You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist

My friend Ryan Rogers returns to the podcast for our third conversation. He's an addictions counselor in Texas, host of Reality Therapy , and now the author of two books — The Woke Mind and his new release, The Carpenter's Recovery , a Christian guide to 12-step recovery. We start with what's being called "gas station heroin": a chemical called 7-OH, extracted from kratom, that's roughly thirteen...

We've talked a lot on this podcast about institutional capture — whistleblowers, mission drift, what happens when ideology takes the steering wheel. Today my guest takes a different angle on all of it. Tanya de Grunwald hosts This Isn't Working, a podcast about workplace dynamics, and runs This Is Working, a business community for employers. From 2018 to 2024 she ran a club for early-careers heads...

Why does your teen tune you out? It might have to do with the role your message unconsciously casts her in. "Alter-casting" refers to the way every message you send implicitly assigns a role or identity to the person you're speaking with. If the role you cast your child in conflicts with how they want to see themselves, your message will be rejected — no matter how accurate, loving, or urgent it i...

In this solo episode, I'm diving into one of the most pervasive and underappreciated cognitive patterns I see across ROGD families: black-and-white thinking. It's the tendency to categorize everything in terms of two mutually exclusive extremes — all or nothing, perfect or ruined, success or failure — with no middle ground. I explain how this pattern is a normal feature of adolescent brain develop...

In this solo episode, I share one of my favorite metaphors for understanding how desistance actually unfolds in practice — because it rarely looks the way most parents hope it will. Many parents carry a fantasy version of desistance in their heads: a tearful moment of confession, an apology, a sudden reversal. That's almost never what happens. What actually happens is slower, messier, and far less...

In this solo episode, I pull back the curtain on the work I do the rest of the week as an ROGD parent coach. Most parents arrive with one goal in mind: convince their trans-identified child to stop believing in gender ideology. I explain why that's the wrong place to put your energy, and why I won't help you do it as a first step. The belief is downstream. There are two goals that actually matter,...

In this short solo episode, I introduce you to a figure who shows up again and again in my ROGD parent coaching work: the disenfranchised dad. He's usually a decent man — hardworking, opinionated, loves his kids — but somewhere along the way he ended up on the outside of his own family's emotional life, looking in. His wife is the emotional center. The kids bring everything to her. He drifts to th...

In this episode, I sit down with Suzannah Alexander — counseling-education whistleblower, writer of the Substack Diogenes in Exile , and now organizer with the National Association of Scholars. Suzannah enrolled in a Tennessee counseling master's program after 25 years as a stay-at-home parent, only to discover that what was being taught wasn't psychology at all. It was demographics, identity poli...

Instead of a long-form interview, this week I'm reading you an essay I wrote called The Most Dangerous Moment in the Conversation: What To Do and What Not To Do When Your Child Finally Opens Up. It originally appeared inside ROGD Repair , my comprehensive program for parents of trans-identified youth, and I wanted it to reach more people. If your child is living inside a trans identity, most of th...

In this episode, I welcome back Mia Hughes — director of Genspect Canada, senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, and one of the sharpest writers on the gender scandal — to dig into the framework she calls "trans as an extreme overvalued belief." Mia walks us through the history of the overvalued idea, from Carl Wernicke in 1892 to Paul McHugh's post-9/11 application of the concept to id...

In this solo episode, I'm bringing you something a little different. I've been wanting to talk about the recent Finnish register study on gender-referred youth since it came out, and rather than wait until my written article was polished, I decided to open the draft I'd been working on, read it to you, and interrupt myself along the way with the commentary and speculation from a psychological lens...

Constitutional attorney Dean Broyles, president of the National Center for Law and Policy, joins me to continue untangling the legal battles reshaping how public schools handle gender identity — and what they mean for parents, teachers, and students. Picking up where we left off with Laura Powell in episode 207 , Dean begins with a detailed breakdown of the Mirabelli v. Bonta case, which started i...

If you have a son, this conversation is essential listening. I'm welcoming back Shane Cole, breathwork practitioner and men's coach, who first appeared in episode 149 , where we broke down what parents need to know about sissy hypnosis pornography. This time, we go even deeper. One of the things I'm most passionate about tackling here is the dangerous myth that sweet, sensitive, smart boys are som...

Joining me today is Laura Powell, an attorney and founder of Californians for Good Governance, to break down one of the most important parents' rights cases in recent history: Mirabelli v. Bonta. We trace how California schools came to adopt policies that require staff to conceal a child's gender identity — including name and pronoun changes at school — from their own parents, and how a federal la...

Writer Róisín Michaux investigates women's rights and free speech in the context of the transgender movement. Róisín brings a uniquely European lens to her research, exposing how LGBTIQ activist organizations in Europe are heavily state-funded — unlike the U.S., where private foundations like the Rockefellers and Ford Foundation dominate — and how this funding pipeline has turbocharged some of the...

Today I'm sharing a conversation I had with Dennison Joyce on his show Through the Looking Glass , originally aired on WIOX Radio last year (episode #228). Dennison asked me to walk through my program for parents, ROGD Repair , and to break down the framework I call the Trifecta of Social Contagion — the three interlocking forces I believe are driving the epidemic of young people identifying as tr...

In this episode, I sit down with Ryan Malphrus, a licensed clinical social worker and therapist in private practice who works with adolescents and adults — particularly boys and men. Ryan spent 15 years working in level-five special education schools before transitioning to private practice, and he brings a grounded, refreshingly honest perspective on the struggles facing young men today. We dive...

Chaplain, coach, and author Dean Abbott joins me for a thought-provoking conversation about the difference between healthy introspection and unhealthy rumination. Dean challenges a popular argument that therapy simply encourages people to think about themselves too much, making the case instead that people don't ruminate for fun — they ruminate because they're in pain and searching for something t...

Today I'm joined by Dr. Will Dobud, a social worker, researcher, and educator who has worked with adolescents and families across the United States, Australia, and Norway. Will is the co-author of Kids These Days: Understanding and Supporting Youth Mental Health , and he brings a refreshingly optimistic yet realistic perspective to the challenges facing today's young people. We dig into some truly...

Today I sit down with my friend Anita Bartholomew, a magazine journalist and author, to discuss her new book Sacrificial Lambs: Liberal Reporter Exposes How the Progressive Left Harms Children in the Name of Gender Ideology . This is Anita's second appearance on the show, and this time she walks us through the findings of her thorough investigation into how gender ideology functions as a predatory...

Today I sit down with investigative reporter Benjamin Ryan, who was the only journalist present for the entirety of the historic Varian v. Einhorn trial — the first detransition malpractice lawsuit in the world to reach a jury verdict. Ben has been covering pediatric gender medicine for three years for outlets including the New York Times, NBC News, the New York Sun, and the Free Press, and he bri...

In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Michael Ziffra, a psychiatrist and associate professor at Northwestern University who specializes in anxiety disorders. Dr. Ziffra has been writing a Substack series called "Wise Mind in Anxious Times," exploring how we can better navigate the intersection of mental health and our turbulent political landscape. We begin by discussing the alarming advice that ma...

In this inaugural roundtable discussion, I dive headfirst into one of the most contentious topics at the intersection of faith and science: psychedelics and Christianity. As a relatively new Christian myself, I've been wrestling with what believers should think about these powerful substances—especially after interviewing guests whose lives were transformed by psychedelic experiences, including de...

Listen on headphones or speakers for best results. Today we were going to air the first “Psychedelics and Christianity” panel, but then a crisis hit our family: my husband fell and broke both bones in his left forearm, while rock climbing with our kids. When I got his call from the ER, I was 2500 miles away, working remotely on ROGD Repair from a peaceful Airbnb in Holualoa, Hawaii, where I was re...

Social psychology expert Brant Elwood joins me to explore the fascinating and often troubling world of unconscious group dynamics. Brant brings a unique perspective, having spent four years as a field guide in wilderness therapy—accumulating over 10,000 hours working with small groups—before transitioning into organizational psychology and leadership consulting. We dive deep into the phenomenon of...