What if “emotion regulation” isn’t just a clinical skill, but a cultural demand?

In this episode of The Radical Therapist, Chris sits down with therapist and professor David Nylund for a rigorous and timely conversation about the near-hegemonic status of emotion regulation in contemporary therapy. Together, they explore how practices often framed as neutral, helpful, or evidence-based can quietly function as technologies of governance, shaping not just how people feel, but who they are allowed to be.

Drawing on narrative therapy, post-structural theory, Black feminist thought, and critiques of neoliberal subjectivity, David invites us to look beyond whether regulation techniques “work” and ask deeper questions: What kinds of selves do these practices produce? What futures do they orient us toward? And whose emotions are deemed acceptable, intelligible, or safe?

A conversation for therapists, educators, and practitioners who want to think more critically about what we’re teaching, what we’re regulating, and what might change if we treated emotions not as problems to solve, but as embodied critiques of the worlds we inhabit.

Chris' Casperson Therapy Center Training

In this episode Chris launches Dangerous Stories Studio, a new constellation of offerings for people navigating transitions and building futures that don't fit existing maps. The work continues in new forms: • A new podcast exploring how stories shape what becomes possible (launching February 2026) • Quarterly Futuring Sprints, intensive workshops for people in liminal space (first sprint March 2026) • The Studio Membership—ongoing community and practice (opening March 2025) • The Futurecraft Mastermind—a three-month intensive for identity and practice redesign (applications open September 2026) Learn more and stay connected @dangerousstoriesstudio Let's build something dangerous.

In this episode of The Radical Therapist, Chris sits down with systemic therapists and thinkers Christopher Loh and Federico Albertini to explore how New Materialisms are reshaping the foundations of therapeutic practice. What happens when therapy loosens its grip on language as the primary site of meaning-making, and begins listening to the material, the more-than-human, the in-between?

Drawing on philosophy, anthropology, physics, and the emerging edges of systemic psychotherapy, Christopher and Federico guide us through a relational world where matter is active, contexts are dynamic, and change emerges from constellations of forces, not just conversations. Together we explore how New Materialisms challenge the limits of the linguistic turn, illuminate the agency of bodies, environments, and objects, and invite therapists to rethink what “systemic” really means.

A conversation for anyone curious about what emerges when we let therapy become a practice of attention to the material conditions of suffering, care, and transformation, and when we recognize that the future of the field may lie in the spaces, relations, and rhythms we’ve long overlooked.