The Taproot Podcast - The Story Science Forgot: Why Psychotherapy Needs Narrative More Than Ever

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

The Story Science Forgot: Why Psychotherapy Needs Narrative More Than Ever by Joel Blackstock LICSW-S MSW PIP no. 4135C-S | Dec 15, 2025 | 0 comments Joseph Campbell is arguably one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. If you have watched a Marvel movie or read a modern fantasy novel or sat in a screenwriter’s workshop you have encountered his fingerprints. George Lucas explicitly credited Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as the structural backbone of Star Wars. Every major Hollywood studio has copies of his work floating around their development offices. Even filmmakers who actively deconstruct his monomyth model still have to be in conversation with Campbell to do so. You cannot escape him if you are telling stories in the Western tradition. But here is the thing about Joseph Campbell that we need to hold in our minds when we think about what psychology has become. He was a showman. He was a legitimate scholar but also someone who understood that the truth sometimes needs a little theatrical assistance. The Showman and the Bear Bones One of Campbell’s favorite presentation techniques involved showing an image of ancient bear bones that were perhaps two million years old and discovered in a cave. The bones had been arranged in a particular way with pieces shoved back into the bear’s mouth. Campbell would present this with his characteristic gravitas and explain that the ancients understood that nature must eat of itself. They knew that to take life is to participate in a cyclical loop of giving and receiving. The bear consuming itself was a ritual recognition that we are all food for something else. It is a beautiful interpretation. It is probably even partially true. We know through depth psychology and early anthropology that prehistoric humans were almost certainly trying to make meaning of existential realities. Ritual practices around death and consumption are well documented across cultures. Campbell was not fabricating this from nothing. But also come on Campbell. These are two million year old bones shoved in a hole. Maybe the jaw just collapsed that way. Maybe soil shifted. Maybe an animal disturbed them centuries after burial. He did not know. He could not know. And yet he presented it with the confidence of revealed truth. Here is why this matters. Campbell’s influence is incalculable despite his methodological looseness. He told a story that resonated so deeply with something in the human psyche that it became the invisible architecture of our entire entertainment industry. He was not objectively right about those bear bones but he was pointing at something real about how humans make meaning. The story he told about that meaning making was more powerful than any peer reviewed paper could have been. We need to remember this when we think about psychotherapy and what it has become. The Dream I Had and the World I Found When I first entered the field of psychotherapy I had a fantasy. I thought I was going to be Joseph Campbell. I was going to find my way to someplace like Berkeley and immerse myself in the grand conversation between psychology and mythology and anthropology and philosophy. I imagined something like the Esalen Institute in the 1970s where Fritz Perls developed Gestalt therapy and where researchers and mystics and clinicians sat together in hot springs and argued about the nature of consciousness. Those places barely exist anymore. What I found instead was a competitive model built on H-indexes and impact factors. I found academic departments that had been siloed into increasingly narrow specializations. Each department defended its territorial boundaries against incursion from neighboring disciplines. The institute model where a psychologist might spend an afternoon talking to an anthropologist about ritual has been systematically dismantled. What we have instead are specialists who do not read outside their sub specialty and researchers whose entire careers depend on defending one narrow hypothesis. We have an incentive structure that actively punishes the kind of cross pollination that leads to genuine discovery. The Hollow Room: How the Biomedical Model Fails This is not just an academic inconvenience. It is a catastrophe for the human sciences and for the actual treatment of patients. There is a reason Freud stuck around. It is not because psychoanalysis was rigorously validated through randomized controlled trials. It is because as the science writer John Horgan observed old paradigms die only when better paradigms replace them. Freud lives on because science has not produced a theory of and therapy for the mind potent enough to render psychoanalysis obsolete once and for all. The biomedical model promised us a better story. It told us that humans are biological machines and that suffering is just a mechanical malfunction. It promised that if we could just find the right neurotransmitter or the right gene we could fix the machine. But look at what that looks like in practice. It looks like the 15 minute medication management appointment. A person comes in with their life falling apart. They are grieving a divorce or wrestling with the trauma of their childhood or facing a crisis of meaning. And the doctor looks at a checklist. They ask about sleep. They ask about appetite. They ask about energy levels. They treat the symptoms like check engine lights on a dashboard. They prescribe a pill to dim the lights and they send the person away. It looks like manualized Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. This is the gold standard of evidence based treatment. But in the vacuum of a manual it becomes absurd. A patient might be crying about the loss of a child and a therapist who is strictly adhering to the protocol has to redirect them to the agenda for Module 3 which is identifying cognitive distortions. The model has no room for the tragedy of the situation. It only has room for the erroneous thought that the patient is having about the tragedy. The result is that by most measures we are not actually helping people more effectively than we were fifty years ago. To understand the depth of this failure, we must look at the “smoking gun” of the psychiatric establishment: the STAR*D study. For nearly two decades, this massive, taxpayer-funded study was held up as the irrefutable proof that the “medication merry-go-round” worked. It cost $35 million and was cited thousands of times to justify the idea that if a patient didn’t get better on one antidepressant, you simply switched them to another, and then another. The study claimed a “cumulative remission rate” of 67%. It told us that two-thirds of people would be cured if they just complied with the protocol. This was a lie built on methodological quicksand. A forensic re-analysis of the data (Pigott et al., 2023) revealed that the researchers had inflated their success rates through a series of stunning methodological sleights of hand. The original design called for the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) to be the primary outcome measure. But when that scale wasn’t showing the numbers they wanted, investigators switched to a secondary, unblinded, self-report questionnaire (the QIDS-SR) which painted a rosier picture. Furthermore, the re-analysis exposed that hundreds of patients who dropped out due to side effects were excluded from the failure count, effectively scrubbing the negative data. Even worse, over 900 patients who didn’t even meet the minimum severity for depression were included to boost the numbers. When the data was re-analyzed using the study’s original criteria and including all participants, the cumulative remission rate plummeted from 67% to 35%. But the most damning statistic is the sustained recovery rate. Of the 4,041 patients who entered the trial, only a tiny fraction achieved remission and actually stayed well. When accounting for dropouts and relapses over the one-year follow-up period, a mere 108 patients achieved remission and stayed well without relapsing. That is a sustained recovery rate of 2.7%. If a heart surgery or cancer treatment had a failure rate of 97.3%, it would be abandoned. Yet, this study was championed by investigators with deep financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, and the results were codified into clinical guidelines that still rule the profession today. This is the indictment: we have built an entire system of care on a statistical fabrication, prioritizing the protection of the model over the healing of the human. I have big problems with Freud. I have big problems with classical psychoanalysis. I am more of a Jungian. But here is what the depth psychologists understood that the biomedical model forgot. Humans are not just biological machines. We are meaning making creatures who navigate the world through story. When you take away our stories you do not make us more rational. You make us lost. The Flock of Dodos This separation of science from narrative has hurt the researchers too. In his book The Ghost Lab journalist Matt Hongoltz-Hetling uses the flock of dodos metaphor to describe this phenomenon. He argues that specialized creatures that are perfectly adapted to narrow environments become extinct when conditions change. Academic science has become a flock of dodos. A neuroscientist studies one particular brain region. A psychologist studies one particular therapeutic intervention. An anthropologist studies one particular culture. Nobody is allowed to step back and ask what all of this means together. When you silo information into separate academic disciplines instead of organizing it into a holistic understanding you kill the narratives that are already there. You cannot see the story until you step back far enough to recognize the pattern. Heidegger and the AI Bubble One of the primary functions of a subjective narrative in an objective field like psychotherapy is that it lets us start with things we consider self evident. These are things that do not need evidence because they are the ground upon which evidence stands. Things like humanity is important. Things like we contain multiplicities and conflicting parts. Things like consciousness is a mystery. The biomedical model has no way to accommodate these self evident truths because they are not measurable. You cannot run a randomized controlled trial on human dignity. Martin Heidegger understood this trajectory. He warned that science and technology were becoming self justifying systems that asked only whether something could be done and never whether it should be done. We are watching this play out right now with Large Language Models and Artificial Intelligence. The tech industry is boiling seawater and consuming enormous amounts of our remaining resources to build ever larger systems. As Ed Zitron has documented the current AI boom is likely a bubble that will crash and burn. It may leave us with a Google monopoly on Gemini that will not actually help anybody. Should we be doing this? Should we be fundamentally restructuring our economy around technology whose benefits are speculative at best? The Heideggerian answer is that we are not even capable of asking these questions properly because we have lost the narrative framework within which “should” makes sense. When everything is reduced to capability and efficiency the concept of values disappears. The Perennial and the Possible Can we just recognize that having a livable planet is probably a self evidencing goal? Can we recognize that having a psychotherapy willing to engage with perennial philosophy might be more valuable than another meta analysis demonstrating small effect sizes for manualized interventions? This is what I mean by reintroducing narrative. I do not mean replacing evidence with myth. I mean recognizing that the facts do not speak for themselves. Data requires interpretation. Interpretation requires a framework. And frameworks are stories about what matters. The story science forgot is the story of science itself. It is the story of how inquiry emerged from human communities trying to understand their world. We can recover this story. We can rebuild the connections that the academic silos have severed. The path is there. It always has been. We just need to be brave enough to walk it. The Exodus of the Sick If academic science has become a flock of dodos clinical practice has become something arguably worse. It has become a reenactment of the Milgram experiment where the system plays the role of the authority figure and the patient plays the victim. We often remember Stanley Milgram’s famous 1961 study as a lesson about the capacity for evil but its deeper lesson was about the capacity for distance. When the subject had to physically touch the victim compliance with the order to harm them dropped to 30 percent. The White Coat only retained its authority when it created a buffer between the human actions and their consequences.   Modern psychotherapy has built a massive administrative White Coat that separates the healer from the healed. This is not just a metaphor. It is a structural reality that is actively driving patients out of the profession and into the arms of pseudoscience. The Bureaucracy as Trauma For a patient in crisis the Evidence Based system often functions as a machine of exclusion. A study on healthcare administrative burdens reveals that the psychological cost of navigating billing and insurance denials and intake forms acts as a friction that hits the most vulnerable the hardest. We ask trauma survivors to retell their stories to three different intake coordinators before they ever see a therapist. This process is itself retraumatizing. When they finally reach a provider they are often met with the biomedical gaze which is a checklist driven assessment that reduces their complex narrative of suffering to a code for billing. As the Australian Psychological Society has noted the chemical imbalance theory and the medicalization of distress have failed to reduce stigma and have instead left patients feeling defective and unheard. The result is a profound Low Trust environment. Theodore Porter in his book Trust in Numbers argues that we only rely on strict mechanical numbers when we do not trust people. We use the DSM and manualized protocols because insurers do not trust clinicians to judge and clinicians do not trust themselves to deviate. The Great Split: Why Research and Practice Are Divorcing This creates a fundamental schism that explains why the profession feels like it is cracking in half. On one side you have the academic researchers who are incentivized by grant funding and publication metrics. To get these rewards they must isolate variables and create reproducible manualized protocols. This means they must strip away the very thing that makes therapy work which is the messy and unrepeatable human relationship. On the other side you have the clinicians who are incentivized by patient outcomes. They are in the room with the messiness. They see that the manualized protocol fails the complex trauma patient so they improvise. They integrate. They use intuition. The academic looks at the clinician and sees a cowboy who ignores the data. The clinician looks at the academic and sees a bureaucrat who has never treated a suicidal patient. This is why the research is no longer informing the practice. We have created two different languages. The researcher speaks in p-values and population averages while the clinician speaks in case studies and individual breakthroughs. Why Pseudoscience Wins the Trust War This low trust environment creates a vacuum that wellness influencers are all too happy to fill. We often mock the public for turning to unverified supplements and TikTok diagnosticians and quantum mysticism. But we have to ask what these influencers are providing that we are not. They are providing narrative. They are providing connection. They are providing a. parasocial yes but still, High Trust experience. A recent analysis suggests that wellness fads thrive not because people are stupid but because the influencers offer a feeling of personal validation that the medical system denies. Even AI chatbots are now being described by users as more humane than doctors because the AI listens to the whole story without looking at a watch or a checklist. When a patient is told by a doctor that their pain is idiopathic or psychosomatic because it does not show up on a lab test and then an influencer tells them I see you and I believe you and here is a story about why this is happening the patient will choose the influencer every time. The trust gap drives them away from care that might actually help and toward solutions that feel good but do nothing. The Clinician’s Moral Injury This leaves the ethical psychotherapist in a state of moral injury. We are forced to participate in a system that we know is alienating the very people we are trying to help. We are trained to value the therapeutic alliance or the bond of trust above all else yet we work in a system designed to sever it with paperwork and time limits and standardized protocols. We have to put down the White Coat of administrative distance. We have to stop hiding behind the Evidence Based label when that label is being used to deny the reality of the person in front of us. Proposals for a Unified Future If we want to stop this exodus and heal the split we need specific structural changes. We cannot just hope for better insurance reimbursement. We need to change what we consider valid science. First we must re-legitimize the systematic case study. For a century the detailed narrative of a single patient was the gold standard of learning. We replaced it with the aggregate data of the randomized controlled trial. We need to bring it back. We need journals that publish rigorous detailed accounts of what actually happens in the room when a patient gets better. Second we need to build open source repositories for clinical observation. Currently the wisdom of the field is locked behind for profit paywalls or lost in the private notes of isolated therapists. We need a Wikipedia of Clinical Practice where thousands of clinicians can document what they are seeing in real time. If ten thousand therapists report that somatic processing helps complex trauma that is a data set that rivals any RCT. Third we need to teach philosophy and narrative in graduate school again. We are training technicians when we should be training healers. A therapist who knows how to read a spreadsheet but does not know how to understand a story is useless to a human being in crisis. If we do not offer a therapy that is human and narrative and deeply relational we will continue to lose our patients to those who do even if what they are offering is a lie. The Mirror and the Map: Why Math is a Story We often treat mathematics as if it were the bedrock of reality itself. We act as though a p-value is a piece of the universe, like a rock or a proton. But we must remember that math is not the thing itself. It is a representation of the thing. It is a map, not the territory. It is a mirror, not the face. Theodore Porter’s work in Trust in Numbers reminds us that we reach for these mirrors when we do not trust our own eyes. But the mirror is useless without someone to look into it and interpret the reflection. Data by itself is pointless. It is a pile of bricks without an architect. It requires interpretation to become meaning, and interpretation is fundamentally a narrative act. When we try our best to make a purely objective study, we are still telling a story. We are saying, “These numbers represent this phenomenon.” Then another researcher comes along, looks at the same numbers, and tells a different story: “No, they represent that.” This conflict isn’t a failure of science; it is science. The Storytellers of Science The greatest breakthroughs in history did not come from people who just crunched numbers. They came from people who could see the story the numbers were trying to tell. These stories are really damn interesting, often stranger and more beautiful than fiction. Consider August Kekulé. He didn’t discover the structure of the benzene molecule by staring at a spreadsheet. He discovered it by dreaming of a snake eating its own tail—the Ouroboros. His subjective, narrative brain provided the image that unlocked the objective chemical reality. The data was there, but it needed a myth to make it intelligible. Look at Quantum Physics. The raw math of quantum mechanics is cold and abstract. But when physicists like Erwin Schrödinger or Werner Heisenberg looked at that data, they saw a story about uncertainty, about cats that are both alive and dead, about a universe that only decides what it is when it is observed. They didn’t just calculate; they interpreted. They told a story about reality that was so radical it changed how we understand existence. Even in psychology, the data of the “talking cure” was messy and anecdotal until Freud and Jung gave us the language of the Unconscious and the Archetype. Were they objectively “right” in every detail? No. But they gave us a framework—a story—that allowed us to navigate the chaos of the human mind. They provided the map that allowed us to enter the territory. The Final Integration We have spent the last fifty years trying to strip this storytelling capacity out of our profession in a misguided attempt to be taken seriously by the “hard” sciences. In doing so, we have thrown away our most powerful tool. The brain is a story-processing machine. To treat it with checklists and spreadsheets is to deny its fundamental nature. We need to be brave enough to pick up the mirror again. We need to be brave enough to look at the data—whether it’s the 2.7% recovery rate of STAR*D or the trembling pupil of a trauma patient—and ask, “What is the story here?” The path forward isn’t about choosing between science and narrative. It is about realizing that science is a narrative. It is the grandest, most complex, most rigorous story we have ever tried to tell. And it is time we started telling it properly again.

Oh, I can change. Oh, I can change. Oh, I can change. Oh, I can change your ways. Well, we'll see about that. We'll see if I can change your ways. This is Dr. Lara Schlesinger with the, I'm just kidding. This is Joel with the Tabruit Therapy Therapy Collective podcast. Anyone remember Dr. Lara? What happened to her? My mom used to always have that playing in the car. Man, she was mean. The people that email me and say that I'm too mean, listen to that one. Or the people who tell me that I'm not mean enough that I should be more fringe and more weird. Email or listen to that show.

She's very mean. It's been a long time. And if you're still subscribed to this podcast, thank you for waiting for the next season. I don't know if this is a new season, but what I've started to do is want to do some little updates when I'm thinking about something. I've learned that if I wait, I don't remember what I was thinking about. If you're 20, keep some notebooks because by the time we're pushing 40, hot damn, you'll wish that you had written those ideas down when you had the time to do it. This is called The Story Science Forgot,

why psychotherapy needs a narrative more than ever. So Joseph Campbell's the mythographer that I talk about a lot. he is sort of responsible for the Hollywood blockbuster indirectly. When Star Wars changed Hollywood, George Lucas was a UCLA, I think, a film student, and he read The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and that's Joseph Campbell's book. And then he said, yeah, there is this pattern to stories that are unconscious longs for, and we want to hear the story a certain way, and that's been repeated in mythology. trying to apply that structure to a movie and he did and um they've been doing that ever since

there's the joseph campbell reading room and um star wars sort of ended the weird third act problems of the 70s and the autour movement and resulted in something that looks like the marvel blockbuster now which is not really joseph campbell's fault i don't know if you would have liked those um but that's who he was he said that there was this monom myth um a lot of people are probably familiar with him i've mentioned him before i write about him a lot on the blog but um You know, he was not wrong. He identified these broad patterns in mythology that once you see, you can't really unsee, which is why he was effective.

But he was also a little bit of a showman, which is why I think he ended up having the success that he did. Well, I mean that, and he also got pretty lucky with the time that he wrote it. And he wrote, Here With a Thousand Faces, this book about mythology in the 50s. And it didn't sell. And then he kept teaching and, you know, most professors that write like a book about the thing that they do professionally, like don't really expect to break the charts a lot of the time. And then all of a sudden his royalties jumped through the roof in the 60s. And he was like, what's going on, man? Like, why are you guys reading my books?

And the hippies started telling him because we're taking LSD and it's showing us mythology and stories and shamanism and your books, man. They're like academic and cool and you're square, but you're hip. and he was surprised so it sort of elevated him to this level and one I don't want to biography Campbell too much but like one of the things that he would do that um was a he did it a lot um especially when he was getting started he had a lot of the same talks he would kind of repackage which is fine you know stand-up comedian doesn't write a new set every day um but what he would do was like um he had this image of bare bones and one of his um they were from a cave they were millions of years old and I think two million to be precise or about that I don't know the

carbon date on the bear bone sorry but it was an extinct bear it's a cave bear one of the ones that you know once people started moving around they killed all the animals like I used to be like why are there lions and stuff in the Bible because there's not like you know there's not lions in these countries or these people well there used to be but they're gone used to be seals in Texas and panthers in Florida and all kinds of things but it was a you know I think a cave bear but an extinct bear and it's in this old tomb and it's buried sort of ritualistically and it's um you know leg bone i think one of the bones maybe a little arm bone i think it's a leg bone because the picture is pretty thick is shoved back through the mouth of the bear and it he would say

you know to these college students this shows that uh the circle of life was understood by the ancient man that hadn't even discovered writing hadn't even stopped evolving didn't even have modern brain like we have and they they buried these objects ritualistically which you know they did it was intentional and they shoved the mouth of the bear open it was eating of itself to give of itself to show that nature destroys itself in order to give new life and that we're in this process of cycles of creation and ancient people absolutely did believe that i mean Campbell's anthropology and archaeological record there about a lot of things we not know exactly what they thought about the Venus of Villendorf but we have a pretty good idea of the symbol

symbols, the forces that these symbols were pointing to. And the bear bones, you know, he would use to illustrate this. But here, like, here's the thing. They're two million-year-old bones. Like, the bone could have just fallen into the bear's mouth. They could have thrown it in the hole. It may not mean that, you know, and he would talk in this way that was very deterministic, but it was also compelling. And he told a story. And it was a story that resonated so deeply with something in the human psyche, they became this, you know, invisible architecture of an industry now and made him one of the most popular speakers in the world at the time. He died pretty young.

I wonder what would have happened to Campbell sometimes because a lot of the male Jungians tend to kind of go mad. They don't age well. They get kind of weird by the end of their life. And I worry about that with myself. I talk about James Hellman a lot. but I'm digressing here. So, you know, Campbell didn't know that he was objectively right about those bare bones,

but he was pointing at something that was real about humans make meaning. So it didn't really matter if the person who put those bones in the ground two million years ago had the exact same thought process that Campbell was saying because he was using it as a piece of evidence to kind of gesture at a story and a bigger truth than whatever this caveman was thinking when they put that there. And that story that he told about making meaning was more powerful than any peer-reviewed paper. And it connected a lot of people to depth psychology in a way that probably let depth psychology

survive in a way that it wouldn't have if it hadn't overlapped with the culture because there were all these fresh recruits, the people that are obsessive, that they watch Star Wars, and then they want to learn about the mythology that Star Wars was based on, and then they want to look at the people that Campbell's pointing at, and they come across people like Jung and other mythographers and anthropologists that are in the up psychology space. Campbell was not terribly honest, I think, about how much he took from Jung. He really could have written the same book and been a Jungian analyst, but that wasn't his bag. He, you know, he mentions Jung a little bit, but he criticized this Freud. You know,

I've said on the weird history of psychotherapy series, he says that Freud was sitting while, or fishing while he was sitting on a whale. And then he read Freud every year. And then eventually he did clear reading Freud because he wasn't going to be. get anything out of it anymore. But every time he read Jung, it changed. That's the most credit that I've ever found across all of his writing that he gave him, that Jung, he never read him the same. And no matter where he was with his discoveries, and no matter how many times he'd read it, he got something new out of Jung. But he didn't give a lot of credit to the hero's journey, really kind of being this deconstruction of a depth psychology process, you know, as much

as some people would like, but, you know, whatever. I don't want to legate feuds from the 1960s. when I first went into the field of psychotherapy, I had this kind of fantasy because I read a lot of Campbell in these things in high school. I wrote my college entry essay actually on him. And I was trying to find this place like Berkeley in the 70s and I wanted to immerse myself in the grand conversation between psychology and mythology and anthropology and philosophy and trauma and integrated care. And I imagine something like the Eastland Institute in the 1970s, you know, because I had read about it and I didn't know as a high schooler that the world was the way that it was now. And, you know, Fritz Perl's developed Gestalt therapy and the, you know, so much stuff.

And I don't want to get lost in the history here. But these researchers and clinicians and mystics, they sat together in Hot Springs. And they argued about the nature of consciousness at Eastland. And, you know, those places barely exist anymore. Institutes, which is one of the reason why I founded Taproot Therapy Collective as an institute that they probably would have been a lot wealthier. if I had gone in a direction where I was not running a socialist collective, but when you do that, you get the best people because you don't make any money because you pay the money to them, and you're bundling the cost of services, and it lets you have the luxury of getting the brightest

people in one place so that you can develop these new things. And when I first came out of school, you know, before I found a taproot, when I was, you know, trying to find a place to work or find a professional identity, I found this competitive model that psychology had turned into that was built on H indexes and impact factors. If you're not familiar with those, that's how you give value to your work. You know, the H index tells you how much somebody has cited your paper. And the impact factor says how many people actually read this research journal. Yeah, you've got to publish, but is this journal really worth it, damn?

And that people were chasing those numbers in a way that had kind of ripped the profession a part. And that's always been a part of psychology. I mean, a lot of people are like, well, I went to school in the 70s, and we still had that. It was a big book in the library. You flipped through, and it still told you, you know, and that's true. These things are remarkably different now. I read about that a little bit. I, you know, I found these academic departments had been siloed into these narrow specializations. You weren't allowed to connect the dots anymore. You know, people are like, that's fine, but you don't have a PhD in anthropology. so you can't talk about that.

And I'm like, well, I mean, we're all kind of studying psychology. Like, aren't we? You know, you're, and, you know, all these departments defended their territory, these boundaries, and they didn't want other disciplines to merge. I mean, people like David Tacey, I think, is probably one of the better academics working in the time that he was working. You know, he was a threat because he knew too much about too many things. And academia wants you to know a whole lot about one thing.

But I think that that is sort of a way, I mean, maybe sort of intentionally, maybe sort of unintentionally of keeping the profession blind. Because everybody's touching one part of the elephant. They can't see the whole thing. And so, you know, what we have instead now are these specialists who don't read outside of their subspecialty. Even in psychology, people will say, well, I can't say anything about marriage and family counseling because I wasn't trained in that. And it's like, well, I mean, you don't want to say you're an expert, but like, you know something. And there's a defensiveness.

And this is not just, you know, like academic inconvenience. It's a catastrophe for the human sciences and for the actual treatment of trauma patients. I mean, I think this is one of the best cases for why something like Freud that's not terribly useful and not terribly correct stuck around. You know, psychoanalysis is still practiced in New York pretty widely. That may be one of the only places. But like it's not because psychoanalysis was rigorously validated in these controlled trials. It's because, you know, John Horgan says this, you know, that I think he says like old paradigms die, but only when we have better paradigms to replace them. And science never provided a better story than psychoanalysis.

And because science never provided a better story, the story that existed stuck around because a story can only be replaced by another story, not a number. And the biomedical model has failed to provide us a better story. The biomedical model of psychology. If you're studying cancer, my arguments against the way that we do evidence-based practice are not relevant to you. If you're studying quantum physics at CERN, like my friend who hopefully comes on the podcast this season, you know, that is a hard science. What I'm describing is people trying to make psychologists,

which is a soft science, a hard science, pretending that it is. But then worse, pretending that it is only when it suits them, only as a cudgel, not where it could be innovative and grow. And it's that double standard that, you know, it takes 15 minutes for most people. You know, that's a long appointment with the psychiatrist before you get put on medication. You know, this person is, and I don't have a problem with medication, I think some people should be on it. and I think some people are ever medicated. You know, I'm a metal ground.

People get angry because they say I'm anti-science because I said something about medication and other people get angry because they say you can heal yourself with crystals and you don't need antidepressants. I'm not in either camp. Feel free to continue to not like me. Don't email me, please.

But, you know, this doctor now looks at a checklist and they ask about your appetite and they ask about your energy levels and then they treat symptoms like check engine lights on this dashboard, and they prescribe a pill. and then they send you out. And that is not the way that psychiatry used to be practiced. And psychiatrists also used to do therapy.

The people that you're reading about, Irvin Yalom, you know, that got a lot of people into therapy. He was a lot of people's gateway drug. He was a psychiatrist that actually did therapy. They don't anymore. I was watching the show Evil recently, and the psychiatrist is like sitting there and doing therapy and prescribing a medication. It's like, how often does that happen?

And how often can this supposedly poor character afford, you know, an hour, two hours of psychotherapy from a psychiatrist a week? You know, how often could she, how often would she afforded if it was a social worker like myself doing the therapy? You know, it's expensive. You know, if you find a psychiatrist in Birmingham who's still doing therapy, they're probably doing Ericksonian hypnosis or something. And they're probably pushing 80 at this point. Those are the only ones that I know that are doing it. And, you know, the result of that is that we started to move to these checklists and inventories and objective assessments that we pretended could do intuition and thinking and subjective science for us. And that hasn't worked out because the more evidence-based, and I don't really think the way we practice psychology in America is evidence-based, but the way that what we call,

basis of evidence. As we have moved closer to the way we have defined the basis of evidence to a more evidence-based psychology, our outcomes have gotten worse. So why? Like if it really is an evidence-based model, why when you are doing it, is it not working as well as it worked before? You look at something like the Stard-Y study. I'm not going to talk about the Stardee study that much. You can Google it. You can look at one of my articles, many of my articles. But, you know, that was a study that it was a meta study. So it was like a pilot study, and then all of this other data was drawn from it. And the way they stack these things, if the initial thing was not right,

then the billion dollars of research he spent on other studies following the initial study, all are bunk. And it guided psychiatry in this country for 10 years. It was seen as the most comprehensive thing. And then it came out because there were a couple critics. that it was complete bullshit, that they were covering up in the thing that mugwort or St. John's ward or something had like a better outcome than Welbutrin. The idea that you could just do CBT and then send somebody to a psychiatrist, and then if they tried at least seven medications, most people would get better. You know, for nearly two decades, this massive taxpayer, you paid for it, funded study.

They didn't pay for it, but you paid for it. study was held up as this irrefutable proof that the medication merry-go-round of trying these different things, you know, and it cost $35 million. The initial study was cited thousands, thousands of times. If you want to say H indexes and impact factors matter, that's how much this was, one of the most cited studies. You know, if they didn't get better, if the patient didn't get better on the end of depression, you switched it six, seven times.

And the study claimed that there was a cumulative remission rate of 67%. I mean, it told us that two-thirds of people would be cured if they just complied with this protocol of CBT and medication. And this was a lie. This forensic reanalogist, it was Pigeo that did it. And then I think the guy who popularized a lot of his work was the, what's the Madden America guy's name? If I wasn't trying to think about it, it would come to me. But he popularized a lot of that. And the original design called for the Hamilton rating scale of depression to be this primary.

outcome measure, you know, the statistical measurement. And when that scale wasn't showing the numbers that they wanted, the investigators switched to the secondary unblinded self-report, this questionnaire, the Q-I-D-S-S-R, I think. And it painted kind of a nicer picture, lots of problems with the study. So I'm not going to go through the whole thing. But a reanalysis at the end of the day exposed that there were hundreds of patients who dropped out due to side effects, and they were excluded from the failure count. So every time somebody said, this sucks, not doing it. They were like, okay, you don't count as somebody who we failed to help. And that's one of my biggest problems with all of the CBT as a gold standard. If you look at those

studies, everybody who says this sucks, so I'm not going to do it for three more months and leaves, those people count as, yeah, they didn't complete the treatment. Well, they didn't complete the treatment because it blew, right? Like, it's not a cancer trial where you get a little bit of the medication. The therapy failed to engage a patient, which is a failure of the therapy modality, of the therapist, not the patient. And because they act like this as medication that you failed to take, then you are not proof that the system doesn't work. So, you know, the most damning statistic, that's 67% after they played with the numbers, it plummeted to 35%. of people get better when they do CBT and then they try, you know, the six or seven drugs on the

smerry go around because there's no way, you know, and I'll give them this. I mean, there's no way for me to look at you and say, this is the antidepressant that's going to work for you. Because I can't test. Nobody can test and say, okay, you've got this parasite or you've got this germ. And so this is the drug that treats that thing. Because you can't do that. You just got to eat them and then see if they work. if you hate them or not, and then you've got to try another one. And that statistic of sustained recovery, so later, you know, 4,000 patients who entered this trial over 4,000 and something, I don't know the whole number, but 4,000 something, they entered

the trial, and this tiny fraction achieve remission, and they stay well, that was normally supposed to be, was reported at 70%, really 67, they rounded up. And then when accounting for dropouts and relapses over this one-year follow-up period where they went back and they looked at it, only 108 patients achieved remission from depression. And they stayed well without relapsing into depression, not I'll call it. They use the word relapse, but it doesn't mean that. And they had, so the recovery rate was actually 2.7%. Okay, if you're doing heart surgery, cancer treatment, and you have a failure rate of not. 97.3 percent, it would be national news. And it would not have affected a fraction of the people

that this study and the effects that it had affected all the people doing psychiatry and therapy in America from more than 10 years. Why do I have to tell you about the Stardee study? This should be the biggest news in the world. And it's not, it's old news now. You know, this, The deep financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry, a bunch of people go through that and they act like they rub their hands in the dark room and they scheme. And they kind of did here because the reason that they changed, I say that's not usually how it works. It's more of an incentive structure that multiple people doing group work and that no one's responsible because everybody's a little bit responsible so nobody is and that bureaucracy is kind of the enemy. And usually that is the case. But in this one, the change to the QIDS was because they realized that what they thought was a placebo.

Bebo, which was St. John's Ward, I believe, which is just like an herb, the fulchromity for depression, was outperforming whilebutrin. I'm not making an argument for St. John's work. I'm just saying, that's what these numbers were doing. That's how meaningful the treatment that we give was working. And, you know, I've got problems with Freud. I have problems I like Jung more than Freud, but like I don't think that everybody needs to be an analysis. I'm not making that argument but you know here's what the depth psychology is understood that these things are systems not checklists that we don't anymore humans are not biological machines we are meaning making creatures who navigate the world through story when you take our stories away you do not make us

more rational you make us more lost one of the biggest criticisms of jungian therapy or depth psychology is like this is just literary criticism that's dressed up to be called therapy and my answer is like, yes. It kind of is. It's helping you make sense of yourself, which is something that humans can't function unless you do. And that's why it works. And it's also why people who are, you know,

they serious don't want to take it seriously because they think that we're supposed to be mental health technicians, that therapy is supposed to look the same for everybody. But they're insecure without a formula that says, when the patient says this, you say, okay, let me identify the cognitive distortion out of the check. checklist of 30. Here's the cognitive distortion. Now I need to pick one of the four interventions that works for this cognitive distortion. Okay, thought-blocking. I'll prescribe that now. And that's

horseshit. It's not good therapy. You know, the flock of dodo's section in the book, The Ghost Lab, we interviewed Matt Hungoltz Hetling twice. He's a buddy mine. He's a nice guy. And he quotes a study where a neuroscientist, you know, it's saying in a publication, that he finds is pretty old, that academic science has become this flock of dodoes. That, and he's not calling them dodoes like they're stupid. He's calling them dodoes like they're going to go extinct. You know, he says that we're not communicating the science well to people and that we're not making the science a story. We're not making it a narrative. We're not letting the numbers tell a story in order to take them seriously. We're kind of

stripping them of meaning and so no one is taking it seriously and they're pivoting to pseudoscience and they're pivoting to folk remedies and the economy gets worse and well hell I can't afford therapy anyway but I'm not really good at admitting that I can't do anything about my situation because I'm a human and so I'm going to project causation on this thing that doesn't work and you know one of those primary functions of a subjective narrative and an objective field like psychotherapy is that it let's us start with things that we consider self-evidence, right? Things that we don't need to do a study to determine because we can just all agree that they are true. And these things do, there are these things that don't need evidence because they are grounds upon which evidence stands,

right? Like, how does the declaration of independence start? They say, we hold these truths to be self-evident. These are our values. Men are created equal. Men are created free. You should be able to pursue happiness. They don't say, well, the pursuit of happiness and the freedom of men and the equality of men is, we did a double-blind, randomized controlled trial, and we think that it's a good idea because it results in these effects. They don't say, it makes people more money if they do this. They just say, this is the reason that we're starting this country, because these things are true. And we, you can say, well, what if that's delusional? well, I think that you run a greater risk of making masses of people delusional when you don't have self-evident truths

because most people agree on things that are self-evident that are uniting and that things that are fringe and weird often most people don't agree with. And the biomedical model has no way to accommodate these self-evident truths because they're not measurable. You can't run a randomized controlled trial on human dignity. You know, Martin Heidegger, understood this, and he warned that science and technology were becoming self-justifying systems that asked only whether something could be done, and not whether or not it should. And we're watching this play out right now with large language models and AI. The tech industry is boiling seawater and consuming enormous amounts of our resources to build these huge systems. And the AI boom is a bubble.

The AI boom is a bubble. It's going to pop. It's probably going to leave Google with Gemini and then some self-hosting models and some super expensive stuff for state actors and maybe corporations, but you're not going to have chat cheap EBT in 10 years, man. Like you're not. You know, should we do this? Should we be fundamentally restructuring our economy for one of the biggest bubbles, like running one of the biggest experiments that we can't bail these out? This won't be the bailout of GM because there's not enough money in government coffers to prop up the value of these companies that can never make back the trillions of dollars that have been

poured into them. You know, can we just recognize that we have, a livable planet is probably a self-evidencing goal can we recognize that having a psychotherapy that will engage with a perennial philosophy might be more valuable than another meta-analysis demonstrating a small effect size for manualized interventions now this is what i mean by reintroducing narrative i don't mean replacing evidence with myth i don't mean replacing science with pseudoscience i mean fixing science to recognize that our brains need stories because they are set up to think that way. And if we need a medicine, if we need an anodyne for our suffering, it's going to be found in somebody being able to make meaning. I mean recognizing that the facts do not speak for

themselves. Data requires interpretation. Interpretation requires a framework and frameworks are stories. The story that science forgot is the story of science itself. It is the story of how inquiry emerged from human communities trying to understand their world. world with the bare bones. We can recover a story. We can rebuild the connections that the academic silos have severed and there's people doing it all over the country now. It's not going to be done by one person. It's not going to be done by hero. It's going to be done by people giving a shit. If academic science has become a flock of dodo's clinical practice has become something arguably worse and it's become a reenactment of the Stanley Milgram experiment where

the system plays the role of authority figure and the patient plays the victim. That's the one where He shocked people. Stanley Milgram was the 1961 study about the human capacity for evil and basically saying that Nazism could happen anywhere. But its deeper lesson was about the capacity for distance. When the subject had to physically touch the victim, compliance with the order to shock the person, I'll back up.

The Milgram experiment you probably learned about in Psych 101, but it's where the guy is just wearing a white, coat. He's not introduced as a doctor. He's just in a white coat and he says, hey, shock the guy in the chair. And the voltages go up until these ones are marked with lethal dosages. It's not real electricity, but the guy in the chair is like, ah, please don't shock me. And most people did it. But if you ask them to reach out and touch the person first, fewer of them did. And when the subject was asked to physically touch the person, 30% less people would shock the person that they had to touch whether than just look at. And that white coat.

The coat retained its authority when it created this buffer between the human actions and their consequences. You know, modern psychotherapy has built this massive administrative white coat that separates the healer from the healed. And this is not a metaphor. It's a structural reality that is actively driving patients out of the profession and into the arms of pseudoscience. You know, for a patient in crisis, the evidence-based system, it functions as, and again, I'm not talking about using science. I'm not talking about what I consider good evidence. I'm talking about what academic clinical psychology right now considers good evidence. You know, there's a study on health care and administrative burdens,

and it shows that the psychological cost of navigating and billing insurance denials and intake forums, it acts as this friction that hits the most vulnerable people the hardest because it drives up the cost of health care. And we ask trauma survivors to retell their stories. you know, to three different intake coordinators before they even see a therapist if you're at a major hospital or a clinic for triage. And this process itself is re-traumatizing. When we finally reach a provider, you know, they're often met with this biomedical gaze, which is a checklist-driven assessment that reduces their complex narrative of suffering.

I can't hear it. It reduces it to a code for billing. And as the, you know, Australian psychological society pointed out, like the chemical imbalance theory and the medicalize, excuse me, the medicalization of distress, it's failed to reduce stigma, and instead it's left patients feeling defective and then unheard. And the result is a profound low trust environment. You know, Theodore Porter in his book, Trust in Numbers, argues that we rely on strict mechanical numbers when we do not trust people. We use the DSM and manualized protocols because insurers do not trust clinicians to judge, and clinicians do not trust themselves to

deviate and the this creates this fundamental schism that happens and explains why the profession feels like it's cracking in half on one side you have the academic researchers who are incentivized by grant funding and publication metrics a lot of times the the way that colleges promote you and tenure you and give you a price point you know salary is your ability to get cited which results in these giant meta analyses that are completely useless but they're going to get cited a lot and it's like content what we're publishing an academic psych now a lot of it feels like content written for a search engine but not for a

human like one of those pages you click on and it answers your search query and it's top ranking but when you actually read it it's just kind of like word salad because they're trying to deal with so much data that somebody else has to cite them and then that becomes what the incentive structure is promoting not real psychology. And, you know, to get these rewards, they must isolate variables and create reproducible, manualized protocols. Just to do the study, they have to strip the story out, the thing that makes therapy work to turn it into this formula that will prove what will work for everyone. And there are best practices that we could use science to determine. There are interventions.

There are neurobiological changes that we could measure. We don't do that. We don't research, not just what works, but what is interesting, which is not boring as sin. Even the people that write this stuff don't want to read it, talk to one of them. And so, you know, on the other side of that split, you've got these clinicians who are incentivized by patient outcomes, and they're in the room with the messiness of real life, and they see that the manualized protocols fail trauma patients. And so they improvise, and then they integrate, and they use their intuition. When this academic looks at the clinical, you know, the academic, a lot of times, like when they see the clinician, they just see this cowboy who ignores data and it's doing whatever.

Why are you doing EMDR? EMDR is not evidence-based. It's because it worked for the person at the training or they saw it work. You know, I haven't met anybody who's an EMDR zealot where EMDR didn't heal them. EMDR, I don't think, is incredibly generalizable. I think it does miracles for 30% of people. I think it does nothing for another 70%. That doesn't mean it doesn't work. It's another tool that you have that you try.

And if you don't get a response, you stop and then you move on to a new tool. It's not a black or white. Like this is this works or it doesn't. And this is why research is no longer informing therapy practice as much as it should be. That's why I wrote that article about the schism between academic and clinical psychology and why they're in two different worlds, which is not good for the profession. We've created these two different languages. And the researcher speaks in P values and population averages.

And the clinician speaks in case studies and individual. breakthroughs. And in this low trust environment, you know, if you read my Theodore reporter article, trust in numbers, he's an interesting guy. Numbers are what you revert to when you have a low trust environment. It creates this vacuum that wellness influencers are all too happy to fill. And we, you know, mock the public for turning to these unverified supplements on TikTok and, you know, snake venom or Joe Rogan or whatever, but like the diagnosticians who are telling people about quantum mysticism, making their soul vibrate to chakras and like all this stuff, they're telling a story,

which is why people are listening to them. We have to ask these influencers, like we have to ask us, like, what are these people providing that we're not? What are these influencers giving to people that feels good? And maybe that should be a part of the initial intake and triage of therapy instead of a false hope. It could be the thing that prepares them for an evidence-based practice that is actually effective. They're providing a narrative. They're providing connection. Maybe it's parisocial, but they're providing a connection to a person. And it feels like a high trust experience.

Whereas modern therapy for a lot of people in these studies that I'm quoting, it doesn't feel like they trust the system after they participate. And it doesn't feel like they'll ever go back because the system sucks. You know, recent analysis suggested that wellness fads thrive, not because people are stupid, but because the influencers offer this feeling of personal validation that the medical system denies them. And even AI chatbots are now being described by users as more humane than doctors because the AI listens to the whole story without looking at a watch or a checklist. And when a patient is told by a doctor that their pain is, you know, idiopathic or psychosomatic because it doesn't show up on you know lab tests and then an

influencer tells them i see you i believe you and here is a story about why this is happening you know the patient will choose the influencer every time and the trust gap drives them away from care that might actually help and towards solutions that feel good but they don't do anything. And because that style of the girls with the crystals in their hair or whatever, doing yoga with perfect makeup on top of a mountain in Denver or something, you know, because that style works, now we're seeing it everywhere. I always make a joke about how like politicians around like the beginning of the Trump administration on both sides like started talking like avatar characters or influencers where like,

if you've seen Avatar, the James Cameron one, they'll be like, I feel you, Jake Sully, Jake Sully, I see you. You know, there's these kind of like, I'm not criticizing the movie, they're fine, but like they have that, you know, kind of new age thing. And then like at the beginning of this administration, there was like Nancy Pelosi and Katie Britt,

both like looking into the camera and being like, we see you, we feel you, Americans. And it was like, whoa, dog. don't feel me okay like past Medicaid for all or build roads or schools like I I don't need validation from y'all but I think that that's the reason that the culture is moving towards that style which is not good you know and this leaves this ethical psychotherapist not I'm not saying I'm ethical but the ethical psychotherapist I mean I'm ethical but I wasn't just talking about myself I'm saying

it leaves this person who is trying to be an ethical ethical psychotherapist that wants to probably follow the science and try and interpret it, but then also figure out things that work in the room and where manualized therapies don't and deviate from them, they're forced to participate in the system where, you know, we know that it's alienating the very people we're trying to help and we're trained to value the therapeutic alliance or the bond of trust above all else. And yet we work in the system designed to separate with paperwork and time limits and insurance remits that don't pay because the system's not clear. Do you know how easy it would be to make an app tomorrow where you walk into a clinic and it's like, oh, we see you're on this

site, but you don't have prior authorization here, your appointment's at five or, oh, you know, here's your insurance app just showed you like six psychotherapists in the area. And these are the people that take your insurance. And here's their availability. Like that app could be done in two minutes. The reason it doesn't exist is because if you're afraid, because you've had this bad experience before and insurance billing is a complete nightmare where the provider can't even tell you, you know, what your insurance benefits are, which is the position I'm in, all the time. This is why I tell people, call your insurance company because it's legal for them to lie to you. It's illegal for them to lie to you. It's not illegal for them to lie to me.

And so they will. And when I call and I wait in line and I get this information, a lot of the time, now it's wrong. And the person's mad at me and I'm just telling them with their insurance company told me when I gave them the benefit. But they can do that. And they're not on the hook for it when they make those mistakes. It would be incredibly easy to simplify this process. They don't simplify it because they don't want it to work because they want you to be afraid and they want it to be complicated because the more that you are afraid and the more that it is complicated, the less likely you are to jump through all of the hoops to get them to pay for the money that they owe you and the treatment that you need. That's why it's hard. If we want to stop this exodus and we want

to heal the split, we need structural change. We can't just hope for better insurance or reimbursement. We need to change what we consider valid science. And we first have to re-legitimize the system, the system of a person, get rid of checklist and under the stand these things as processes. Because of my website, I have to do all this SEO. One of the worst things that search engine optimization and there's schema markup and code and all the stuff that I wish I never had to learn. But now that I know it, like the worst thing that you can do is be like, what are the top 10 things I have to do for my website? What order do I need to improve my website? Check, check, check, check, check. Because it doesn't work. Google won't see it. You can do all those things like a

checklist. You have to understand them as parts of a system that are balancing each other out that have tradeoffs that have an effect on each other and the human mind works like that too you know we have to replace those checklist with aggregated data of those randomized controlled trials we need to bring back qualitative not quantitative study we need journals that publish rigorous detailed accounts of what actually happens in the room when a patient gets better and look at the people that are effective and see what they're doing you know second we need to build open open source repositories for clinical observation like currently the wisdom of the field is locked behind the profit paywalls were lost in the private notes of isolated therapists and we need a wikipedia of

clinical practice where thousands of clinicians can document what they're seeing in real time if 10,000 therapists report that semantic processing helps complex trauma that is data that is set that rivals any randomized controlled trial because it's somebody who did it yesterday not a therapy that somebody invented 10 years ago then they wrote a book on five years ago then the book got popular than it got on Oprah and now because it's on Oprah and in the New York Times and they're famous now they're going to research it and on the study costs it 13 million dollars and it took three years and now you can do it this watered down version of this thing that that person figured out a decade ago stop doing that it doesn't work the world is sick

we need it to be able to be there's no reason to do it it it benefits nobody other than the bottom line of some people you know third we need to teach philosophy and narrative and graduate schools and while you're at it go ahead and add like anthropology and some neuroscience to therapists you're talking about polyvagal theory and half the people don't know what these words mean because they don't know how the brain works which I took classes and to learn because it's my job you know we are training technicians when we should be training healers and a therapist who knows how to read a spreadsheet but they don't know

to how to understand a story is useless to human beings in crisis if we do not offer therapy that is human and narrative deeply relational we will continue to lose our patience to those who do, even if what they are offering is a lie. And we often treat mathematics as if it was this bedrock of reality itself, like the real stuff was a number. Numbers represent reality. They are the mirror. They're not the thing.

The thing speaks for itself. Numbers are a way of recording it imperfectly. And we act as if a P value is a piece of the universe, like a rock or a proton. but we have to remember that math is not the thing itself. It's a representation of the thing. It is a map. It is not the territory. It's a mirror.

It is not the face. You know, Theodore Porter entrust in numbers. It's a great book. Read it. He reminds us that we, you know, we reach for these mirrors when we do not trust our own eyes. But the mirror is useless without someone to look into it and interpret the reflection. Data by itself is pointless. It's a pile of bricks without an architect.

and it requires interpretation to become meaning, and interpretation is fundamentally a narrative act. And when we try to make a purely objective study, we're still telling a story. We're still saying these numbers represent this phenomenon. The problem with the Sardee study was not the data. The data was fine. It was the interpretation because the numbers told a story

that you're not allowed to tell anymore, which is that the system did not work. What was the evidence-based practice gold standard has failed? And so they changed the story. You know, then when you research something, you say, these numbers mean this thing. And another research comes along, looks at the numbers and says, no, this story does, it represents that because look at them from this lens. Look at them from this way. You know, that conflict, a lot of people say the science changes when you point out these conflicts.

Yes, it changes. But it needs to change based on improving lenses, not based on our subjective. blind spots because the problem with not having a story by pretending like oh we're just going to be a flock of dodoes and this is for experts and we're just going to look at numbers and data because we're evidence-based creatures we're logical beings we're not emotional beings that sometimes have logic we're logical beings that sometimes have inconvenient emotions the problem with that conception is that you don't see the story that you're telling with it which is the problem with academic psychology right now you know um the great some of those big biggest breakthroughs

history. Like, they didn't come from people who crunched numbers. They came from people who could see the story that the numbers were telling. And these stories are really damn interesting. And they're often stranger and more beautiful than the representation. I mean, like, you don't have to go to a mystic like Kukule who invented the benzene ring, which made you be able to get diesel fuel out of a charcoal, basically, which is why diesel fuel took on. I'm not going to go through that. But, yeah. Look up how a, uh, uh, GM, uh, GM, and Ford, you know, Henry Ford being super racist, like, sort of let the Nazis happen because they gave a lot of, like, the information on how to get charcoal out of diesel fuel to the Nazis

because, yeah, I don't know, they liked Nazis. And, like, part of that is the reason why World War II was ever able to happen since Germany had no oil until you taught them how to make it out of charcoal. But, you know, Kukle discovered that in a dream. And when you look at the uroboros, he saw the urobarus, the snake eating its own tail, the infinity symbol, and then he started thinking about molecules and what the snake was telling him. And then he realized, like, oh, this is what the molecule is doing. It's an interchange, and you can affect that interchange, and you can synthesize, you know, coal from oil

because they have this same structure and something else goes here. You know, the data didn't lead him there. And you don't have to go to the mystics. I mean, look at quantum physics. Like the raw math of all of quantum mechanics is never somebody who gets to the math, and then you know they hit a hole in the math like that's how you get some theories that kind of patch holes in these numbers but when you have physicists like schrodinger or werner heisenberg when they look at data they see it's this story about uncertainty um you know uh that the cat is both alive and dead because the particle hasn't been observed um they didn't calculate they interpreted um Einstein and um Oppenheimer you know like Einstein said when he's discovering relativity. Well, what if there's a guy in an elevator,

and the guy in the elevator is going, like, straight up. Newton says that gravity is like a force, and that movement inertia is, or movement and inertia is this force that acts universally and never changes, like gravity or like light, but I don't really think that. What if a light beams hitting the guy, and he's moving up in this glass elevator in space, and then a hand comes out of nowhere that's giant,

it grabs him and jerks him to the side, I think that there would be, you know, a recoil dynamic. So that doesn't mean that momentum is this straight force like Newton thought. It means that space itself has a shape and that gravity and velocity are this in this relay, and time are in this relationship that when you move space quickly, empty space, it takes a minute to change and bend. Like he saw that in his mind. He didn't like math. Oppenheimer, you know, he took Einstein.

I'm not a quantum physicist, so if I'm getting some of this a little bit off, you know, come at me. But like Oppenheimer, from what I understand, you know, he just took classical physics to the most extreme breaking point where he said, what if there's a singularity where you compress everything down into one tiny atom? What if, you know, there is the end of velocity? What if there's the end of space? You know, what if there is like more gravity, then could enough gravity to suck up light and then said oh it broke you know you can't have these extremes so there must be this dualism of probability where there's things that haven't happened yet so we can't calculate them all the way because they haven't happened they're going to happen and they're in the process

of being discovered what they will be but they're not absolutes that we can calculate that's how he got to the mysticism of quantum physics and brought it to america from bore you know and even in psychology, the data of the talking cure, it was messy and it was anecdotal until Freud and Jung gave us the language of the unconscious and the archetype. You know, we were objectively right. Were they right in every detail? No, not really, but they gave us a lens, a framework, a story to see something, that once we saw, we couldn't unsee. And we need to get back to that. Numbers don't give you that. And that allowed us to navigate this chaos of the human mind, and they provided this map that allowed us to enter a territory.

We've spent the last 50 years trying to strip the storytelling capacity ever since CBT, ever since the Reagan and Thatcher Revolution, you know, every since the insurance company, ever since the corporatization of colleges that are supposed to train people, we've stripped the storytelling capacity out of our profession in this misguided attempt to be taken seriously by the hard sciences or treated like one, which I don't think should be the goal of psychology at all.

And in doing so, The brain is a story processing machine. Look up neuroscience like Michael Gazzaniga. Look up people like Carl Friston. The brain is trying to understand stories based on past data that will happen in the future. And where there's predictive metrics are wrong, it causes a problem until we understand the story that got the predictive mechanism there,

pick the predictive mechanism apart, and then teach you to predict differently. You know, that would be Fristons. would be Fristons neuroscience work. You can read them out about them on the Get Therapy, Birmingham.com blog if you want. And, you know, Gazzaniga saw these kind of layers of conscious story and awareness that were competing. And those things, neuroscience, cognitive science,

is more friendly to the idea, which is a harder degree to get, by the way, and a more respected one than social work or clinical psychology. they're more open to the idea that the brain is a storymaking system that has to be dealt with narratively because it prefers that structure and recreates it than clinical psychology. Just because of insecurity, just because we can't look at numbers that tell us that the way we've always done it is wrong. When we see the numbers tell us that story, we figure out another thing that they must mean because that can't. can't be true. Is that evidence-based? We have to be brave enough to look in the mirror again,

and we need to be brave enough to look at the data, whether it's the 2.7 recovery rate of the Star D, which when they were like, oh, the study's bad. Somebody messed up. Nobody published that and got it on the news, one, but two, nobody was like, hell, 2.7, that's really bad. That wasn't the story. The story was that the study that didn't show that was done badly, not the reality once we re-looked at the data of what it actually said. We didn't do anything with that. What's the story here? I mean, the path forward is not about choosing between science and narrative. It's about realizing that science is a narrative. It is the grandest and most complex and most rigorous story that we have ever tried to tell. And I don't want to attack it. I want to

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