Discover + Heal + Grow🔭❤️‍🩹🌱 : A Taproot Therapy Collective Podcast

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We felt the world had enough whispery mental wellness podcasts asking you to eat healthy and breathe deeply. We aim to be more honest and sometimes irreverent and funny about the forces that affect us all. Some episodes feel like hanging out with professional therapists at the bar after work, while others might feel like you’re listening in on a university class with professional thought leaders. We discuss creativity, intuition, trauma, and the overlap between the three in the spectrum of consciousness and the psyche. Approaching topics from a depth psychology and brain-based medicine perspective, we explore the archetypes inherent in arts, design, and mass media. We delve into neuroscience, cutting-edge trauma neurobiology, Jungian psychology, relationships, political psychology, and feature interviews with both amateurs and experts. Discover + Heal + Grow is the podcast of Taproot Therapy Collective, a complex PTSD and trauma-focused therapy practice in Birmingham, Alabama. Hosted by Joel Blackstock and the other therapists at Taproot, it focuses on consciousness and all the cool and messy parts of being human. Subscribe for new episodes where we unpack topics like: The neurobiology behind new age and eastern medicine concepts Psychology of artists and design Cutting-edge trauma therapy approaches Brain-based medicine Archetypes in culture and media Psychology of true crime Therapy representation in entertainment Burnout in helping professions And much more! Whether you’re a fellow trauma therapist or just a fellow seeker, we offer authentic conversations that challenge conventional thinking and explore the depths of consciousness and healing. Based in Birmingham, Alabama, Taproot Therapy Collective is the premier provider of therapy for severe and complex trauma, PTSD, anxiety, and depression. We provide EMDR, Brainspotting, ETT, somatic and Jungian therapy, as well as QEEG brain mapping and neurostimulation. Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ #TraumaHealing #DepthPsychology #ConsciousnessExploration #MentalHealthPodcast #TherapyCollective #PTSD #EMDR #Neuroscience #JungianPsychology #BirminghamTherapy The resources, videos, and podcasts on our site and social media are no substitute for mental health treatment. Please find a qualified mental health provider and contact emergency services in your area in the event of an emergency. Our number and email at Taproot Therapy Collective are only for scheduling, are not monitored consistently, and are not a reliable resource for emergency services.

  1. 1 DAY AGO

    Part 7 - A Psycho-History of American Psychology: Those That Walk Away from Omelas

    If you have ever felt like a failure because the "evidence-based" protocol didn't fix you, or if you are a clinician feeling the crushing weight of a system that rewards compliance over competence—this episode is your validation. The wall is hollow. The science has become science-flavored capitalism. But the real work is still happening in the cracks of the system, in the rooms where two human beings are brave enough to put down the worksheets and simply look at each other. "The way a profession defends a failed paradigm against its own data is the same way a patient defends a failed self-image against their own felt experience." In the explosive penultimate episode of Psychotherapy on the Couch, Joel takes a magnifying glass to the single greatest crisis of modern American psychiatry: the moment the apparatus proved its own foundation was a lie, and then decided to just keep building on it anyway. This episode dives deep into the STAR*D study—a $35 million federal initiative designed to prove the medication-first paradigm worked. It didn't. But instead of changing course, the industry buried the data, ignored the severe suicidality rates, and proceeded to build decades of clinical guidelines on a fiction. This isn't just a story about bad science; it's a clinical case study in institutional dissociation. When the cold machine looks in the mirror and sees a monster, it doesn't change—it just shatters the glass. 🎧 In This Episode, We Explore: The STAR*D Cover-Up: How the largest antidepressant study in history quietly swapped its protocols to hide a true sustained recovery rate of just 2.7%—and buried data showing severe, treatment-emergent suicide attempts. Institutional Dissociation: Tracing the exact psychological mechanism patients use to avoid painful truths, and watching the entire mental health profession do it at scale. The Replication Crisis: Why the "gold standard" of Evidence-Based Practice is often anything but, and how hundreds of heavily cited, peer-reviewed studies (especially around CBT) fail to be replicated in the real world. The Hijacking of Beck and Ellis: How the original, nuanced cognitive interventions of Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis were flattened by the apparatus into manualized, twelve-session worksheets built for insurance billing, rather than human healing. The Powell Memo & The Think Tank Pipeline: How a 1971 corporate blueprint systematically captured the American research establishment, replacing university-led science with dark-money think tanks and financialized clinical encounters. The Omelas Choice: Borrowing from Ursula K. Le Guin, we confront the agonizing reality of the modern therapist: Do you dissociate to survive inside the machine, or do you walk away and risk losing your ability to help anyone at all? STAR*D Study, Replication Crisis in Psychology, CBT Efficacy, Evidence-Based Practice (EBP), Antidepressant Research, NIMH, Thomas Insel, Institutional Dissociation, The Powell Memo, Think Tank Pipeline, Aaron Beck, Albert Ellis, Psychiatric Reform, Mental Health Infrastructure, Ursula K. Le Guin Omelas, QEEG Brain Mapping.

    1hr 45min

  2. 29 APR

    Part 6 - A Psychohistory of American Psychology: Please DO NOT Mangle, Spindle or Mutilate Me

    In July 1979, Jimmy Carter went to Camp David for ten days and came back with the strangest speech a sitting American president has ever given. Officially it was about energy. Functionally it was about the soul. Eighteen months later, Ronald Reagan won forty-four states by promising the opposite, and American psychology received its marching orders for the next forty years. This episode traces how the apparatus got built. From Mario Savio's "put your bodies upon the gears" speech in 1964 to the dispersal of the counterculture into yuppies, Silicon Valley engineers, Lockheed contractors, oil-patch roughnecks, and the back-to-the-land movement that eventually curdled into the survivalist pipeline. From David Rosenhan's fraudulent 1973 study "On Being Sane in Insane Places" to Robert Spitzer's typewriter parties at Columbia, where two new psychiatric disorders could be drafted between cups of coffee. From the Feighner Criteria and the St. Louis Group to the Medicare Resource-Based Relative Value Scale and the RUC, the secret AMA committee that sets the prices of every medical procedure in the country while the nation tells itself it has a free market. From the academic capture of CBT and the manualization of what could be measured to Allen Frances spending his retirement trying to take back what he had built. At the heart of it sits the bet the field made and lost. For thirty years, American psychiatry wagered its entire diagnostic edifice on the assumption that biological validation was imminent, that the genes and the imaging and the neurotransmitter chemistry would arrive in time to retroactively justify the DSM. Twenty billion dollars later, NIMH director Thomas Insel posted a blog three weeks before the DSM-5 shipped admitting the categories were not scientifically valid. He later told Wired he had funded a lot of cool papers and not moved the needle on suicide, hospitalization, or recovery for tens of millions of Americans. The cathedral had been built on a foundation that turned out not to exist, and the surrounding infrastructure had become too entangled with it to demolish. This is the story of how a profession built to listen to suffering became a wall that suffering speaks into. Diagnosis as checkbox, payment as procedural code, research as citation farming, and the Sherman Antitrust Act ensuring that the only people who could fix any of it, the frontline clinicians, are forbidden by federal law from organizing the way that would give them leverage.

    1hr 33min

  3. 22 APR

    Part 5 A Psychohistory of American Psychology: The Wound that Speaks

    In Episode 5 of Psychotherapy on the Couch, the host explores a profound and unsettling premise: psychosis, paranoia, and conspiracy theories are not random malfunctions of the brain. Rather, they are the language our culture uses to express its unprocessed, collective trauma. From the animistic voices of the early 1900s to the algorithmic paranoia of the 2020s, this episode traces how the "American Unconscious" absorbs what society refuses to acknowledge—and how the psychiatric establishment has systematically failed to listen. By pathologizing systemic wounds into individual symptoms, modern psychology has left us uniquely vulnerable to cults, conspiracy theories, and an epidemic of isolation. Key Themes & Takeaways 1. The Evolution of Psychosis Psychotic delusions act as a mirror to the cultural environment, adapting their vocabulary to the dominant anxieties of the era: 1910s: Voices tied to nature, ancestry, and the land. 1930s (The Depression): Hungry, pleading voices reflecting profound economic and manufactured inadequacy. 1950s–1970s (The Cold War): Voices of surveillance and persecution, directly mirroring the existential dread of the atomic bomb and the very real operations of the covert state (e.g., MKULTRA, COINTELPRO). 2020s: Algorithmic, technologically driven voices reflecting the reality of digital surveillance and data capture. 2. The Neurology of Meaning Drawing on Paul MacLean's "Triune Brain" model and Jungian psychology, the episode highlights how Western culture aggressively privileges the analytical cortex while dismissing the older, emotional, meaning-making layers of the brain (the paleomammalian layer). When a culture numbs its trauma, it also numbs its intuition, forcing the unconscious to speak through improper channels—like physical exhaustion, hallucinations, or societal panic. 3. The Map is Wrong, but the Wound is Real Conspiracy theories—from the anti-Masonic panics of the labor era to modern QAnon—are framed not as intellectual defects, but as misdirected grief. People accurately perceive that they are being exploited, manipulated, or discarded by a system, but they lack the vocabulary to name the true structural causes. Because the "map" is wrong, their very real rage is directed at scapegoats. 4. The Tragedy of the Satanic Panic The episode examines the 1980s Satanic Panic as a prime example of a culture losing its symbolic language. Both feminists and religious conservatives accurately sensed a massive cultural crisis regarding the sexual exploitation of women and children. However, because modern psychology had abandoned symbolic, mythological language in favor of rigid cognitive-behavioral literalism, this valid cultural terror was forced to express itself as a literal hallucination of underground cults. 5. The Weaponization of Diagnosis The script addresses the dark history of psychology acting as an arm of state control, specifically highlighting how the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia were deliberately altered in the 1960s to pathologize the justified rage of Black civil rights activists. 6. The Algorithmic Shadow Unlike past collective traumas, today's algorithmic feeds deliver highly personalized, individualized "wounds." This has created a fragmented landscape of paranoia where people feel—accurately—that their nervous systems are being manipulated by tech platforms, but incorrectly attribute the manipulation to shadowy cabals rather than engagement-optimized incentive structures. The Core Lesson for Mental Health Therapy was originally designed to listen to the symptom as a form of communication. Today, however, the clinical apparatus has been captured by 15-minute med checks, billing codes, and symptom-reduction protocols. To heal the culture, we must stop arguing with the "hallucination" of the conspiracy theorist and start addressing the legitimate, bleeding wound beneath it. History of Psychology, Carl Jung, Collective Unconscious, Conspiracy Theories, QAnon Psychology, Mental Health System, Satanic Panic, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Trauma, Systemic Abuse, Somatic Experiencing, Psycho-history, Taproot Therapy Collective.   Find More information and resources at our Hoover, AL therapy clinic website.

    1hr 12min

  4. 15 APR

    Part 4: A Psychohistory of American Psychology: Too Fuzzy, Too Soft, Too Big

    In 1960, two Harvard professors took psilocybin and accidentally broke the boundaries of American psychology. What happened next is the story of a road not taken. In Episode 4 of Psychotherapy on the Couch, Joel Blackstock explores the wild, lost era of the 1960s and 70s—a brief window when the psychological establishment dared to investigate the "unmeasurable" depths of human consciousness. We trace the divergent paths of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), the CIA’s dark experiments with mind control (MKULTRA) and remote viewing (the Stargate Project), and the "horseshoe theory" of consciousness where neuroscientists and mystics face the exact same unsolved mysteries. But this era of exploration didn't last. We break down how the Reagan Revolution, the gutting of the social safety net, and the creation of the DSM-III brutally slammed this door shut. Discover how American psychology traded the human soul for strict billing codes, managed care, and the illusion of total, mechanical objectivity. If you've ever felt that modern therapy is missing a sense of meaning, spirituality, or depth, this episode explains exactly when—and why—we engineered those things out of the system.   #psychology history, timothy leary, ram dass, psychedelics in therapy, mkultra, cia stargate project, remote viewing, dsm-3 history, reaganomics mental health, history of psychiatry, psychotherapy podcast, consciousness, terence mckenna, mental health crisis, cognitive behavioral therapy, adam curtis style, sociology, cultural critique, taproot therapy,    Find More information and resources at our Hoover, AL therapy clinic website.

    1hr 31min

  5. 7 APR

    Part 3: A Psychohistory of American Psychology: The Void and the Cure

    In Part 3, we look at the strange psychological reality of post-World War II America. The new suburban "American Dream" offered unprecedented material wealth, but it also delivered crushing isolation, atomization, and the constant, buzzing terror of nuclear annihilation. Instead of addressing the structural failures of this new lifestyle, the medical establishment decided to just numb the pain. Enter Miltown and Valium: the first blockbuster tranquilizers designed to chemically manage the despair of the suburban housewife. We break down the era of the "Comfortable Void." We explore how the metaphor for the human mind shifted from a steam engine to a computer, how the radical ideas of the 1960s Human Potential Movement (like Esalen) were stripped of their teeth and sold back to us as corporate mindfulness, and the dark, unforgivable reality of deinstitutionalization that turned American cities into open-air asylums for traumatized veterans. Finally, we look at how the desperate push to "re-scientify" therapy in the late 1970s threw out the body and the soul, leaving us with the cold, mechanical billing codes we deal with today. psychology history, postwar america, mental health podcast, psychopharmacology, miltown, valium, the cold war, cybernetics, human potential movement, esalen, deinstitutionalization, cognitive behavioral therapy, sociology, american history, taproot therapy   Find More information and resources on the blog and website for our Hoover, AL therapy clinic

    55 min

  6. 2 APR

    Part 2: A Psychohistory of American Psychology: The Myth of Normal and the American Plague

    When the Great Depression wiped out the myth of the rugged, self-made American hero, the country was left with a massive psychological void. Right on cue, Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis arrived in the U.S. with refugees fleeing Europe. Freud famously warned that he was bringing America a "plague," but America didn't catch it. Instead, we domesticated it. In Part 2 of Psychotherapy on the Couch, Joel explores how the deep, messy, and uncomfortable theories of the human soul were repackaged to fit American consumerism. We look at how Edward Bernays weaponized his uncle Freud's ideas to invent modern PR and advertising, how a bizarre 1940s contest to find the mathematically "average" person gave birth to the suffocating myth of Normalcy, and how the brutal logistics of World War II forced the military to create a standardized checklist for human suffering—laying the exact groundwork for the modern DSM. If you've ever wondered why we treat mental health like a checklist, the answer starts here. #psychology history, sigmund freud, psychoanalysis, edward bernays, the dsm, mental health podcast, history of therapy, sociology, american history, great depression, world war 2, taproot therapy, cultural critique, mental illness.   Find More information and resources on the blog and website for our Hoover, AL therapy clinic

    36 min

  7. 27 MAR

    Part 1: A Psychohistory of American Psychology: The Sun and the Clock

    Why do we treat our minds like broken machines? In The Psychohistory of American Psychology traces the birth of modern American psychology back to its dark, industrial roots. Before therapy, Americans processed suffering through community, religion, and the union hall. Then came the stopwatch and the assembly line. This isn't a story about healing; it’s a story about optimization. We explore how engineers like Frederick Winslow Taylor and behaviorists like John B. Watson systematically stripped away the "messy" human soul to build a more compliant worker. We also unpack the era's defining paranoia—the "Money Trust" and the secret banker meeting at Jekyll Island—to reveal that the true conspiracy to steal human agency wasn't hiding in the shadows. It was walking right out in the open on the factory floor. Psychology didn't emerge to cure the trauma of the 20th century. It emerged to make us function inside the machine. Listen to discover: What Americans used to make sense of suffering before therapy existed. How the invention of standardized "machine time" literally rewired the human nervous system. The dark truth behind John B. Watson’s Behaviorist Manifesto. Why the paranoia over the Jekyll Island Federal Reserve meeting missed the real conspiracy of the Gilded Age. Find More information and resources at our Hoover, AL therapy clinic website.

    47 min

  8. 24 MAR

    The Spider and The Birdhouse Novella Preview

    In this episode, I’m thrilled to share a very special preview with you all! I recently had a short story published in The Running Wild Anthology Number One, a fantastic collection of unique and captivating tales. Tune in as I read an exclusive excerpt from my story. If you enjoy this sneak peek and want to find out what happens next—as well as discover a whole bunch of other amazing short stories by talented authors—please consider grabbing a copy of the book! Get your copy of The Running Wild Anthology Number One here: 👉 https://amzn.to/4sWlbDS (Note: This is an affiliate link. Using it helps support the show at no extra cost to you!) Read this excerpt as a blog article:  Thank you so much for your support, and I can't wait to hear what you think of the full story!   Find More information and resources at our Hoover, AL therapy clinic website.

    30 min
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About

We felt the world had enough whispery mental wellness podcasts asking you to eat healthy and breathe deeply. We aim to be more honest and sometimes irreverent and funny about the forces that affect us all. Some episodes feel like hanging out with professional therapists at the bar after work, while others might feel like you’re listening in on a university class with professional thought leaders. We discuss creativity, intuition, trauma, and the overlap between the three in the spectrum of consciousness and the psyche. Approaching topics from a depth psychology and brain-based medicine perspective, we explore the archetypes inherent in arts, design, and mass media. We delve into neuroscience, cutting-edge trauma neurobiology, Jungian psychology, relationships, political psychology, and feature interviews with both amateurs and experts. Discover + Heal + Grow is the podcast of Taproot Therapy Collective, a complex PTSD and trauma-focused therapy practice in Birmingham, Alabama. Hosted by Joel Blackstock and the other therapists at Taproot, it focuses on consciousness and all the cool and messy parts of being human. Subscribe for new episodes where we unpack topics like: The neurobiology behind new age and eastern medicine concepts Psychology of artists and design Cutting-edge trauma therapy approaches Brain-based medicine Archetypes in culture and media Psychology of true crime Therapy representation in entertainment Burnout in helping professions And much more! Whether you’re a fellow trauma therapist or just a fellow seeker, we offer authentic conversations that challenge conventional thinking and explore the depths of consciousness and healing. Based in Birmingham, Alabama, Taproot Therapy Collective is the premier provider of therapy for severe and complex trauma, PTSD, anxiety, and depression. We provide EMDR, Brainspotting, ETT, somatic and Jungian therapy, as well as QEEG brain mapping and neurostimulation. Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ #TraumaHealing #DepthPsychology #ConsciousnessExploration #MentalHealthPodcast #TherapyCollective #PTSD #EMDR #Neuroscience #JungianPsychology #BirminghamTherapy The resources, videos, and podcasts on our site and social media are no substitute for mental health treatment. Please find a qualified mental health provider and contact emergency services in your area in the event of an emergency. Our number and email at Taproot Therapy Collective are only for scheduling, are not monitored consistently, and are not a reliable resource for emergency services.

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