It’s official. 📖
Contemporary Narrative Therapy: Maps and Methods for Collaborative Clinical Practice, co-authored with @lindseyhampson is available for pre-order in October. Books arrive in November. Published by Routledge.
This is the book I wanted when I was learning narrative therapy and kept not finding. Identity as dynamic. Practice as relational. Therapy as something more than technique.
More soon.
Most people who feel stuck aren’t broken. They’re living inside a story that has no future in it.
That’s the diagnosis. The Virtual Futuring Sprint is the response.
Four Sundays. A small group. A structured process for moving from defuturing analysis, naming what’s closing your possibilities down, to futures composition, to real experiments in the worlds you’re trying to build.
It’s for therapists and coaches who want to bring futures thinking into their practice. For people standing at the edge of a new business, a new identity, a new chapter. For anyone at a threshold who’s done waiting for a map that never arrives. Reach out for how to participate.
Something is shifting for you. You can feel it. You just don’t have language for it yet, and you don’t have people to think it through with.
That’s what the Futuring Sprint is for.
This isn’t therapy. It’s not strategic planning. It’s coalitional practice, a small group of people doing the serious work of analyzing what’s foreclosing their futures and composing genuinely different ones.
The first cohort showed me how alive this work gets when the right people are in the room together. I’m ready to find the next group.
Four Sundays. June 21 through July 19. 15 people maximum. $699.
If you’ve been sitting on the edge of something, this is your container. Details in the image. DM me to hold your spot.
Most people don’t feel stuck because they lack options.
They feel stuck because their futures have already been narrowed.
I’ve been calling this defuturing.
It’s what happens when:
– systems decide what’s viable
– culture decides what’s realistic
– time decides what’s possible
And slowly, without noticing, the range of your life shrinks.
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So this isn’t about finding “the right path.”
It’s about:
→ identifying what’s foreclosing your future
→ composing multiple possible alternatives
→ and actually testing them in your life
Not someday. Now.
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That’s the work of the Virtual Futuring Sprint.
A 4-week space to:
• map what’s limiting your future
• design 3–5 radically different scenarios
• and begin prototyping them through real experiments
This isn’t therapy.
This isn’t strategy.
It’s practice.
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I’m putting together the next cohort now.
If you want to be part of it:
DM me “FUTURE” or email me
to get on the early list when registration opens.
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The future isn’t predicted.
It’s composed.
PRESENTER ANNOUNCEMENT
J D’Arrigo
Who has the right to mandate living?
At Dangerous Stories (October 1-3, Irvine) J draws upon the work of Alexandre Baril to step beyond critical suicidology’s gentler critique of pathologizing frameworks, inviting us to reckon with the question most in our field refuse to ask: Should suicide prevention be our professional obligation just because licensing boards say so?
Suicide can feel devastating in a world where so many who want to live are dying. Often without warning, without consent, and without justice. In this context, suicide confronts us with a painful paradox: life is both fiercely desired and, for some, unbearably hard to continue.
How do we live with this tension?
The field offers prevention. J asks: What about accompaniment?
Where do people living in relationship with suicide go to talk about dying and living in the meantime? To explore the “what ifs” and “maybes” keeping them alive for now? These conversations can’t happen in prevention’s framework. Prevention precludes them.
This conversation is about troubling the western mandate that privileges life’s sanctity and treats death as failure. It’s about creating space for what remains unspeakable in our profession. It’s about questioning taken for granted efforts to eradicate suicidality, and moving towards “new ways to imagine it and to live, and sometimes die, with it.” (Baril, 2023) It’s about grappling with the right to refuse the injunction to live.
Dangerous? Absolutely. So is prevention as usual.
In this episode of The Radical Therapist, Chris sits down with youth organizers Chloe Yates and Rosie Williams of Mad Youth Organise to explore a radically different approach to the so-called “mental health crisis.” What happens when we stop treating distress as an individual pathology and start understanding it as a rational response to social, political, and economic conditions?
Drawing on their work with Just Treatment, Chloe and Rosie challenge the dominant narratives of awareness culture, diagnostic labeling, and therapeutic individualism. Together, they make the case that rising rates of youth distress cannot be separated from the influence of Big Tech, precarious futures, and systems that privatize suffering while avoiding accountability.
We explore how Mad Youth Organise reframes lived experience as leadership, critiques the role of algorithms in shaping identity and mental health, and calls for collective action over individualized solutions. This conversation pushes beyond therapy as a site of healing alone and asks what becomes possible when care is reimagined as something political, relational, and shared.
The Five Remembrances and Impermanence. I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
PRESENTER ANNOUNCEMENT
Jonathan Miranda
A client reached the limits of insight and still longed for something more.
Jonathan presents at Dangerous Stories (October 1-3, Irvine) with a question that haunts every therapist who’s ever felt the technique fall away: What becomes possible in the actual presence of another person?
Not more insight. Not better interventions. Not deeper analysis. Something more felt than explained. Something that happens in the encounter itself when we stop performing therapy and start meeting as humans.
“A Human Experience” is an experiential workshop for a moment of distance, performance, and disconnection. When therapy has become a series of correct moves, therapeutic questions, and professional performances, what gets lost? What remains unavailable in all our sophisticated frameworks?
Through story, reflection, and shared inquiry, Jonathan invites participants into the thing itself. Not talking about connection but creating conditions where it might become possible. Not explaining presence but experimenting with it. Not describing the human but risking the encounter.
This is therapy’s ghost question: After all the training, all the models, all the expertise, can we still simply meet another person? Do we remember how?
Nine presenters risking actual encounter:
marcela polanco | Catherine Liu | Chris Hoff | Larry Zucker | Jonny Kosmo | Will Sherwin | Finishing School | Jonathan Miranda
Let’s build something dangerous together.
/dangerous-stories/
