The Radical Therapist

What happens when therapists learn to take stories apart and feel unsure how to help people build a life afterward? In this episode of The Radical Therapist, Chris Hoff reads his essay “Ruins on Ruins,” prompted by a conversation with graduate students about the limits of critique. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s compositionist philosophy, narrative therapy, and futuring practices, Chris explores what it takes to give a preferred story somewhere to live: relationships, witnesses, material support, and opportunities to test what might become possible. The episode considers the pleasures of being the critic, the responsibilities of helping something take shape, and Michael White’s invitation to practice from a position that is decentered and influential. What would therapist education look like if students spent more time helping fragile possibilities become durable enough to sustain a life? Order Contemporary Narrative Therapy Join me in Winnipeg for The Future of Therapy and a Narrative Therapy Workshop Interested in the Virtual Futuring Sprint? Message me.  

What if saving the relationship is the wrong goal? In this episode of The Radical Therapist, I read my essay “The Wrong Conversation,” reflecting on relationship expertise, my own experiences in couples counseling, and a question I sometimes ask the couples I work with: Are we having the wrong conversation? Should we be talking about how to come apart? I explore the cultural expectations that shape our ideas of a successful relationship, the power relations that can disappear behind the language of communication, and what therapists risk overlooking when staying together becomes the assumed measure of success. What becomes possible when couples have room to reconsider what they want their relationship—and their lives—to become? Read the essay: https://chrishoff.substack.com/p/the-wrong-conversation

Who is the “you” trying to become a better meditator? In this episode of The Radical Therapist, Dr. Chris Hoff welcomes back Ron Purser to discuss his new book, Mind Space: Discovering Meditation Without the Meditator. Drawing on Tarthang Tulku’s Time, Space, and Knowledge vision, Ron invites us to question the inner manager that monitors our progress and turns meditation into another assignment in self-improvement. We get deep into questions of self, awareness, and the observer—and what these questions open up for therapy. When does self-reflection become self-surveillance? How do our stories shape the boundaries of experience? What happens when the demand to optimize ourselves follows us onto the meditation cushion? We also explore how this inquiry connects with suffering, social conditions, and our responsibility to change the world we share. Ron Purser is the author of McMindfulness, a professor at San Francisco State University, and a faculty member at Dharma College in Berkeley. Learn more: https://ronpurser.com Winnipeg Narrative Therapy Workshop: Register/Info Winnipeg Future of Therapy: Hang out with me. Pre-Order Contemporary Narrative Therapy

“Where do you feel that in your body?” What happens after we ask that question? In episode #151, Dr. Chris Hoff reads his manuscript, The Body Doesn’t Escape the Story, examining the assumptions behind contemporary somatic therapy and the growing authority of nervous system language. Descriptions such as “dysregulation,” “safety,” and “the body’s own intelligence” shape how people understand their experiences. What do these descriptions make possible, and what might they obscure? The essay explores how bodily experience takes shape through language, relationships, culture, and history, and how therapeutic practices teach us what to notice. It invites somatic practitioners to examine the stories their approaches carry, while asking narrative therapists to attend more closely to breath, movement, silence, and sensation. A reflection on embodiment, interpretation, and the responsibility therapists hold when helping people make meaning. “The body can hold the pen too. But the body never learned to write alone.”

In this episode of The Radical Therapist, Chris Hoff draws on Mark Fisher’s idea of hauntology to ask a deceptively simple question: If we could show today’s psychotherapy to a therapist twenty years ago, would anything about it genuinely shock them? From psychoanalysis and family systems to postmodern therapies, trauma, somatics, neuroscience, psychedelics, and AI, psychotherapy has changed enormously. But Chris wonders whether all this innovation has occurred within a surprisingly stable idea of what therapy is. Drawing on Fisher’s concern with “lost futures,” he explores how once-radical therapeutic movements become models, models become certifications, and critique becomes continuing education. The episode turns toward a different question: What might emerge if the next significant development in helping doesn’t look like another psychotherapy at all? Bringing therapy into conversation with futures studies, scenario planning, community, art, politics, ritual, and world-making, Chris considers what it might mean to recover our capacity to imagine helping otherwise. Perhaps therapy doesn’t need another model. Perhaps it needs to become strange again. The Future is Not Lost - Matt Bluemink Dangerous Stories: A Therapy Salon

What if therapy has become too good at helping people adapt to conditions that should never have been accepted in the first place? In this episode of The Radical Therapist Podcast, Chris sits down with narrative therapist, author, and educator Julie Tilsen, PhD to discuss her provocative new book, Personal Responsibility, Inc.: How Psychotherapy Turns Society's Problems into Yours. Together we examine one of the most pressing questions facing the mental health professions today: When does therapy relieve suffering, and when does it unintentionally reinforce the very systems that produce it? Their conversation explores psychotherapy's relationship with neoliberalism, why so many social and economic problems become framed as individual pathology, and how the language of self-care, resilience, and personal responsibility can sometimes obscure questions of power, inequality, and collective life. Julie also shares how narrative therapy has informed her thinking, where she believes the field still has blind spots, and what a practice grounded in collective responsibility might actually look like.   Julie's Book: https://orbooks.com/catalog/personal-responsibility-inc/   Books Discussed: https://orbooks.com/catalog/desperately-seeking-self-improvement/   https://cup.columbia.edu/book/in-the-ruins-of-neoliberalism/9780231193856/   https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/600158/mcmindfulness-by-ronald-purser/

In this episode of The Radical Therapist, Chris sits down with narrative therapist and poet Tobin Kriwel for a conversation at the intersection of poetry, therapy, metaphor, and human attention. Together we explore what poetry can teach therapists, not as a technique, but as a way of being with people. We talk about why poetry refuses efficiency, how metaphor opens new possibilities for living, and what gets lost when therapy becomes preoccupied with outcomes, explanations, and quick solutions. Along the way we consider Michael White's notion of the absent but implicit, the value of uncertainty, and why some experiences can only be approached through poetic language. This conversation is an invitation to slow down, listen differently, and reconsider the kinds of conversations that make transformation possible. Whether you're a therapist, writer, poet, or simply someone interested in living more attentively, I think you'll find something here worth carrying with you. Tobin's Book The Field

What does it actually mean to practice from a decentred position? Has narrative therapy's commitment to being non-expert unintentionally softened its political edge? And what might we have misunderstood about Michael White's work over the past three decades? In this episode, Chris sits down with narrative therapist and researcher Dr. Kelsi Semeschuk to discuss her important new work examining Michael White's therapeutic practice through hundreds of hours of archived video recordings and her recent article, Towards a decentred, politically influential, accountable and yet uncertain narrative practice. Together they revisit some of the central assumptions of narrative therapy and ask whether "decentred" has too often been separated from "influential." The conversation explores the inevitability of therapist influence, the ethics of political practice, accountability in the therapy room, and why uncertainty may be one of the most overlooked aspects of Michael White's legacy.   Towards a decentred, politically influential, accountable and yet uncertain narrative practice.    

In this episode of The Radical Therapist, Chris sits down with artist and former narrative therapist Cath Duncan to explore what happens when a professional identity no longer feels large enough to hold who we are becoming. After years of therapeutic practice, Cath made the transition into full-time art-making, a move that was less a departure from narrative ideas than a re-authoring of them in a different medium. Together, Chris and Cath explore the often-unspoken terrain of transition: the liminal space between established identities, the uncertainty of stepping away from familiar forms of recognition, and the challenge of authorizing ourselves into new ways of being. What stories must be released when we cross these thresholds? Which commitments endure, even when the context changes? Drawing from Cath’s current exhibition, Topophilia: Landscapes of Belonging, the conversation examines belonging not as something we discover, but as something we actively create through relationships, places, practices, and imagination. They discuss the ways narrative therapy continues to inform Cath’s artistic work, including her innovative Self-Guided Reflection Tour, which invites gallery visitors into processes of reflection, meaning-making, and connection outside the traditional therapy room. A conversation about creativity, identity, courage, and the stories that carry us across life's thresholds. For therapists, artists, and anyone standing at the edge of a significant transition, this episode offers a thoughtful exploration of what becomes possible when we trust the call toward an emerging future. www.CathDuncan.com Untangle Your Grief book: https://www.cathduncan.com/untangle-your-grief

In this episode of The Radical Therapist, Chris sits down with philosophical therapist and scholar Joanna Polley to explore what philosophy can offer in an age increasingly dominated by diagnosis, optimization, and self-help solutions. What happens when we stop asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and begin asking deeper questions about meaning, freedom, ethics, identity, and how we ought to live? Drawing from continental philosophy, literature, and thinkers such as Nietzsche, Derrida, Deleuze, and Kafka, Joanna invites us into a vision of philosophy not as an academic discipline confined to universities, but as a living practice of inquiry. Together, Chris and Joanna explore the distinctions between philosophical therapy and psychotherapy, the role of dialogue in confronting life’s uncertainties, and why some of our most persistent struggles may be philosophical rather than psychological in nature.   Joanna's Website Philosophical Therapy