The Radical Therapist

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