I’ve grown weary of the word radical.
Yes, I host The Radical Therapist podcast and go by the Radical Therapist on Instagram and Facebook, and just recently co-edited a beautiful book titled An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping.
But I’ve grown weary of the word radical.
Recently I was asked by the Eastside Institute to do a short video on what radical means to me. This request has encouraged me to make public thoughts I have been wrestling with for a while now.
So what does radical mean to me now?
When Angela Davis said that "radical simply means grasping things at the root," she was echoing a longer political and philosophical tradition, one shaped by Marxist, feminist, and Black radical thought. But what does grasping at the root mean? Primarily when we are getting at the root, we are not just addressing symptoms, but causes. We are challenging foundational assumptions which often requires questioning taken for granted norms, institutions, and identities that are treated as "natural" or unchangeable. And finally, committing to deep transformation. So, when Davis invokes “radical,” she’s not referring to extremism, but rather to a clarity and depth of analysis, a commitment to transformation that begins where the problem originates.
Over the last several years of doing the Radical Therapist Podcast I have noticed something troubling: a co-opting of radical by both the right and the left.
The right’s radical is often a politics of nihilism, Elon Musk and others in the MAGA universe want to burn it all down, wreck the institutions, own the libs. Their vision of the root is rot. It seems their radical mission is the “radicalization” of young men in online echo chambers where alienation becomes rage, and rage becomes identity. We are now seeing the effects of their brand of radical populism.
Meanwhile, parts of the left have turned radical into a brand (yes, guilty as charged) something to be performed for clicks, clout, and algorithmic credibility. Recently I watched a therapist I followed move from more traditional therapy posts to posts that centered a more political stance. In this move their audience grew and their content became of the standard progressive political flavor. In this scenario Radical risks becoming aesthetics, not ethics. A pose, not a position. Something that often centers self-expression more than collective transformation (see Jennifer Pan’s Selling Social Justice or Olúfémi Táíwò’s Elite Capture).
In the Encyclopedia of Radical Helping Erin Segal and I wrote that in using the term “radical,” we risk conflating the “radical” in “radical helping” with a specific US Leftist “radical” agenda. In naming my podcast The Radical Therapist (borrowing the term from the The Radical Therapist journal) almost 9 years ago now, I did not realize I was taking the same risk. I have watched the word transform.
We went on to write that our contributors to the encyclopedia don’t all hold all the same feelings and interpretations, the same approach to how groups and institutions should handle issues of identity and speech, the same opinion about whether the carceral state should be reformed or overhauled, the same theory of individual healing and social change, and so on. And that aligning this Encyclopedia project with Leftist critiques of society is not inaccurate, per se. But that examining diverging approaches is important. It’s not easy to sit with contradictory truths, but we put forward that it’s an essential skill to cultivate. Maybe even radical?
So, I’ve found myself asking these last couple of years, what does radical mean anymore? What does it mean to me, and do I align with what the word has taken up, how it’s been taken up?
Amid the tsunami of information that the digital age has wrought, and the acceleration of contemporary life, I think radical can be found in the increasing need for meaning, identity, and orientation.
In this new world is there still space for radical as care?
Radical as relational?
Radical as rigorous inquiry into how we live and how we might live otherwise?
I think there is. But it requires us to hold the word more carefully. To clean it off a little. To return it to its roots.
Because radical, in its truest form, is not about noise or spectacle.
It is about attention. A clarity and depth of analysis.
It is about being willing to ask uncomfortable questions and stay in the room with the answers. It is about reaching deep enough to touch what sustains the current order, and then imagining what could compose something better.
Peace.
Stuff I’m up to..
Join The Eastside Institute for a An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping: A Radical Community Building Project. In this celebratory conversation, the Institute’s Jennifer Bullock & Janet Wotten introduce Chris Hoff, Erin Segal and Julie Cho, along with a few of the Encyclopedia’s radical, global practitioners: Care Pods (HyoYoung Minna Kim), Relationality (Sadaf Vidha & Aryan Somaiya); and Poverty-Aware Social Work/Resistance (Michal Krumer-Nevo). Join the Conversation!
I will be presenting at the 2nd Annual Contemporary Narrative Therapy Conference- November 6-8, 2025. Have you registered yet?
And don’t forget to join The Liminal Lab by California Family Institute on Patreon for all things narrative therapy and beyond.