Underground Transmissions

We are meaning-making creatures. It’s the thing we do with our minds whether we choose to or not, the way we turn a hard year into a story we can carry, the way a song on the radio at the right moment feels like it was sent from some mysterious higher power. For people like me, who have lived through extreme states, meaning-making runs hot. Sometimes it’s a gift and sometimes it’s a flood. Either way, it’s the water I swim in, and it’s what I’ve spent twenty-five years building community around.

This is an adaptation of a longer article recently published in the Ideas Letter. It's not an argument against AI in mental health. It's an argument about who builds it and what it's built from. Not everyone needs to read it. But some people really do. Are you one of them? Joseph Campbell put it plainly: the psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight. What determines drowning or swimming is almost never the experience itself. It’s the container.

I have so much respect for the people who try to actualize their creative dreams and invite us into them. It’s too easy to just let the status quo roll over us and accept what we’re handed. But in the realm of public mental health the status quo is often so absurdly lacking and sometimes dystopic that we have to do our best to build our dreams or risk ending up living in someone else’s nightmare. A few weeks ago I got to participate in a collective dream.

I’m writing this from a train somewhere between London and Paris. I’ve been in the UK for two weeks with Alice and the kids, leading T-MAPs groups at a gathering in rural Wales, watching people light up as IFS clicked into place for them, some hearing the “parts” framework for the first time and recognizing themselves immediately.

Reflections on a Month of T-MAPs Work, May 2026 There is a particular quality of attention that happens in a room -- or a Zoom room -- where people have agreed to stop performing wellness. I have been part of a lot of groups over the years, and I know the difference. Most support spaces ask you, implicitly or explicitly, to be on your way to something: recovery, stability, healing, a final coherent version of yourself. This group asked for something different. It asked people to show up unfinished.

When our critique lands in the wrong hands, the underground gets paved over (See below for details on Resistance is Fertile, a 3 day retreat in Wales, UK where I’ll be lucky enough to be leading workshops.) On which note, here’s what’s been on my mind.

Reflections from the May 2026 T-MAPs cohort I've been running a four-week online workshop series this spring, teaching something called T-MAPs: Transformative Mutual Aid Practices. It's a tool I've been developing with my friends for twenty years, a personal document you build when you're well so that the people in your life know how to find you when you're not. Recently I've been experimenting with integrating Internal Family Systems ideas into the process and it's been really fun and gratifying.

My almost 5 year old son and I cut down a dead tree in our front yard last week and this morning I was in the alley breaking up all the branches and putting them in the green bin. I was listening to a recording of Pema Chodron reading When Things Fall Apart and I had this really striking realization that I’ve just been out of touch with for awhile: there’s an incredible power in being connected to the Infinite, even just a little bit of the Infinite.

A few weeks ago I was invited to speak at a symposium in New York City on deinstitutionalization. It was a long day of panels: lawyers, policy people, advocates, researchers. Good people grappling with hard problems. And then Freddie deBoer got up and gave an impassioned speech about why we need to increase forced institutionalization for people with serious mental illness because people like us are statistically more violent than the rest of the population.

I taught two T-MAPs workshops yesterday: two cohorts, about thirty people total, and now it’s the next day and I’m still thinking about them. That’s how I know I’m still the same person I was at 22. I’ve had a private 1:1 therapy practice for six years, since the beginning of the pandemic. Online the whole time. I’ve gotten comfortable with it, I genuinely love it. But something has been missing, and these workshops reminded me what it is: the particular electricity of group work.