Free CE Webinar This Friday! Plus the Human Capacity for Delight and Wonder

Hello comrades in care,

The thing about having a baby is that I am constantly inspired and constantly short on time. My list of topics to write about, trainings to develop, and projects to take on has grown longer than ever both because I am generating so many new ideas and because I’m not able to start most of them — let alone finish them! One such idea that has been bouncing around my head is an essay on our relationship to and capacity for delight and wonder.

Our child is nearly five months old and for weeks now she has been full of smiles and giggles and wide eyes. Her experience of herself, of other people, and of the world around her is rooted in pure delight and wonder. Yes she gets overwhelmed or scared sometimes, but thanks to a secure attachment and many months of general safety, she does not perceive her environment through threat detection mode so much as “what is this incredible thing?!” mode. I am astonished with how much of her waking hours are spent being fully delighted and in awe.

My wife often recounts the story of how shortly after birthing this splendid human into the world, she was on a walk in the cemetery near our home and was moved to tears by the fact that every person buried there and marked on the gravestones had once been a baby. We were all once babies. Which means we all inhabited a developing mind-body state driven by delight and wonder. Now some of us were not fortunate enough to have adequate safety and attachment to perhaps be as open and curious and gleeful as others. And still there is something innate in our human capacities that allows us to experience and motivates us toward delight and wonder as we explore and understand the world around us.

This is deeply inspiring to me. I spend my own therapy sessions these weeks feeling like I’m just dumping out all the existential worries in my brain. I won’t list them all here today. You don’t need that! You’re just checking your email! But you know. And when I feel so full of awareness of current challenges and future threats, I am not naturally driven to delight in or sit with wonder at the world and people around me or my experience of myself. I am driven toward the opposite, really. Of course. It’s easy be pulled to just see the things that reinforce my sense of threat and despair. To invest my energy (unconsciously or consciously) in keeping us safe and guarded.

But all I need is a reminder (thank you, babies!!!) that actually I, too, was built for delight and wonder. And it is worthwhile and accurate to find that in the experience of living. Even now. My innate capacity is still there buried under the fear and disappointment and the defenses of apathy and snark. I can watch my child realize that she is attached to and has control over her hands and wait — maybe her feet too?! and realize that actually that IS incredible. And I have a bit more knowledge than her which actually means even more opportunities for delight and wonder. I am in awe of all that is going on underneath my skin to facilitate my hands working to type this and the sensory information being sent back to my brain and brought into my conscious awareness. And speaking of sensory information, when I tune into it, there is something delightful about the way the keys feel against my finger tips. It almost tickles when I’m paying attention.

So this is my invitation to you, comrades, to be intentional about digging out and bringing forth your innate capacities for delight and wonder. I feel quite comfortable promising you it will be transformative.

Important Offering (Not From Me) THIS FRIDAY

The Psychology of Radical Healing Collective is putting on its inaugural virtual symposium and registration, including up to 6 CEs is free. It’s this Friday from 11am to 5pm Eastern Time, and you can learn more and register here: https://psychologyofradicalhealing.com/.

For folks who have attended any of my trainings, you know that the Radical Healing Framework (and in particular Radical Hope) has been a core influence in how I practice liberatory approaches to psychotherapy. This is an excellent chance for folks to learn more from the psychologists who first developed the framework and others who are expanding its applications.

The conference opens with opening remarks and the keynote Radical Healing Under the Cloud of Tyranny: Transforming Pain into Awareness, Hope, Action presented by Drs. Hector Adames and Nayeli Chavez-Dueñas. Two panels follow, focusing on research and therapeutic applications of Radical Healing Frameworks. While I am eagerly looking forward to learning from all of these scholars and practitioners, I want to highlight that the Research panel includes my colleague Dr. Em Matsuno discussing a clinical trial of an adaptation of Radical Healing therapy with BIPOC Two-Spirit, Trans, and Nonbinary clients. And the closing keynote will be Dr. Della Mosley presenting Love, Black Girls: On Embodying the Psychology of Radical Healing Framework.

My sincere apologies for not helping to get the word out about this sooner and I hope that many of you have already learned about this and at least some of you have the flexibility to attend pieces or all of this on Friday!! I’ll be there 😃 

Upcoming Offerings from Sebastian

Cape Cod Institute just released new promotional images for my 2026 course (featuring my now long-gone mullet of 2025), which I love because they highlight a belief I have about what we in the psych and mental health fields have the ability and responsibility to offer society. The use an excerpt from a piece I wrote acknowledging the horrible uses of psychology and psychiatry against marginalized communities in the past while honoring that “…those of us working in the field of psychology today have the potential to facilitate powerful healing, liberation, wellness, and resistance.”

Registration is open for my 2026 course, a two-day 8 CE course titled Weathering the Storm Together: Therapeutic Approaches to Sociopolitical Stress in Trans and Nonbinary Clients. Learn more about it at www.transpsychologist.com/weathering-the-storm . You can take it in-person or live-online, and student pricing is available. If you’d like to receive a discount code for registration, please comment on and share my original instagram post. (You can also email me if you don’t use instagram — [email protected])

Recent Writing

Given how much is in my head that I haven’t had time to get out into the world, it’s a bit comical how much I’ve actually managed to write over the past month. I hope some of these Substack posts are helpful to others. Click the image to be linked to each individual article, or head over to my substack directly and browse yourself: sebastianmbarr.substack.com.

That’s mostly it for now, folks. One last piece is that I am opening up a spot in my calendar for short-term but regular consultation/supervision. This will be on Mondays until June and can be weekly or every other week. My consultation fees are sliding scale 150-300 per 50-minute “hour.” Reach out if you’re interested in learning more: [email protected].

Thank you everyone for your work in these trying times.