The Interpreted Rock

  By Stephen C. Schultz Over the past 30 years in the mental health field, I’ve had the privilege of working with and walking alongside hundreds of families through some very difficult, very personal situations. These are not easy conversations. They rarely are. But if there is one thing I’ve learned that holds true across every diagnosis, every crisis, every level of care, it is this:  Secrets sabotage care.  There’s a moment in almost every conversation about problematic sexual behavior (PSB) where things quietly shift. A parent pauses. A question goes unasked. A detail stays just beneath the surface. Not because you don’t care, but because you care so much . When Not Knowing Feels Safer If you’re a parent walking this road, there’s a very real tension you’ve probably felt: “Do I really want to know everything?” Because knowing can feel overwhelming. It can change how you see your child. It can introduce fears you weren’t ready to carry about safety, about sib...

By Stephen C. Schultz Birthdays have a funny way of sneaking up on us. Not the date itself, we all know that’s coming. They show up every year like clockwork. But the memories that tag along with them…those can arrive out of nowhere. It was my brother’s birthday recently. Nothing unusual about that. As I mentioned to him, he’s developed quite a streak of having one every single year! But birthdays have a strange side effect for me. They tend to send my mind wandering back down old neighborhood streets and dusty trails that only exist now in memory. I started thinking about the adventures we had as kids. There were summer hikes to “the reservoir,” which at the time felt like an expedition deep into the wilderness, even though it was probably only a couple miles from home. Of course we carried our BB guns, because every proper childhood adventure required them. We rode our Big Wheels down the street so fast that our feet couldn’t stay on the pedals. Gravity would take over, and suddenly ...

  By Stephen C. Schultz Life rarely unfolds the way we imagined it would. Everyone eventually encounters a moment in life when the story you thought you were living suddenly changes. Sometimes it changes slowly. Other times it changes all at once. A diagnosis. A mistake. A loss. A decision that carries consequences further than we expected. And in those moments, something subtle but powerful happens. We begin to ask: What does this mean? Not just what happened—but what it says about us, about our future, about our worth. I have come to believe that much of life is shaped not only by the events we experience, but by the meaning we construct around those events. Two people can walk through the same storm and come away with very different interpretations of the rain. One may say, “I can't believe I'm so dumb as to forget my umbrella!” Another may say, “Dang, I forgot my umbrella! This is kind of fun just walking in the rain! I haven't done this since I was a kid, walking to sc...