Dan Koch just finished a seven-and-a-half-year process and came out the other side a fully licensed clinical psychologist. So I did what any friend would do — took over his podcast, gave him a week off from prepping, and made him answer every question I’ve been saving. He did zero prep on purpose. What we got is the conversation you have with someone you’ve known long enough to skip the throat-clearing: what existential therapy actually gave him clinically, why permission structures are the hidden architecture of both clergy and therapy work, why he’s moved from the big abstract questions toward attention and embodiment, and what it means that a psychologist with ADHD is trying to work out how attention relates to love. Plus: the oral history of the Enneagram I am definitely writing, why he’d take the drum stool for Against Me! on the White Crosses tour, and Lars Ulrich in Moscow as the runner-up. And there’s a whole extra hour of this — music, movies, punk as a theology of human dignity, and the story of when Rob Bell hijacked a Homebrewed episode live.
Highlights from the conversation
- Becoming a cognitive-existential therapist. Dan’s honest account of how it happened. He had a window before licensure study — still racking up the last 700 of 3,000 required hours — and wanted something that would serve both the podcast and his clinical gaps. So he went deep: Yalom, and then Emmy van Deurzen’s clinical workbook. What surprised him was the hit rate. Nine times out of ten, when he brought an existential concept to a client, they wanted to go there. That project became the Anxious Times series with Kristen, and it moved him from “cognitive therapist who uses some existential and positive psychology” to just calling himself a cognitive-existential therapist.
- Permission structures. Where You Have Permission got its name, and why the question of who gets to go deep with whom keeps returning. Tripp’s story: the church dad who wanted to meet at the tap room after work, went straight to the real thing, and then admitted he wouldn’t have that conversation with any of his actual friends — but would have it with clergy. Dan’s version out in the world: he now tells people up front that he’s an existential psychologist and this could get weird, offers outs after two or three volleys, and works with the feedback he’s gotten over the years that he can be a lot and can miss the true interest level of the person across from him.
- What keeps him in it. Two things. Existentialism is hyper-focused on human experience at the individual level, and he finds human experience endlessly interesting. And — like cognitive therapy — it tries to deal with reality as we actually find it, with a strong emphasis on ridding us of self-deception. His words for that: a cold drink of water.Dealing with the real thing, capital R, capital S. Which he suspects is close to what draws people into ministry: wanting to deal with ultimate things, or at minimum, in the Tillich sense, with matters of someone’s ultimate concern.
- The bomb, and the anxieties that don’t go away. On the mid-century existential moment: looking backward at the Holocaust and two world wars in thirty years, and forward at what it means to have the bomb. Dan’s point about 1949 — the bomb is four years old, and for the first time in history there’s a mass understanding that a few bad actors could end the world. His read is that this dread never really left the modern mind. Tripp’s addition: the nuclear crisis is the archetype of uncontrollable threat, and now it’s multiplied — climate, genetics, AI.
- From ultimate things to attention and the body. The trajectory Dan names in his own thinking: from bigger, more abstract questions toward the specific, concrete, and embodied. He has ADHD; he’s fairly confident at least one of his sons does too. The working lens now is attention and bandwidth — what he actually has energy for, how not to spin his wheels, how parenting complicates all of it. And the honest theological discomfort in the move: coming from a worldview with some Gnosticism baked in, it can feel like downgrading from the ultimate things of God to the penultimate things of the body. (Being married to Jaffrey, who is naturally more oriented to the material and immanent, is a stated advantage here.)
- Attention as love, and the neurodivergence question. The best open question in the hour. Attention is closely linked to love in some theological circles — what you love is what you pay attention to, in one form or another. Dan wants to think harder about how that lands for people with ADHD, since it’s a neurodevelopmental condition nobody chooses. How do we think about the capacity to love with or without it? Should we carve out space for neurodivergence in how we read someone’s attention as love? Tripp’s parallel from Whitehead: the whole metaphysics comes out of taking seriously how a moment happens — how the past floods in, and how your orientation to it changes what’s consciously available for the future. A philosophy of organic attention. Which raises the parenting question both of them are actually sitting in: what does it look like to model that, and hand it on?
Get the extra hour
This conversation keeps going for about another hour, and the second half is the part where we stop behaving. Dan’s theory of punk’s irreducible amateurism as a kind of human dignity. The psychology of music project he’s building — endorphins, synchronicity, mosh pits at fifteen, and what it has to do with what mainline worship gave up. Byung-Chul Han’s hell of the same, and Dan cutting my doom with whole milk. Robert Eggers. The Refused frontman walking backstage before “New Noise” to tell my thirteen-year-old do you want to know why I do this? And my ongoing public campaign to get Five Iron Frenzy to play Theology Beer Camp.
Join the Process This Substack at processthis.substack.com to get the full extended conversation, plus every episode ad-free, bonus content, and the classes. It’s how the podcast keeps running, and it’s where the good stuff lives.
About our guest and his shows
Dr. Dan Koch is a newly licensed clinical psychologist based in Bellingham, Washington, specializing in religious change and deconstruction, working from a cognitive-existential orientation. Before psychology, he spent a decade in an emo band and a decade as a commercial composer. He hosts Religion on the Mind (formerly You Have Permission), on psychology and religion, and Pretty Good Vibrations, his music podcast. Support his work at patreon.com/dankoch. His telehealth licensure covering 42 states is in process.
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