Welcome
Radical Therapy is an approach to growth and development based on group processes that enable individuals and collectives to support each other and learn new ways of being that enrich people's lives and promote well-being.
The purpose of this website is to serve as a resource for all of us using Radical Therapy tools in our practice and lives.
If you would like to support future workshops, community events, articles, and online offerings, our non-profit accepts donations.
About Radical Therapy
Radical Therapy begins with the simplest of premises: people are good. We do the best we can under the conditions we are given. Those conditions are social in nature, and because severely stressed for most of us, they stress and distort human experience. The first step, therefore, is to name the material conditions in which emotional and interpersonal life is lived.
Starting with an understanding of alienation, we study the ways social dynamics become deeply imbedded in individual psyches and lead to feelings, ideas, and behaviors that limit a sense of what is possible, sometimes causing people to act against their own best interests in a manner that may seem irrational but, seen in a larger context, is not. Instead, such behaviors, and the feelings that intertwine them, are products of oppression and its internalization.
It is in the interrelationship of material facts and internalized oppression that the work of “therapy” lies. We put quotation marks around the word because it suggests a process of healing when in fact we're talking about a process of change. Language is a boundary, a fence walling off alternative ways of thinking. None of us is nor ever has been a psychiatrist, in the professional sense of the word. But in the early days of our work, we reclaimed “psychiatry”, noting that the Greek meaning translates into “soul healing”, a practice, we insisted, that is everybody’s business. In that sense, the process of group is not about sick psyches; it is about injured spirits.
In the spirit of learning through relationships, we train new practitioners in apprenticeship with experienced leaders. A group of trainees meets regularly for experiential and didactic learning, all based on participation in the groups and mediations as assistants.