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Finding Possibility Within Harmful Systems: Hope, Solidarity, and Systemic Thinking in Therapy - An Interview with Travis Heath, PhD
Most of us were trained to look for the problem inside the client. Curt and Katie welcome Travis Heath, PhD, back for a long-awaited second conversation about widening that lens: seeing clients in the systems they inhabit, recognizing that therapists live inside those same systems, and continuing to show up for clients anyway.
Drawing on narrative therapy and Black abolitionist thought, Travis explores how to name harm you can't fix in a single session without leaving clients hopeless. Few of us can opt out of late capitalism, so he looks for the in-between space: small, particular ways clients (and therapists) can relate differently to harmful systems and find possibility where it looked like there was none. He also makes the case for solidarity alongside empathy, uncertainty as a gateway to hope, and slowing down in a profession that keeps asking us to be more productive.
This conversation is for therapists thinking about DEI, social justice, and stewardship of the profession, and for anyone trying to practice with integrity inside systems they didn't design.
In this episode, we discuss:
- Why many presenting problems are shaped by the systems clients live in, not only by what's inside them
- How asking where a client's values came from helps clarify what they actually want
- Finding micro-alternatives within late capitalism instead of all-or-nothing thinking
- Why certainty, whether optimistic or catastrophic, gets in the way of hope
- How Black abolitionist thought reframes change as presencing and small experiments
- Why solidarity asks for collective action in a way empathy alone does not
- Rethinking productive therapy and choosing which battles to fight
Timestamps:
- 02:05 - Who Travis is and what he's putting into the world
- 04:23 - Seeing problems in context, not only inside the client
- 09:54 - Questioning inherited stories and values
- 14:48 - Living in the in-between within late capitalism
- 19:53 - Uncertainty, hope, and Rebecca Solnit
- 25:20 - How Travis sustains himself in this work
- 30:01 - Black abolitionist thought and solidarity
- 38:32 - Individual and collective responsibility for therapists
- 46:36 - Productivity, diagnosis, and choosing your battles
- 51:32 - Questioning with purpose, not nihilism
Guest Bio:
Travis Heath, PhD, is a licensed psychologist and Associate Professor at San Diego State University, where he chairs the Department of Counseling & School Psychology. His work explores how culture, power, and dominant stories shape people's lives, including cultural democracy, Black abolitionist scholarship, and the use of rap music in narrative therapy. He is co-author, with David Epston and Tom Carlson, of Reimagining Narrative Therapy Through Practice Stories and Autoethnography (Routledge, 2022), creator of the Psychotherapy.net video series Reimagining Multiculturalism: A Contemporary Narrative Approach, and host of the Therapist Confidential podcast.
Full show notes and transcript: mtsgpodcast.com
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Modern Therapist's Survival Guide Creative Credits
Voice Over by DW McCann: https://www.facebook.com/McCannDW/
Music by Crystal Grooms Mangano: https://groomsymusic.com/
