The Radical Therapist #121 – Listening as Activism w/ Carol Halliwell & Ben Shannahan

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.

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