the most useful thing I know for working across difference.

What Must Be Unlearned

For any of this to land practically, I think there are a few things that need to be unlearned, and I say this as someone still in the process of unlearning them:

• The myth of homogeneous community. Belonging doesn’t require sameness. The longing for a group of people just like us is understandable, but it’s a trap. The richest, most generative relational experiences I’ve had have been in friction, not comfort.

• Purity politics. The idea that alignment requires total agreement. That I can only stand beside you if I endorse everything about you. This is the thing that most reliably kills coalitions, on the left and the right.

• The privatization of struggle. The narrative that whatever you’re carrying is yours alone. Systems produce suffering at scale and then individualize it, pathologize it, therapize it. Part of the work of coalitional imagination is putting the structural back in frame.

• The idea that discomfort means disconnection. Tension can be generative. The friction is often where the insight lives. Jean-Luc Nancy (Inoperative Community) would say the encounter happens at the limit between subjects, right at the place where we are not the same. That limit-space is not a problem to be solved. It’s where community actually happens.

The Closing Thought

Connection is never finished. And I think the fantasy that it could be, that we could one day arrive at community and rest there, is one of the things that makes the journey so discouraging. We keep comparing our lived, partial, messy experience of relating to an imagined destination we’ll never reach.

The shift I keep trying to make, and keep failing at, and keep returning to:

Community asks us to arrive. The commons asks us to tend.

Tending requires a different posture, more patient. Staying with incompleteness. Letting partial alignment be enough. Not requiring that others become like you as the price of their belonging. Remaining in relation with what you cannot fully understand.

We don’t need to be the same island. We need to be part of the same sea.

That’s what I was trying to say at the panel. That’s what I’m still working out.

Peace.

Alert!

Early bird tickets! Sale starts March 1st. Only 40 available. Super early bird sold out fast, this round will too.

Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon, October 1–3, 2026. Link Here

Michael White did not give us vibes. He gave us maps. Externalizing conversations. Re-authoring conversations. Re-membering practices. Definitional ceremonies. The absent but implicit. These were not rigid protocols. They were scaffolds, provisional architectures that allowed practitioners to enter difficult conversations without drowning in them. Maps were never about control. They were about orientation. They were deeply compatible with Vygotsky’s idea of the zone of proximal development, the idea that learning happens when someone is supported just beyond their current skill, with just enough structure to move forward. Scaffolding is not authoritarian. It is generous. It says you do not need charisma to do this work. You need structure, support, and practice.

But increasingly, what do we see? Conference stages. Workshops built around edited transcripts. Live demonstrations with handpicked cases. Beautifully sculpted language that feels more like performance art than teachable craft. And rarely, almost never, unedited video of real clinical work. We see the polished result. We do not see the hesitation, the misstep, the repair, the scaffolding. The result is subtle but corrosive. The field begins to believe that narrative therapy is something you embody, not something you learn. It becomes style rather than structure. Aura (as the kids say) rather than architecture.

Here is the danger. When pedagogy shifts from maps to performance, learning shifts from apprenticeship to admiration. The teacher becomes the model, the model becomes the mystique, and mystique cannot be scaffolded. You can’t replicate mystique. You can only imitate it. Which is how guru cultures form, not because anyone intended it, but because performance without transparent process creates hierarchy. If I cannot see how you got there, I can only assume you are special.

And here is the irony. Narrative therapy was born as a critique of expert authority, a move away from interpretation as power, away from the clinician as the one who knows. White was relentless on this point. The therapist’s job was not to be brilliant. It was to be genuinely curious, structurally thoughtful, and transparent about the moves they were making. But guru pedagogy quietly reintroduces hierarchy through aesthetics. The anti-expert expert is still an expert. Just harder to question.

Let’s talk about transcripts. Transcripts are curated artifacts. They are edited, cleaned, and sequenced for clarity. They remove the mess of real time, the long pauses, the awkward pivots, the questions that land flat, the moments when the therapist reaches for an externalizing question and misreads the room entirely. Transcripts are after-the-fact coherence. And when they become the primary teaching tool, we are not teaching practice. We are teaching retrospection. We are teaching students to recognize excellent work, not to produce uncertain, iterative, improvised-but-grounded work themselves. Show me the raw footage. Show me the rupture, the moment you didn’t know what to say. That is where learning lives.

To be clear, the problem is not transcripts themselves. It is curation without disclosure. An unedited transcript, one that preserves the fumbles, the silences, the therapist’s uncertainty, the moment a question lands wrong and has to be walked back, can be a profoundly generative teaching tool, precisely because it shows the scaffold rather than hiding it. At California Family Institute, my colleagues Danny Livingston and Jonathan Miranda do something I find genuinely instructive. After each men’s group session, they record their debrief, their raw impressions, their doubts, what they noticed, what they would do differently, and share an unedited transcript of that conversation with the group members. It is not polished. It is not performance. It is two practitioners thinking out loud together, modeling the kind of reflective process that Vygotsky had in mind: not the finished competence, but the movement through uncertainty toward it. That is the Vygotskian spirit of scaffolding applied honestly. The transcript becomes a scaffold rather than a monument. Used this way, transcripts don’t create guru culture, they dismantle it.

The zone of proximal development is not about inspiration. It is about guided participation. It assumes there is a next step, that the step can be scaffolded, and that the scaffold can be removed once competence develops. Maps function as scaffolds. They create shared language, reduce overload, and make replication possible, not rote repetition, but principled improvisation. Without scaffolding, only the already-talented thrive. Everyone else feels inadequate. Which is, ironically, profoundly non-collaborative, a strange outcome for a practice that claims collaboration as one of its core ethics.

The guru model benefits one person. The map model benefits the field. And we need a field. Because without shared maps, narrative therapy becomes a vibe-based aesthetic, powerful in the hands of the gifted, inaccessible to everyone else, untransmissible across cultures, contexts, and institutions. Maps allow critique. Maps allow revision. Maps allow evolution. Gurus allow devotion.

This is not a call to return to rigid formulas. It is a call to transparent pedagogy. Show your thinking. Name the move you’re making. Explain why you pivoted. Make the implicit explicit. Draw the map as you walk it. This is what the best training cultures in narrative therapy have always done, and what the field needs more of, not less. Practitioners willing to say, I was using the Statement of Position Map here, and I kept returning to the landscape of identity because the landscape of action felt unsafe, and then opening that observation to the group. That is teaching. That is craft.

There is something humbling about maps. They admit that no one improvises from nothing. Improvisation always rests on structure. Jazz has scales. Architecture has blueprints. Therapy should have maps, not to constrain us, but to free us from dependency on personality.

If narrative therapy is to have a future, especially in a world of AI-assisted practice, manualized treatments, and institutional pressure to standardize everything, we need transmissible knowledge. Not performative brilliance. Not curated transcripts. But teachable craft. The map is not the territory. That much Korzybski and White both understood. But without a map, only the guru survives. And I am less interested in cultivating gurus than in cultivating cartographers.

Peace.

What has your experience been? Have you found training cultures that model transparent pedagogy, that show the scaffolding rather than just the finished product? Drop it in the comments. And if this landed somewhere useful, share it with a colleague who teaches.

Want to learn a map for defuturing conversations?

From Failure to Launch to Threshold Navigation: A Narrative Therapy Training with Dr. Chris Hoff

Description

What if “failure to launch” isn’t a diagnosis, but a story?

In this training, Dr. Chris Hoff invites clinicians to reconsider one of the most common and quietly shaming phrases used to describe young adults living at home or struggling to move into independence. Drawing from narrative therapy, rites of passage theory, and futures thinking, Chris shifts the dilemma not as pathology, but as a stalled or unsupported threshold crossing.

This workshop explores:

— Why “failure to launch” functions as a defuturing story that distributes shame before curiosity

— Arnold van Gennep’s three-stage model of rites of passage, and what modern culture has stripped away

— How prolonged liminality without witness creates stuckness

— Four core narrative therapy moves for working with families in transition:

• Externalizing the Stall

• Naming the Grief

• Mapping Multiple Futures

• Designing Witnessing Practices

— The parent’s parallel rite of passage, from manager to witness, rescuer to boundary holder

— Why structural realities (housing, debt, precarity, digital isolation) must be named, not psychologized away

This is not a training about fixing young adults.

It’s about redesigning the scaffolding around developmental thresholds.

If you work with families navigating prolonged transitions, adult children living at home, or high-achieving young adults who feel stalled and ashamed, this conversation offers a different lens.

There is no failure here.

There is a threshold.

And thresholds are not meant to be crossed alone.

This isn’t a personal failure. It’s a cultural condition. Mark Fisher named it capitalist realism, the sense that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than any genuine alternative to how things are. Tony Fry calls it defuturing, the active destruction of viable futures before they can even be imagined. Our clients arrive carrying this foreclosure in their imaginations, in their sense of what’s possible.

The question isn’t how to help them choose better. It’s how to help them compose differently.

This is futures composition, and it’s becoming central to my practice.

Traditional therapy often treats the future as something to be planned for or worried about. Strategic planning treats it as something to predict and control. But both approaches assume a singular, linear timeline and a stable world in which to make decisions. Neither assumption holds anymore.

Futures composition is different. Drawing from speculative design, pluriversal thinking, and narrative therapy’s long-standing interest in “unique outcomes,” it treats the future not as something to predict but as something to compose, rehearse, and inhabit experimentally. It recognizes, as Arturo Escobar argues, that we don’t live in a universe but a pluriverse, many worlds are possible, many futures are composable, and the work is to practice the imagination needed to bring them into being.

Bruno Latour reminds us that we assemble reality through “matters of concern” the things we gather around, the issues that pull us into relation. Futures composition asks us what matters of concern could organize your life differently? What alliances, rhythms, and practices would emerge?

This is where therapy becomes cultural architecture. We’re not just helping individuals feel better. We’re helping them develop the compositional capacities to navigate a world where the old scripts are breaking down and new ones haven’t yet been written.

* * *

Scaling the Method: Futuring Sprints

For the past year, I’ve been experimenting with taking this process beyond the therapy room. What happens when you gather a small cohort of people at similar thresholds and guide them through intensive futures composition work together?

I call these “futuring sprints” quarterly gatherings where participants spend focused time composing multiple possible futures for their work, their relationships to institutions, their creative practices, their rhythms of life. Not as fantasies or escapes, but as serious experiments in pluriversal thinking.

Why quarterly? Because the acceleration of change means annual planning is obsolete, and because the work of futures composition needs regular practice, not one-off visioning retreats. Why sprints? Because intensity matters. The concentrated focus allows for deeper imaginative work than scattered sessions over months.

Why now? Because we’re in a period of profound transition. Neoliberalism is dying but hasn’t died. Tech feudalism is emerging but isn’t yet consolidated. The therapeutic industrial complex is showing its cracks. Climate futures are radically uncertain. Many of the people I work with, therapists, cultural workers, educators, artists, coaches, are caught in institutions that feel increasingly incoherent, serving logics they no longer believe in.

They need space to compose alternatives. Not to immediately quit or blow things up, but to develop the imaginative and practical capacities to navigate transitions that are already underway.

The Process

A futuring sprint is structured around three movements:

Movement One: Defuturing Audit

We begin by examining how your current situation is foreclosing futures. What institutional logics, relational patterns, temporal rhythms, and narratives about “what’s possible” are actively destroying alternative futures before they can even be imagined? This isn’t therapy—we’re not healing wounds. We’re doing systems analysis of how foreclosure operates.

Movement Two: Futures Composition

Working with scenario mapping, speculative writing, and embodied imagination practices, participants compose three to five radically different futures they could inhabit over the next 12-24 months. These aren’t wishes or predictions—they’re serious compositions that account for constraints while refusing current foreclosures. We attend to the different temporalities, rhythms, relationships, and value systems each future would require.

Movement Three: Experimental Prototyping

The sprint concludes with designing small experiments to begin inhabiting these futures. Not commitment, but prototyping. What would it feel like to work four days instead of five? What happens if you spend Saturdays in creative practice instead of catching up on email? What shifts if you start building coalitions instead of communities?

Throughout, we work coalitionally, assuming difference, partial alignment, and ongoing negotiation rather than consensus or shared identity. The group becomes a laboratory for practicing the kinds of relations these alternative futures require.

* * *

An Invitation

I’m launching my first online futuring sprint in [April/May 2026], and I’m deliberately keeping it small, 10 participants maximum, because I’m still experimenting with how this work translates to virtual space.

This sprint will run over four weeks with weekly 2.5-hour sessions, plus asynchronous work between meetings. Because this is experimental, I’m offering a significantly reduced rate: $400 (my standard rate for developed sprints will be $1200).

This sprint is for you if:

• You’re a therapist, cultural worker, educator, or creative who feels the constraints of your current professional container but can’t quite see the exit • You’re navigating institutional collapse or transition (organizational, professional, relational) • You’re experiencing the acceleration and disenchantment that comes with algorithmic life and need to reclaim different rhythms • You’re interested in pluriversal thinking and coalitional practice, not as abstract theory but as lived experiment • You’re ready to do rigorous imaginative work, not just complain about what’s broken

This sprint is not for you if:

• You’re looking for strategic planning or business consulting • You want someone to tell you what to do next • You’re not willing to experiment with genuine alternatives (including ones that might feel destabilizing) • You’re invested in the idea that there’s one right future you need to discover

Logistics:

• Platform: Zoom (link provided upon acceptance) • Sessions recorded for participants who miss a session • Time commitment: Four 2.5-hour sessions + approximately 2-3 hours of asynchronous work between sessions • You’ll leave with: Your futures portfolio (3-5 composed scenarios), experimental protocols for prototyping, and access to a shared resource library

To apply:

Email me at chrishoffmft@gmail.com with: • A brief description of the threshold you’re at (200 words max) • What draws you to futures composition work • Your availability for weekly sessions in [specific time blocks - e.g., “Wednesdays 4-6:30pm PST” or “Fridays 10am-12:30pm PST”]

I’ll confirm the cohort by March 31st and we’ll begin the week of April 20th.

The future isn’t something that happens to us. It’s something we compose, together, in the ruins of what’s collapsing and the emergence of what’s not yet here. Let’s practice.

This sprint is the first offering from Dangerous Stories Studio, my practice of futures composition and cultural architecture work. If you’re interested in the October 2026 Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon gathering in California, or future in-person intensives, stay tuned.

If you want to follow the development of this work, subscribe to Liminal Lab. If you’re interested in futures composition but can’t join this sprint, reply to this post, I’m building a list for future cohorts.

Chris Hoff, PhD, LMFT, is a therapist, writer, and founder of California Family Institute. He’s the co-editor of An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping (Thick Press, 2024) and host of The Radical Therapist podcast. His work explores therapy as cultural architecture and futures composition.

Peace.

I’ve been chewing on this for weeks now. Because, I’m one of those people. I cite Latour constantly. I’m fascinated by how we’re entangled with non-human actors, how agency distributes across assemblages, how we might think beyond the humanist subject. My whole Cultural Architecture framework draws heavily from this post-human turn. But my colleague’s critique landed. And I think it’s pointing to something crucial about how we engage with these ideas, especially in therapeutic, organizational, or cultural work.

What strikes me is that the post-human thinkers who actually land for me, Latour, Haraway, Barad, aren’t bypassing the human so much as relocating it. They’re asking us to develop a more sophisticated literacy about our entanglements, our attachments, our situated ways of knowing. That actually requires MORE formation, not less, but a different kind. Think about Latour’s method. Following actors through their associations. Tracing networks. Documenting controversies. This isn’t abstract theorizing from nowhere, it’s a narrative sensibility. It requires the patience to attend to detail, the humility to follow rather than impose frameworks, the aesthetic sense to notice what matters.

Consider Donna Haraway’s “staying with the trouble.” That’s not just a conceptual move, it’s a cultivated capacity to dwell in complexity, to resist the urge toward resolution, to practice what she calls “response-ability” in multispecies entanglements. You don’t get there by skipping over your own formation as a sensing, meaning-making creature. Karen Barad’s agential realism asks us to attend to how phenomena emerge through intra-actions, how measurement apparatuses participate in what they measure, how the observer is always already part of the observed. But to notice that kind of entanglement, you need training in attention itself.

When students (or therapists, or consultants, or anyone) jump straight to post-human frameworks without the humanistic formation that precedes them, something specific gets lost. The capacity for thick description, for one. You can’t trace networks if you haven’t learned to notice. The arts and literature train us in this, how to attend to texture, ambiguity, the grain of particular situations. Without that training, post-human theory becomes thin, abstractionist, disconnected from the very materialities it claims to honor. Situated literacy is another loss. Post-human thought isn’t asking us to escape our situatedness, it’s asking us to become more literate about it. To read the assemblages we’re already in. To notice how we’re being constituted even as we constitute. That’s a refined skill, cultivated through engagement with narrative, poetry, philosophy, art.

Comfort with complexity also suffers. Literature teaches us to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously. To sit with uncertainty. To recognize that meaning emerges rather than being imposed. These aren’t just nice-to-have sensibilities, they’re essential for actually doing post-human work rather than just performing it theoretically. And then there’s ethical formation. The humanities cultivate the willingness to remain in difficult questions, to refuse easy resolutions, to practice care in the face of complexity. Post-human ethics requires this, but you can’t shortcut your way to it.

So here’s what I’m thinking, without humanistic formation, post-human theory becomes just another way to float above the messiness rather than learning to dwell in it differently. It becomes a sophisticated form of dissociation, using theoretical complexity to avoid the harder work of actually being present to our entanglements, our vulnerabilities, our profound dependencies. It lets us perform criticality while remaining untouched by the implications. But when post-human thought is grounded in humanistic formation, when it emerges from people who know how to read closely, think carefully, attend patiently, it does something else entirely. It becomes a way of deepening our engagement with the world, not escaping it.

I’m thinking about this in relation to my own Cultural Architecture practice. The whole point is helping people and organizations navigate transitions, design emergent futures, work with uncertainty. Post-human frameworks are incredibly useful for this, they help us see how we’re entangled with technologies, institutions, narratives, material conditions. But if I’m honest, the clients who can actually use these frameworks most effectively are the ones who bring humanistic formation to them. They’ve read novels. They’ve studied philosophy. They’ve developed aesthetic sensibility. They know how to dwell in ambiguity. They’re using post-human theory not to escape their humanity but to relocate it more accurately, to see how their agency is distributed, their identity assembled, their futures co-constituted. That’s a different move entirely from using theory as an exit strategy from the messiness of being human.

What would it mean to “become human first” in preparation for post-human work? Not a return to humanist orthodoxy. Not privileging human exceptionalism or sovereignty. But rather cultivating attention, learning to notice, training the capacity for presence. This is what art teaches, how to attend to what’s actually happening rather than what we assume is happening. Developing relational literacy means reading widely, thinking across traditions, building the conceptual repertoire to recognize patterns, trace connections, hold complexity. You need vocabulary to notice what’s there. Practicing embodied knowing goes beyond just thinking about entanglement to feeling it. This is where contemplative practices, somatic work, creative expression matter. The post-human isn’t just a thought experiment, it’s about how we’re actually living. And building ethical capacity through engaging with philosophy, literature, art cultivates care, responsibility, the ability to respond thoughtfully to what emerges. Post-human ethics require formation, not just frameworks.

I’m still working this out. But I’m grateful to my colleague for the provocation. It’s made me reconsider what I’m asking of people when I bring post-human frameworks into therapeutic or organizational work. And it’s reminded me that the most radical thing we might do is actually become more fully present to how we’re already assembled, which requires exactly the kind of humanistic formation we’re tempted to skip.

Peace.

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

🎟️ SUPER EARLY BIRD TICKETS NOW AVAILABLE — ONLY A FEW LEFT! 🎟️
The lowest ticket tier for Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon is officially open, but they’re going fast! With only a handful of Super Early Bird tickets remaining, don’t wait to secure your seat. Once they’re gone, prices go up, so act now to save your spot at this groundbreaking event.

WHAT IS DANGEROUS STORIES: A THERAPY SALON?
Dangerous Stories isn’t your typical conference, it’s a three-day salon for bold conversation, cultural exploration, and reimagining therapy itself. Taking place October 1–3, 2026 in Irvine, California, this gathering brings together therapists, cultural workers, artists, and changemakers in a space built for thought, dialogue, and possibility.

This salon blends:
Provocative keynotes from incisive thinkers challenging the status quo on mental health and society.

Intimate dialogues where disagreement is not only welcomed, it’s essential.

Live art and performance that ruptures the ordinary and invites visceral experience.

Late-night salsa, because even the deepest ideas deserve a dangerous dance floor.

This is a rare opportunity to move beyond clinical orthodoxy, explore therapy as cultural intervention, and engage with perspectives that shift how we think about healing, identity, community, and possibility itself.