About Chas

I have spent roughly twenty-five years in direct clinical practice as a psychotherapist, alongside thirteen years teaching and counseling students as a professor at Michigan State University. I also spent nearly fifteen years co-founding and managing a large group of clinicians and functioning as C.O.O. of a managed care company responsible, at one point, for delivering and managing mental health services for roughly 800 thousand people in the state of Michigan. My wife of forty-seven years and my three children have all, I'm convinced, earned sainthood for living with a man who never met a dad joke he didn't like.

About the Book

Resurrecting Abel comes out of what I watched in that consulting room for a quarter century: the same pattern showing up everywhere I looked, once I knew to look for it. We bury a whole mode of being human -- direct, wordless, immersive experience -- under the reflective mind's constant naming, judging, and constructing. Every institution does its own version of the burying. This book traces it through therapy, marriage, religion, law, politics, science, and education, and asks what it would take to let that buried self breathe again.

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Each chapter of the book stands on its own, so you're free to read in order or jump straight to whatever pulls at you. The buttons below will take you to any chapter; from there, you can return here or move straight to the next one.