Pain and Purpose
It’s been a busy few months. I’ve moved fully into an outpatient role at the hospital. M’s back to the office two days a week. V started at daycare again for the first time in over a year. We went on our first vacation since the time before Vera was born and spent a week at a cabin on a secluded lake near beautiful Eagle River, WI. It was a much-needed reprieve.
Meanwhile, the world continues to be unmoored and terrifying. What can you do?
I’ve been doing some significant training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT, pronounced like the word), particularly some online trainings with Dr. Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap and a number of other self-help books that make ACT accessible to the layperson, as well as several really good textbooks and primers that make it more accessible for clinicians! It’s really been an incredible experience training with Russ, and I’ve found something in ACT that I’m not sure I knew really existed. For a long time, I made the point of saying that as a clinician, I don’t have a primary modality. That I’m eclectic. But nope, turns out I just hadn’t gotten enough into ACT yet.
But I could go on for literally ever about ACT, so I’ll stop for now. Let me know if you ever want to talk more about it though because I think it’s based on some really important principles about what drives human suffering and how to pivot away from suffering toward a life of vitality. Even when the world is a mess. Maybe especially when the world is a mess. (Sometime I will writer more about how ACT addresses the problems I’ve always had with CBT—no, the other CBT; that one is fine if that’s what you’re into.)
In a rare show of earnestness, I wrote this thread over on Twitter about some of the problems with how we diagnose and conceptualize the idea of mental illness. I think it could be worth a read? idk I’m biased.
Anyway, I’m off to do some gaming in a few minutes, so here’s a video roundup and a quick blurb about some books I’ve read!
My family got to appear in this really great music video for our friends in Weird Storm. Check it out!
Throughout June and July, I played in this incredible series of Rebel Crown, a game I highly recommend if you’re into courtly intrigue stuff like War of the Roses, Game of Thrones, etc. Here’s the first session:
And here’s a playlist with the whole series.
Also in June, I played in a really fun short series of MOTH-LIGHT. Again, here’s the first session:
And the playlist.
I got a LOT of great Forged in the Dark experience this summer!
I’m currently playing in a run of Checkpoint Midnight, a cool PBTA game about supernatural spies in postwar Vienna and so far it’s a blast. No videos yet though!
Lastly, I actually finished some books for the first time since … grad school? Maybe? At the End of the World, Turn Left was a really cool mystery about identity and language taking place in Riverwest during the time I was partying and going to basement shows there. American Madness, by my buddy Tea Krulos, is a hauntingly personal examination of the conspiracy mindset that’s unfortunately taken hold over a significant portion of the American public. Finally, while I didn’t finish it, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters, by ACT founder Steven Hayes, seems to be a really great introduction of ACT and discussion of the context it was created within.
Hope everyone is having as good a summer as you can have here in the end-of-days.