At the poetry retreat with Pádraig Ó Tuama, we experienced numerous prompts and poetry forms on Tuesday and Wednesday. One prompt was extraordinarily simple: This I Believe. So, while on my Wednesday morning slow run, I came up with the following poem. . .which is mostly about my mother and what she taught me to believe.
Dead End Street
Contrary to the sign, our street wasn’t dead.
And it did not end.
Maybe it was the confusing and tangled mass of Mormon, Italian, Catholic, Levite, Austrian roots that led to that rainy morning when, delayed by my longstanding personal relationship with toilets, I burst into the living room in my underwear, shouting.
I got it!
My gaze met the neighborhood. Darrell, Rosa, Matt.
My Mother’s explanation was weak.
“Now you’ve all missed the bus. I can drive you to school.”
I might’ve known sooner when my Catholic mother growled about wanting to shout down Matt’s Evangelical mother for wondering whether my father, the only Jew on the dead-end street, could make his way past Saint Peter.
I might have known in 1973, when I stumbled upon evidence of her infidelity.
She confessed. Yes, she had been repeatedly having coffee and cookies with Mario, Darrell’s younger brother—the only gay, black, teenager on our street, and probably the only gay, black teenager in our county.
I was justifiably concerned. “Why did you let Mario eat all the cookies?”
Years later, Darrell explained, “You were okay. But we really loved your mom. Some days we didn’t have food. Your mom fed us.”
Everyone was welcome at her table.
Everyone.
Even White Christian neighbors.
Even her son, who mistakenly thought he owned the cookies.
I’m on Day Two of our poetry retreat with Pádraig Ó Tuama (see photo above). He is truly a genius. With a background in theology, conflict mediation, group facilitation, and poetry his knowledge and experience is immense. He is host of Poetry Unbound on NPR. I have found his comments crystal clear and illuminating.
We wrote several poems today. The one I’m sharing came to me while on a slow morning jog. The others may not be ready for prime time. . .or even for blogging. Oddly, the one I’m sharing is the one that took the least time to write.
Running Away
I forgot to dance today.
I think it was the bombs
or the laser surgery.
Either way
I had to stay in and hold the baby.
I forgot to sing today.
My inner voice was hoarse from yelling at me for things
Historically, August was the month when psychotherapists vacationed. In that spirit, this evening I find myself at a retreat center just south of Santa Fe. Rita and I are celebrating our 40th wedding anniversary with a four-day poetry retreat.
Our retreat is with Pádraig Ó Tuama. I would have said “the amazing Pádraig Ó Tuama,” but this evening he let us know in no uncertain terms that he’s what might be called an adjective- and adverb-slayer. Meaning, he doesn’t like them and he’s inclined to kill them. He also doesn’t like repetition, which could spell trouble for me, being an academic type who likes to foreshadow what’s coming and then summarize what happened.
My favorite line from Pádraig’s opening comments this evening was (paraphrasing here):
If you’re projecting your resentment on me, you’re wasting your resentment.
He also said something about diagnosis and not putting lots of stock in it and suggested he didn’t much trust the solidity of identity anyway.
Tomorrow, we start at 7am. We also got a mini-lecture on punctuality. Oh my. I had no idea poetry was so disciplined. Although I’m inclined to preface the 7am start time with an adjective or two, I’ll keep this sparse, which allows you to formulate your own phenomenological projections of what my adjectives about a 7am poetry start time might have been.
It might be that this week I will also try to weave in some counseling and psychotherapy theories content into the poetry experience (and vice versa). For tonight, my thoughts turn to Chapter 1 in the brand-new 4th edition of Counseling and Psychotherapy Theories in Context and Practice. Here’s a section on “A Plan for Maximizing Positive Outcomes” in counseling/psychotherapy. How does that relate to the beginning of a 4-day poetry retreat? It seems obvious to me, but you should let me know what you think. Here’s the excerpt:
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Below, we’ve listed six ideas for maximizing positive outcomes.
Emphasize the therapy relationship (J. Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan, 2024). Intentionally try to be genuine, accept clients for who they are, and show empathy (see Chapter 6 for more details). Consistent with Bordin’s (1979) tripartite working alliance, you should (a) establish an emotional connection with clients; (b) set mutual goals; and (c) collaborate on therapy tasks linked to therapy goals (Budge et al., 2023; J. Sommers-Flanagan, 2015; Zagorscak et al., 2020).
Use flexible and culturally sensitive assessment approaches to tailor treatment to clients and their problems. As you read each chapter, you’ll see that each theory includes recommended assessment strategies. Regardless of theory, therapeutic assessment should be collaborative, empathic, and practiced with cultural humility (Finn et al., 2012; Summers & Nelson, 2023).s.
Engage clients in role induction. Role induction “involves educating clients about their role and what to expect in the assessment and treatment process. When implemented well, role induction not only educates clients but also facilitates an interactive discussion about client expectation” (J. Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan, 2024, p. 91). Clients will do better when you discuss therapy process openly and transparently, offer them a chance to ask questions, and explain the pros and cons of specific therapy techniques.
Keep up with research. Educate yourself on evidence-based relationships (Parrow, 2023), empirically supported treatments (ESTs; Harrer et al., 2025), and research-supported skills and methods (Hill & Norcross, 2023). Given the multitude of ESTs, you should learn a few for working with specific populations (e.g., if you want to work with individuals suffering from trauma, learning trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive processing therapy, and/or eye movement desensitization reprocessing would be useful).
To avoid negative outcomes, you should (a) continually work on self-awareness using individual supervision and peer supervision; (b) individualize therapy approaches to fit clients—rather than expecting all clients to benefit from one approach; and (c) avoid using PHTs (Lilienfeld, 2007).
Use practice-based evidence or progress monitoring (PM) to track therapy process and outcomes. Practice-based evidence (aka PM) involves collecting data, sometimes every session, pertaining to client symptoms and/or client satisfaction (Meier, 2015; Sun et al., 2021). This will allow you to make modifications in your approach as needed (Lambert, 2010).
All too early tomorrow morning I’ll be doing a couple presentations for medical staff at the Community Medical Center in Missoula. Despite the early hour, I look forward to some interesting and useful conversations with the staff. This link is to a very long ppt slide deck. It’s long because the two groups with which I will work are small, and so I will do portions of the slides depending on what the groups would like to cover. Here’s a pdf of the ppts!
Below, I’ve a pasted LinkedIn post from Dr. Craig Bryan, author of “Rethinking Suicide” and a leading suicide researcher. At the bottom of his comments there’s a link to the article of which he speaks.
Enjoy!
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From Craig Bryan, LinkedIn – 6/29/2026
We keep trying to predict who will attempt suicide. A 15-year study suggests we’re asking the wrong question.
Researchers followed 2,060 Brazilian children from age 10 into their mid-twenties—one of the longest prospective suicide studies ever conducted outside a high-income country. They measured genetics, perinatal history, family psychiatric illness, childhood adversity, cognition, and clinical symptoms, then tested all of it together against who later attempted suicide.
The result: even with multiple domains of risk factors combined, prediction accuracy stayed modest (AUC 0.665), barely above the ceiling seen across 50 years of suicide research. More sophisticated machine learning models didn’t do any better than simple logistic regression.
Three factors stood out as consistent, actionable, and population-relevant: childhood threat exposure (especially bullying), caregiver history of suicide attempts, and childhood externalizing disorders. Bullying alone accounted for the largest share of preventable risk in the entire study.
The authors’ conclusion is blunt: distal childhood risk factors will likely never predict individual suicide attempts with precision, because suicide is driven by acute, fast-moving processes that a baseline assessment can’t capture. Trying to screen our way to safety has a ceiling. We hit it decades ago.
The better investment may not be sharper prediction. It may be quieter, structural prevention like anti-bullying programs, supporting parents with histories of suicidal behavior, and early identification of behavioral disorders, the kind of intervention that helps a population, whether or not we ever know which child needed it most.
I’m excited about Dr. Bryan’s post not because of the difficulties with prediction (which we’ve long know), but because of the idea of moving upstream toward structural prevention. I also feel this fits really well with what we’re trying to do with CAPE.
Obviously, I love this quotation: “Trying to screen our way to safety has a ceiling. We hit it decades ago.”
I’m at the Office of Public Instruction Summer Institute in Bozeman today (and tomorrow), along with the Pirate and the Pusher. The Summer Institute is an annual four days of training for Montana educators.
Shortly after arriving, two women sitting at a table stared at me, looked away, and then stopped me as I walked by, saying, with enthusiasm, “We just took your class!”
They were, of course, referring to our Happiness for Educators course. Although completely online, I’m presenting in many of the videos, sometimes in my pajamas. We were all excited to meet in person.
They also got to meet Dylan Wright (who plays the role of a pirate in our Happiness for Educators course). I mean, how can you have a Happiness for Educators course without a pirate? They also met Tammy Tolleson Knee, the new and fabulous director of the Phyllis J. Washington Center for the Advancement of Positive Education at the University of Montana and high leverage “Pusher” of all things positive.
Tomorrow will be even more excitement. I have the honor of delivering the morning keynote. I’ll be opening with a make-believe scenario, with me as a candidate for governor. I’ve done this a few times previously during presentations for educators. It’s a method I use for emphasizing the central and foundational role that educators and education play in society.
My platform as a candidate for governor of Montana is education . . . education . . . and education . . . because. . .
The road to a good economy goes through education.
The road to a healthy enviroment goes through education.
The road to a civil society goes through education.
The road to excellence in health care goes through education.
The road to justice goes through education.
I could go on, but I think you get the point. As John Adams, founding father and our 2nd president once said (I’m paraphrasing), “It’s impossible to spend too much money on public education.”
And so, yes, there will be more excitement tomorrow because it doesn’t get much better than spending a day with 400 Montana educators who are dedicated to helping young people become educated citizens.
I’m posting ppts of my two presentations (keynote and workshop) below.
From Wikipedia: Sonja Lyubomirsky is a Russian-born American professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside and author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want.
And there’s so much more.
Not long ago, Tammy Tolleson Knee, the new Director of the Phyllis J. Washington Center for the Advancement of Positive Education, asked me if I thought she should attend the Western Positive Psychology Conference at Claremont Graduate University. I saw that Sonja Lyubomirsky was the featured keynote speaker and immediately said “Hell, Yes!” [I didn’t really swear at the time, but it sounded cooler for this blog post].
I also looked at my calendar and was bummed that I couldn’t attend. But then I said to Tammy that we should reach out to Dr. Sonja for a possible short meet-up at the conference.
So I did.
She responded within hours.
At the conference, Tammy got to meet her and talk–despite the fact that Dr. Sonja also was busily signing her new book for the masses. How cool!
And then, Tammy shared the following email with our whole CAPE staff upon her return.
Happy Friday, ,
In honor of my Sonja Lyubomirsky buzz, I thought I’d share some fun tidbits and resources from the WPPA conference!
Her last name is pronounced Lou – Boe – Mere – Ski
Here is a recent chapter she co-authored in the Handbook of Social Psychology(6th ed.) titled “Well-being” (though she prefers the term “happiness”). It’s long but comprehensive.
Here is a 5-minute Ted Talk teaser on her new book.
Fun fact: She has been cited in academic publications more than 90,000 times.
She said the Big 3 PPIs are Gratitude, Kindness, and Social Interventions (or Acting Extraverted).
Among the many fascinating findings she shared was a study fromBrain, Behavior, and Immunity suggesting that intentionally engaging in more extroverted behavior can improve patterns of gene expression.
She joked that part of her wishes they had never introduced the happiness pie. More on that later.
Her final advice: Share deeply, listen and be curious.
My overall takeaway: There is no end to what we can learn in positive psychology, and CAPE is very much on the right track.
In conclusion: Who is Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky? She’s a bad-ass academic researcher who’s also incredibly personable and who, in her spare time, writes books designed to help people live better lives. You can learn more about her here: https://sonjalyubomirsky.com/
Rita and I got our copies in the mail two days ago. Thanks to Bryan Cochran, the book is better than ever, and the cover is more beautiful than ever. Bryan asked Brian Christianson, a local photographer in Missoula, Montana permission to use one of his photos and, wow, it looks great.
The feeling of opening a box, getting out a book, and holding it in my hands never gets old. And, when the book has your name on it, the feelings are magnificent.
I feel like Steve Martin in the old classic film, The Jerk, when he gets a new phone book and finds his name in it.
Our books are for students in the mental health professions and mental health professionals, so they will never be bestsellers. Nevertheless, we get some sweet, meaningful, and validating feedback—which I treasure. Here’s the latest, forwarded to me by a former doctoral student at the University of Montana who is now a professor and who is already using our book (which is very kind and affirming). One of her students wrote,
“. . .let them know their text is easy to digest and has this magical ability to pull the reader in. There are moments in the first chapter where I felt like I was part of the authors’ lived experience. That feeling makes it easy to read and learn! I have enjoyed the text so far.”
Hopefully the magic will continue beyond the first chapter.
I’ll try to be more consistent in posting a few excerpts from the book on this blog. . .despite the fact that I’m not all that great at consistency! If you’re interested, you can find the text online.
Think about it. Can you name a single mental disorder that, in your lifetime, has decreased in significance?
Depression? Anxiety? ADHD? Bipolar? As a mental health professional for the past 45 years, I’ve watched mental disorders in America stubbornly increase, despite more national, state, and local mental health awareness and prevention programs than ever before.
Mental health awareness and prevention are failing for multiple reasons, none of which are the fault of all the compassionate, hard-working, and well-intended people involved with mental health prevention. More likely, our collective failure begins with confusion over how to define mental health. Most Americans use “mental health” to describe mental health problems, mental disorders, or mental illness. Mental health is supposed to be positive and include joy, happiness, meaning, and mutually supportive relationships.
Instead, even the term “mental health prevention” is awkwardly phrased. Wait. Does mental health prevention mean we’re preventing mental health? Ironically, that might be exactly what we’re doing.
Pretend for a moment that you’re a young person. You have two options. You can enroll in a program designed to reduce your anxiety and depression. Or you can enroll in a program designed to help you strive toward happiness, meaning, and realizing your abilities. Of course, this is a false dichotomy, but which direction do you find more hopeful and inspiring?
We also need to stop using unidimensional slogans to bludgeon community mental health from bad to better. Mental health awareness is a great example. Too much awareness of negative symptoms is not a good thing. More on this soon.
Contemporary prevention programs also ignore several basic psychological principles.
When young people begin learning about mental disorders, a natural and powerful process begins. First, they learn about psychiatric symptoms. Then, they’re told these symptoms represent mental illnesses. Inevitably, they see these symptoms in themselves (or their friends) and begin self-diagnosing. Sometimes, the labels help explain their experiences and youth experience temporary relief. Who’s not reassured to learn that social anxiety is a thing? But, when the label gets too closely linked to identity, diagnosis becomes self-limiting. Students think: “I can’t pay attention because I have ADHD” or “My anxiety stops me from having fun and being around people.” And, because labels are sticky, it becomes difficult for young people (and adults) to shake the label and pursue their potential.
As you read these words, thousands of American youth are learning about their so-called mental disorders in at least two ways: on social media (via Tik-Tok, in particular) and through school-based mental health literacy/awareness workshops. More awareness and more information can make mental health worse—especially if the information is inaccurate or not applied with sensitivity and nuance.
Another psychological principle operates to sustain and deepen negative labeling. Like everyone, young people are inclined toward “confirmation bias.” They easily find evidence for their pre-existing beliefs while discarding evidence inconsistent with their pre-existing beliefs. If I believe I have anxiety and my anxiety limits my ability to participate in social activities, I will become skilled at noticing when my anxiety is adversely affecting me, while dismissing evidence that I’m strong and resilient enough to socialize with my peers.
What we pay attention to grows. Although my teenage clients would respond to this statement with “duh,” prevention programs ignore this concept by paying far too much attention to what’s wrong. We will not shrink problems by paying more attention to them. This is fundamental brain science. The more we focus on and talk about our problems, the better we become at focusing on and talking about our problems. The famous neuroscientist Donald Hebb put it this way: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.” The more we think about our problems, the more we’re teaching our brain to think about our problems. Soon, it becomes automatic, and you’ll be thinking about your problems all day long.
For 2027, let’s reboot mental health. Let’s redefine mental health as a positive emotional, psychological, and relational state. Then, let’s help young (and older) people develop strengths, skills, empathic relationships, positive experiences, and resources to successfully pursue positive mental health.
Together, we can turn Mental Health Awareness Month into a collective experience of joy and wellbeing for everyone.
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John Sommers-Flanagan, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and founding director of the Phyllis J. Washington Center for the Advancement of Positive Education at the University of Montana. He is coauthor of 10 books and many professional articles. The opinion expressed here is solely that of John Sommers-Flanagan and does not represent his current or former employers. You can email your thoughts to: john.sf@mso.umt.edu. For more information, go to https://johnsommersflanagan.com/ or https://www.umt.edu/education/cape
At the Phyllis J. Washington Center for the Advancement of Positive Education at the University of Montana we have two big and exciting activities happening this summer.
The first one is called “A Really Good Day for Educators.” We’re offering this FREE, live and in-person day of training for educators on August 3 in Missoula in collaboration with a fabulous organization called Legacy+. Legacy+ is a Toronto-based organization that helps bring purpose to life. They’re also fun and amazing collaborative partners. As one example, they immediately claimed the site https://areallygoodday.com/ for our event landing page. Go there now (if you’re interested). You can learn more about Legacy+ here: https://legacyplus.org/about-us/
The second activity is our usual Evidence-Based Happiness for Educators course. We still have openings and the price is an absolute bargain for 3 UM grad credits or 45 OPI license renewal units.
Last thing. I wrote an Op-Ed piece on Mental Health Awareness Month and sent it to the New York Times. I do that sort of thing once in a while when I want to have sort of a lonely-rejection experience. However, the NYT may be ignoring me, but I’m not ignoring myself, because, I have now submitted the Op-Ed to @johnsommersflanagan.com. . .and the johnsommersflanagan website monitor is much kinder and has let me put a link to a pdf of the lightly edited Op-Ed piece here!
John Sommers-Flanagan 