wtf is life

What does it actually take to heal, not just manage symptoms or get through the week, but to grow? Dr. Irene Hurford, MD, is a psychiatrist who works from a non-biological frame. She sees the person and their development first, and the diagnosis and prescription pad second. In this conversation we get into what robust psychological treatment can look like, including with people experiencing psychosis, a population often written off as reachable only through medication. Irene talks about medication as a supplement rather than a cure: sometimes helpful, sometimes necessary, but rarely the whole story. We also explore what developmental pain feels like from the inside: the disorientation, the grief, the sense that something is breaking when something may actually be forming. Irene makes the case that this process isn't reserved for the severely ill. It's a human one, and most of us are somewhere in it. Both of us being proud patients in analytic treatment. Heal on my dudes!

We think language describes reality. What if it's actually building the room you're stuck in?

This episode goes deep into psycholinguistics, Wittgenstein, and the strange architecture of the analytic mind — asking what happens when the words available to you become the walls around you. We talk about alexithymia not as a deficit but as a kind of exile: what it means to feel something with no linguistic door back out. And we look at analytic training itself as a slow, often disorienting process of being handed a new vocabulary — one that can either free you to think thoughts you didn't have language for, or quietly cage you inside someone else's theory.

Is language the thing that lets the soul speak, or the bars it speaks through? Probably both. That's the episode.

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This episode we ask the dumbest smart question we could find: how many holes does a body actually have? It's a topology bit that turns into an epistemology bit, because it turns out "how many holes" depends entirely on how you define a hole — and that's basically the whole problem with diagnosing a mind too. We get into why mental illness makes a lot more sense as a functional disease than a static one — not a broken part, but a broken process, which is a very different thing to try to fix. That takes us from William James's pragmatism all the way to Mark Solms's neuropsychoanalysis, with some cybernetics and emergent-systems thinking in between, because apparently we can't talk about the mind for twenty minutes without also talking about ontology. We get it wrong a few times along the way. That's kind of the point though. Thanks again Dr. Kristian!

Catherine joins Dr. Max for an hour on the thing every clinician is taught to hold and no one likes to talk about plainly: the erotic pull of the consulting room. We get into transference and its afternoon weather, the difference between feeling love and acting on it, and why the boundary isn't prudishness but the very thing that makes the work possible.

We lean on Gabbard and Davies to trace the fight for a developmental, relational therapy — one that takes desire seriously instead of wishing it away — and we make the case for the neutral frame as a sanctuary rather than a cage: the container that lets a patient feel everything precisely because nothing will be enacted and everything will stay as if.

It's a solemn conversation about ethics, longing, and the discipline of restraint. It's also funny, because we are both hilarious, and because the only honest way into this material is never to be too serious.

wtf is life anyway?

please join me and mel in this proverbial fireside chat and we'll bring the lube as we dive head first into what makes love, love; hate, hate; women, women; and men, men. we've got it all here people. this one ain't for philosophy or psychology nerds alone. Mel shares her gift for gab all over the place, messying and expanding our understanding of sexuality, humanity and what makes life absurd and painful and fun all at the same time. cleanup not included. your interior life matters. your feelings are information. healing is possible. live, love, laugh, like, comment, share and subscribe!

hack the mainframe! please join us in this insightful conversation about the problems and positives to psychological testing, the seductive appeal of knowledge and diagnoses, ground truth in the person, scientism, diagnosis vs prognosis, the causal power and value of experiential gain and much much more! your interior life matters. your feelings are information. healing is possible. live, love, laugh, like, comment, share and subscribe!

please steep in this in-depth conversation about how our fears, taboos and censors--inside and out--continue to perpetuate the public health crisis of suicide. it is only through experiential understanding that we can liberate our selves and those we care about most from this most alienating form of suffering. people must be heard, felt, seen and understood. this is not a problem to do with reason, but to do with love and hate. your interior life matters. your feelings are information. healing is possible. live, love, laugh, like, comment, share and subscribe!

enjoy this in-depth conversation into what makes couple's counseling actually therapeutic with catherine jensen as we explore the nuances to appreciating the relationship itself as something to be understood, felt and clarified. find out why your partner picks their nose or doesn't tip or never does the dishes!your interior life matters. your feelings are information. healing is possible. live, love, laugh, like, comment, share and subscribe!

a crucial dive into the uncanny overlap between meaningful psychotherapy and poetry. this conversation celebrates the ineffable and intangible ground that gives rise to development, healing and growth in our person. it is our ever-maddening humanity that generates our capacity for discovery. your interior life matters. your feelings are information. healing is possible. laugh, like, comment, share and subscribe!

a deep dive into what makes diagnosis matter with Dr. Awais Aftab MD. This meaningful conversation involves and includes and invites the reality that diagnostic pluralism can give rise to more effective and individualized treatments for many psychiatric/psychological illnesses. The more we can integrate treatment approaches, the better outcomes we will have. The interior life matters. Healing is possible. like, comment, share and subscribe!