For decades, ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder) has been understood through the lens of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity—a classic trio that makes school, work, and relationships an uphill battle.

But what if we’ve been missing something?

What if the emotional rollercoaster—the meltdowns, the mood swings, the struggle to self-soothe—isn’t just a side effect of ADHD, but a core part of it?

New research published in Nature Mental Health suggests exactly that.

A study analyzing longitudinal brain data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study found that emotion dysregulation is a key pathway to ADHD, potentially as important as the well-documented cognitive and motivational dysfunctions (Hou et al., 2024).

In other words, ADHD isn’t just about struggling to pay attention or sit still. It’s also about struggling to regulate emotions—a factor that may explain why standard ADHD medications don’t fully work for everyone.

So, what did the researchers discover? And what does this mean for treatment, diagnosis, and the way we think about ADHD? Let’s dive in.

There’s a moment in every betrayal story when the affair ends.

Maybe he got caught. Maybe she dumped him.

Maybe he woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and decided to be a better man.

Regardless of how it happened, the affair is over. And yet—something feels off. He’s home, but he’s not home.

He looks at you, but he’s looking through you. He reaches for your hand, but there’s no grip, no warmth. You ask him how he’s feeling, and he gives you the dead-eyed “I’m fine.”

And then, one day, it hits you like a gut punch. He’s grieving.

Not the loss of your marriage—he’s grieving her. The affair partner. The forbidden, intoxicating, all-consuming fantasy that slipped through his fingers.

And where does that leave you? You—the one who stayed, the one who held your heart together with duct tape and sheer willpower, the one who still, against all odds, wants to make this work?

You deserve to know what’s happening. And, more importantly, you deserve to know what to do about it. This post is for you.

Marriage, as an institution, predates most gods.

The first couples weren’t blessed by a priest but probably nodded at each other over a fire and said, “Let’s not kill each other.”

Family? That’s justmore people and more opportunities for passive-aggressive notes on the fridge.

But what happens when you strip marriage and family life of religious scaffolding?

What happens when you seek therapy without faith in divine intervention, cosmic justice, or even a benevolent old man watching from the clouds?

You end up here: in the very human, very secular, but still very messy reality of relationships.

Welcome to marriage and family therapy for atheists.

St. Thomas Aquinas never had to schedule an emergency session for a couple on the verge of divorce.

He never sat in a dimly lit office watching two people, exhausted from years of cold war, chew their lips bloody as they struggled to say anything at all.

He never glanced at the clock, wondering whether another 50-minute hour could even begin to untangle the knots in their love.

But Aquinas knew something about human nature. And that’s all couples therapy really is—an attempt to wrestle with the raw, unreasonable, incomprehensible stuff of human nature.

The good saint knew that love isn’t a feeling, or a reward, or a cosmic accident.

Love is a thing that people do, day after day, in defiance of entropy.

It is an act of the will, a choice, a sacrifice, a small rebellion against the overwhelming loneliness of being alive.

Aquinas did not think this was particularly romantic. He thought it was true.

There are two types of wisdom in the world. One comes in polished journal articles, bound in academic presses, and cited at conferences by people in uncomfortable shoes.

The other lives in the words of monks, grandmothers, and poets—wisdom passed down through experience rather than through data.

Somehow, St. Porphyrios of Kafsokalyvia and Murray Bowen, contemporaries contrasted by continents, and theological worldviews, arrived at the same conclusions about families.

One called it grace. The other called it Family Systems Theory.

Both agreed on this: families are not collections of isolated individuals. They are systems, alive with unseen currents, emotional contagion, and patterns that stretch across generations.

If Virginia Satir, the warm and endlessly optimistic mother of experiential family therapy, had ever set foot on Mount Athos, she probably would have been delighted to meet St. Paisios, one of modern Orthodoxy’s most beloved monks.

Not because he was a trained therapist—he wasn’t—but because his entire life was one long experiment in healing human hearts.

Satir believed that every family was a living, breathing system where emotional wounds got passed around like a contagious illness (Satir, 1983).

St. Paisios saw the same thing, except to him, family wounds were spiritual infections—and like all infections, they either worsened or healed (Agioritikovima, 2012).

Both of them, in their own ways, spent their lives telling people the same message:

"You’re not broken. You’re just stuck in a bad pattern. And good news—patterns can change."

If you’ve been doomscrolling through the internet lately, you might have stumbled upon the claim that manipulative, self-absorbed, and delightfully callous folks—otherwise known as members of the "Dark Triad"—are irresistible to potential mates.

You may have even been led to believe that narcissists, Machiavellians, and psychopaths are cleaning up in the dating scene, leaving the rest of us hapless romantics in the dust.

But alas, a new study published in the Journal of Personality suggests that this notion is about as accurate as a horoscope predicting your ex will text you back.

Researchers Yavor Dragostinov and Tom Booth took a long, hard look at whether Dark Triad traits actually make someone more attractive in the eyes of potential partners—or if this so-called ‘bad boy’ appeal is just a modern fairy tale we keep telling ourselves to justify bad decisions.

If an insomniac adolescent stumbles into your kitchen at noon, bleary-eyed and scouring the fridge for a breakfast burrito, you might wonder: Were they up all night doomscrolling? Lost in the abyss of TikTok?

Secretly engaged in philosophical debates about whether time is a flat circle?

No, gentle reader. According to a recent study in the Journal of Sleep Research, their internal clock might just be responding to the most unassuming influencer of all: sunlight.

When we think of Jewish thought leaders influencing family therapy, names like Martin Buber (I-Thou relationships) or Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (radical empathy) might come to mind.

But Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (1707–1746), the Ramchal, an 18th-century Italian kabbalist and ethicist, offers an even more profound connection—one that speaks directly to the inner workings of family dynamics, intergenerational trauma, and the structure of healthy relational repair.

At the heart of his work Mesilat Yesharim (The Path of the Just) is a structured process of spiritual, emotional, and ethical refinement—a process that mirrors what we now recognize in the field of family therapy.

Through the lenses of awareness (zehirut), order (seder), and rectification (tikun), Ramchal provides a roadmap for healing family wounds, navigating relational conflict, and breaking cycles of dysfunction.

Let’s explore how.

My favorite saint is Maria Goretti. She is a truly modern saint, a symbol of something profoundly uncomfortable—something that has evolved in meaning over the last century.

To the Catholic Church, she is a martyr of purity, a girl who chose death rather than sexual defilement.

To my eyes, her story is far more complex: an act of brutal male entitlement, a crime of lust and control, a reflection of family dysfunction, and, perhaps most strikingly, a study of how trauma ripples across generations.

In the curious pantheon of Roman Catholic saints, few are as peculiar—or as profoundly instructive to family therapy—as St. Joseph of Cupertino (1603–1663).

Known as the "Flying Saint," Joseph was a Franciscan friar who reportedly levitated during prayer.

But before he became a celestial wonder, he was a bumbling, ridiculed, and unwanted man—a man who, by all worldly measures, should have been cast aside.

The intersection of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and gender-expansive behavior has garnered increasing attention in clinical and academic research.

ADHD, a neurodevelopmental disorder marked by impulsivity, executive dysfunction, and emotional dysregulation, appears to have a notable correlation with gender variance, including gender nonconformity, nonbinary identities, and gender fluidity.

This paper explores the research linking ADHD to gender identity development, highlighting neuropsychological, social, and emotional factors that contribute to this phenomenon.