Rachel Stein
LPC-S, LCDC · Founder of Atomic Souls
TL;DR - We have spent decades training absurdity out of people in the name of discipline and correct answers. Ryan, a visual artist and educator with ten years in higher education, made the case recently that this is not just a failure of education. It is a failure of healing. Critical thinking and absurdity are not opposites. One without the other produces people who are very good at circling the same wall.
Hi everyone,
Ryan said it like he was just filling in a gap in the conversation. No buildup, no dramatic pause. Just: "We've mistaken belief for morality and they're not the same thing."
He is an artist, not a clinician. He has never sat across from a client. But he has spent ten years in higher education watching people confuse what they believe with what is right, and another decade in business watching the same thing happen with different vocabulary.
I had to sit with that one for a while. Because it describes a pattern I see every week in this field. The client who is not lying to you. Who genuinely cannot see the gap between what they believe and what is actually true. Because to them there is no gap. The belief is the truth. The truth is the morality. The morality is the identity.
Touch one and you touch all of them.
That is what you are actually up against.
And the reason most interventions fail to reach it is not a lack of clinical skill. It is a deficit of something that nobody in this field talks about nearly enough. Absurdity.
Absurdity is not the opposite of serious. It is the doorway serious cannot open alone.
Every clinical framework we train people in is built on logic. Cause and effect. Thought, feeling, behavior. Stimulus and response. These are useful. They are precise. They are also completely useless for reaching the part of a person that logic never touched in the first place.
The client who has been abused does not need a better argument for why their self-worth is intact. The client in addiction does not need a more coherent case for sobriety. They need access to a part of themselves that the wound closed off long before the logic arrived.
That part does not open through reason. It opens through play. Through absurdity. Through the sudden collapse of the rules that have kept the whole architecture standing.
Ryan talked about how our systems, education in particular, have been systematically removing absurdity from the room in the name of correct answers and conformity. The result is not better thinkers. It is people who have become very fluent in repeating what they were taught and completely unable to generate something new when the teaching stops working.
That is the absurdity gap. And it shows up in therapy every single week.
Creativity is not a coping skill. It is a cognitive reset.
There is a version of expressive therapy that gets treated as the soft option. The thing you offer when nothing else is landing. The art project at the end of a difficult session. That framing is exactly backwards.
Ryan described creativity as the capacity to make metaphors. To take what is true and translate it into something that can be held, examined, and rearranged. Most client have been living inside the same metaphor for their entire adult life. The one that was handed to them before they were old enough to question it.
You cannot argue someone out of a metaphor. You cannot CBT your way through an image that lives in the body. But you can give someone a different material to work with and watch what they make with it. Because what they make will tell you something the intake form never could.
The reason creativity works is not because it is expressive. It is because it is generative. It produces something that did not exist before. And a person who has spent years feeling trapped inside a fixed story about who they are and what they deserve does not need a therapist to edit that story. They need the experience of making something new. Proof, in their own hands, that new things are possible.
That is not a metaphor. That is neurobiology.
The difference between teaching what to think and teaching how to think is the difference between compliance and recovery.
Ryan's mentor once told him something that he carried through a decade of teaching: the goal was never to transfer the right answers. It was to build the capacity to generate them.
That distinction is the entire crisis of modern mental health treatment in one sentence.
We have built a field that is extraordinarily good at giving people the right answers. The skills. The frameworks. The psychoeducation. And we have produced a relapse rate that tells us something is not working. Because a person who only knows what to think will return to the old thinking the moment the clinical scaffolding is removed. The thinking that was handed to them is not theirs. It belongs to the treatment. And treatment ends.
Teaching someone how to think is harder. It requires tolerating uncertainty in the room. Sitting with a question that does not have a clean answer. Letting the session go sideways sometimes and trusting that sideways is not the same as lost.
I see it in this field the same way Ryan sees it in education. The clinicians who are most effective are not the ones with the most frameworks. They are the ones who are genuinely curious about what this particular client is going to figure out next. The ones who have enough absurdity in them to follow a session somewhere unexpected and not immediately redirect it back to the protocol.
Critical thinking without that capacity is not critical thinking. It is a more sophisticated version of conform, conform, conform. And the client who are sitting across from it know the difference, even if they cannot say it out loud.
When was the last time you gave a client permission to not know? To make something that had no right answer? To be a little absurd? Is that in your treatment plan, or is it still the part you skip?
My Reads of the Week
Rethinking ethics in psychology: why morality gives answers and ethics keeps things open Psychology Today makes the clinical case for exactly what Ryan named in the podcast. Morality asks what should I do in general. Ethics asks what is happening here right now. One closes possibilities. The other keeps them open. If your practice is built entirely on the first question, this one will make you uncomfortable in the best way.
Expressive therapies and the mind-body connection: what creative expression actually does to the brain Creativity is not a soft add-on to a clinical plan. It is a dopamine mechanism, a trauma processing tool, and a direct pathway to parts of the brain that talk therapy cannot always reach alone. This piece breaks down the science behind why expressive arts work, and why the patients who seem most resistant are often the ones who need it most.
Harnessing creativity for mental health: how art, music, and writing heal A clinical and personal breakdown of what happens when patients are given permission to process experience through creation instead of narration. Worth reading if you have patients who tell you they are not creative. That statement is the diagnosis, not the limitation.
Wisdom Nugget
We live in a world that is flooding us with images, opinions, and information at a rate our nervous systems were never built to process. Ryan talked about this directly on the podcast: we are not failing to consume enough. We are failing to process what we consume. And without a framework for processing, we start to mistake everything we see for what is true, and everything we believe for what is right. That is the absurdity gap in real time. The social media post on the Atomic Souls blog breaks down what constant digital overload is doing to the brain underneath the anxiety, why the solution is never just logging off, and what it actually takes to start thinking again instead of just absorbing.
Hot Takes
Words are nice. Behavior is the truth your beliefs can't hide from (YouTube)
Pov: your therapist just told you that you're part of the problem (TikTok)
Writing from my desk at
The essence of our mission at Atomic Souls transcends the realms of recovery and stability; it's about igniting the flame of purpose and passion within each soul we encounter. Join us.
Thanks for reading,
Rachel
p.s. If this is our first introduction, hi, I’m Rachel, founder and CEO of Atomic Souls Counseling. I’m a Licensed Professional Counselor Supervisor (LPC-S) and a Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor (LCDC). After years in the trenches as a clinician, I discovered that my real passion isn’t just helping clients heal; it’s helping therapists thrive.
I’ve built Atomic Souls into more than a counseling practice; it’s a place where healing and business intelligence meet. I work with therapists, counselors, and practice owners to help them build sustainable, ethical, and profitable practices. Together, we focus on strategy, systems, and the economics of growth the behind-the-scenes work that allows you to keep showing up fully for your clients without burning out.
My approach blends clinical wisdom with business strategy. I coach on everything from pricing models and team structure to marketing, leadership, and scaling, all while maintaining your integrity and purpose. I believe you can be both a gifted clinician and a confident entrepreneur; those two identities don’t have to compete.
Through Atomic Souls, I’ve built a community where mental health professionals support one another, share resources, and turn purpose into sustainable success. Whether you’re just starting out or ready to expand, I’m here to help you build a practice that aligns with your values and fuels your life, not drains it.
If you’re a therapist ready to step into the next chapter of your career with clarity and confidence, let’s connect.
I write about the business of healing: strategy, systems, and soul for therapists who want to build thriving, values-driven practices on my blog.
Your clients are doing the work. Is your business?
Take the free Therapy Practice Health Check and see where things are solid and where support is overdue.
Until next time,
Rachel