Hate is bad.
(Unless.)
Do not harm.
(Except when.)
Mistakes are essential.
(But.)
Be yourself.
(As long as.)
What if the youth mental health crisis isn't just about screens or peers or politics?
What if it's also about the energy we're generating – the hate, the fear, the contempt – and that energy doesn't care if it's coming from the left or the right, woke or MAGA, the present parent or the absent one?
Nearly half of all high school students report persistent sadness or hopelessness – a 10 point increase over the past decade. 20% have seriously considered suicide. Among young adults 18–25, nearly 1 in 3 experienced mental illness last year. For young people ages 10-24, suicide is now the second leading cause of death.
Despite unprecedented access to therapy and medication, these numbers keep climbing. What if we're missing something fundamental?
What if the problem isn't in them?
What if it's in us? All of us.
We tell our children to be empathic and kind. Then they watch us dismiss or demonize those who disagree, and withhold compassion the moment we feel wronged or can't relate.
We tell them everyone makes mistakes. Then they watch us erupt in panic, stress, or shame when we err – or in righteousness and contempt when others do.
We tell them to think critically. Then they watch us collapse every issue into good guys and bad guys, right side and wrong side.
We tell them people can change. Then they watch us disparage and discard people for a hurtful misstep, a dysregulated reaction, a skill they don't yet possess.
We tell them character matters. Then we help them build lives that prioritize performance over integrity.
Our children aren't learning from what we tell them.They're learning from how we live.
They're learning from how we talk about people who see the world differently. From whether we extend curiosity or contempt, humility or condescension. From whether dignity is conditional on agreement.
They're learning from how we engage our own wounds and egos. They're learning when we want more. They're learning when we look down. They're learning when we hate. They're learning from the extent to which we are what we're fighting.
They're also learning when we express hope in the face of despair. When we apologize with sincerity – not only to them, but to another adult in front of them. When we ask questions before drawing conclusions. When we celebrate mistakes as a key to growth. When we focus on what's possible and what we can create, rather than on what's broken or falling apart.
Our youth are absorbing it all – our hope, heart, and humility, our fear, hate, and hypocrisy – regardless of our politics, our intentions, or how much we love them.
The patterns live in everyone. So does the capacity to interrupt them.
Young people don't need perfect adults. They need adults who can look at themselves with honesty and compassion. Who can hold their own light and dark – and extend that same grace to others, even those they disagree with. Who can acknowledge harm and engage repair. Who can hold how dynamic and interconnected we all are.
When we fail to do our own work – when we exile our darkness, deny our harm, insist our side is "good, correct, and justified" while others are "bad, wrong, and unforgiveable" – we feed the very systems of fear and hate we decry. And we teach our youth:
What are we actually modeling?
Binary Thinking
Good people and bad people. Right side and wrong side. No nuance, no middle ground. Pick a side and defend it absolutely.
Mistakes are Catastrophic
One wrong move and you're canceled. No room for growth, repair, or second chances. Hide your failures. Perform perfection.
Certainty Over Curiosity
You must have strong opinions on everything. Questions are weakness. "I don't know" is failure – or a sign of alignment with the enemy.
Conditional Worth
You're valuable if you have the right opinions, achieve the right things, never make mistakes. Your worth depends on outcomes, not who you are.
Contempt is Acceptable
Cruelty is fine if they're on the wrong side. Dehumanization is justified if you're right. Curiosity about "the other" is betrayal.
Fragmentation
Hide your dark parts. Exile what's unacceptable. Never show your whole self.
And yet, when we integrate – hold our contradictions, practice repair, tolerate imperfection and uncertainty, extend dignity across difference – when we love ourselves through all of that – something else becomes possible.
We model that being human means being whole, not perfect. That mistakes are essential to growth and all developmental, relational, and creative processes. That people are complex and capable of change. That curiosity is more powerful than contempt. That everything is fluid – care and harm, victimhood and villainy, what we know and what we don't.
We've all been hurt, and we've all caused hurt. There are things we know and things we don't. We are all unfinished. Modeling this truth creates space for young people to do the same – to be whole rather than fragmented, curious rather than certain, human rather than performing.
A New Framework
It isn't easy to engage with the destructive or harmful aspects and instincts of the human condition – particularly as they live in us and those we love. There are layers upon layers of subconscious defenses built up expressly to prevent us from doing so. There is an element of survival at play. It feels tremendously threatening because during childhood, and in many social contexts, it is. We need to know what is safe or unsafe. We need to know how to avoid exile.
But these frameworks are outdated. The things that keep us safe as we learn and develop – clear, fixed categories of good and bad, right and wrong – become so deeply embedded that we begin to see everything as fixed. And this is where we counterintuitively stumble. We struggle to transition out of the binary framework that was developmentally necessary during childhood and into the one that would better serve us in adolescence and adulthood – one grounded in balance, nuance, fluidity, and dynamism. One where seeing ourselves and others as fixed is precisely what keeps us stuck.
It is my belief that if we could understand this fluidity as fundamental to reality – perhaps more fundamental than the binary frameworks we default to – we might be more free. Engaging with ourselves and others more humbly and more honestly might feel less scary and more accessible.
Emergence Psychology
At the most fundamental level, reality isn't rigid or binary. It's fluid, interconnected, shaped by observation, and transformed through uncertainty. Quantum systems don't operate in either/or – they hold multiple states simultaneously. They change through interaction. They evolve through disruption. And they reveal that what looks like chaos is often reorganization preceding something new.
What if these principles have something to teach us about why we get stuck – and how we get free?
Emergence Psychology is a framework that draws on quantum mechanics and dynamic systems theory to explore human experience through a different lens. It proposes that mental states may function less like fixed conditions to be corrected and more like fields of possibility – fluid, context-dependent, and continuously shaped through how we observe, engage, and connect.
This matters because the rigidity we bring to ourselves and others – the binary thinking, the pathologizing, the certainty that people and conditions are fixed – isn't just a habit. It's a lens that collapses possibility. And when we see just how dynamic and alive and fluid everything actually is, the hard work of looking at ourselves honestly becomes less terrifying. It gets lighter. Not because the darkness isn't real, but because nothing about it is permanent. Everything can shift. That's not wishful thinking – it's how reality works at its most fundamental level.
Grounded in established findings from quantum biology and dynamic systems research, and honest about where established science ends and speculative inquiry begins, this framework is an invitation to ask better questions – about possibility, interconnection, and the nature of change.
Read the full paper: The Future of Mental Health Is Tiny →
I'm actively collaborating with physicists, neuroscientists, and systems thinkers to pressure-test and evolve this framework. If this work resonates – or if you see something I'm missing – I'd welcome the conversation. Reach out.
Building Something New
Creating conditions for what's possible
The path may feel counterintuitive:
Self-love grows through compassion and accountability, not one or the other.
Peace comes from tending to our own integrity, not policing it in others.
Freedom comes from knowing we have everything we need – and releasing others as problem or solution.
We get lighter by lifting what's heavy – and so does the air around us.
What becomes possible:
Agency untethered from external validation. Power without superiority. Confidence born from humility. Hope born from knowing that nothing is fixed – that every moment, and every person, can be new.
A world on fire becomes an opportunity to build something new.
There's the sense right now that the world is on fire. The strain is not imagined. A lot is shifting, deteriorating, and accelerating. And, understandably, we look outward. But here's what we can miss in the smoke: unexamined selves are the fire. Not through malice, for most people – but through patterns we haven't faced, energy we generate without seeing it, unconscious wounds we haven't healed. What we exile in ourselves doesn't disappear. It leaks out – through stress, contempt, superiority, performance, fear. And our youth absorb it all. They feel the effects of all that hasn't been integrated.
We're all caught in patterns we didn't consciously choose. We're all doing our absolute best. This work isn't about being better or more impressive. It's not about being small or ashamed. It's about noticing what we carry and becoming whole and more free – the rarest thing we can offer ourselves, our children, and the world. The only thing that really shifts the field.
Emergence Workshop
Rethinking our role in the emotional landscape young people inhabit
A two-session workshop connecting what's happening in the collective to what's happening in our homes, schools, and workplaces – from political discourse and social binaries, to cultural fear and the subtle forms of supremacism that live in all of us. Examining how the energy we generate shapes the emotional field young people develop within.
Brave work, grounded in self-compassion.
Adult Consultation
A surprising path to peace
For parents, educators, and caregivers ready to feel lighter. We explore patterns that no longer serve you, practice integration, and look honestly at what we're modeling – with courage, self-compassion, and an eye toward freedom and a more sustainable sense of peace.
Youth Mental Health Mentoring
You're the medicine. You're the magic.
Compassionate, collaborative work with teens and young adults. I listen, reflect, and help clients navigate their unique challenges and opportunities – with attunement to heart and fear, intuition and defenses, the systemic and the personal.
This isn't formulaic. It's a relational process of discovery, anchored in compassion for self and others, with support for both what is painful and what is possible.
About
For over two decades, I've worked at intersections most people don't connect – criminal justice and quantum science, clinical psychology and tech, education and business strategy, privilege and marginalization. I've spent years in proximity to people society has written off as well as people society celebrates. I've witnessed joy and transformation in the harshest environments and immense suffering in the most comfortable. I've witnessed cruelty in the good, and kindness in the criminal.
What I've learned is simple, but has profound implications: nothing is fixed. Neither people, nor conditions, nor character, nor ways of being. Everything is more fluid – and more interconnected – than we tend to think. We are dynamic, emergent beings existing in fields of possibility, and we're affecting one another all the time. We contain contradictions. We've been harmed and we've caused harm. And we are all, always, capable of something new.
The patterns I saw in criminal justice – harm begetting harm, fear driving rigidity, binary thinking obscuring our shared humanity – are the same patterns I see in families, in schools, in political discourse. The cycles are the same. The interruptions are available everywhere.
My work is grounded in a fundamental belief: when we can look at ourselves and others with honesty and love, when we can hold complexity without collapsing into binaries of good and bad, we access genuine power to create change. Not by fixing others, but by transforming conditions – starting with ourselves and the energy we generate.
BA Political Economy, UC Berkeley
MS Clinical Psychology, Notre Dame de Namur University
Writing & Work
I'm collaborating with physicists, psychologists, and systems thinkers on the Emergence Psychology framework, and always eager to bring in additional voices and lenses. If this work resonates, please reach out.
Why this work matters now: The Problem with Monsters and the Instinct to Destroy
"It is not enough to follow the heart. We must also train it."
— Ajahn Sumedho