Author: Overcoming Adversity | Buteau’s Odyssey

When I first meet a patient, I ask a question that often catches them off guard: “What’s your secret?” Specifically, I’ll ask, “Given everything you’ve described—the stress, losses, or hardships that brought you here—what’s your secret to having made it this far?” It’s a disarming question, but a powerful one. It changes the entire frame of therapy and narrative from “What’s wrong with me?” to “What’s strong in me?” From the Disease Model to the Strength Model Traditional psychiatry and psychology have long operated within a disease model—identifying symptoms, diagnosing disorders, and reducing pathology. But human beings are not machines…

Key West doesn’t need embellishment. The horror here was written by wind, water, and human loss long before it was ever packaged for ghost tours or souvenir shops. This island has been drowned, burned, rebuilt, and reshaped more times than most American cities its size—and its folklore reflects that brutal intimacy with death. Set and shot in Key West, Key of Bones: Curse of the Ghost Pirate draws from pirate myth and island lore, tapping into the same storms, wrecks, and vanished lives that shaped the city’s earliest ghost stories. These aren’t urban legends imported for tourists. These are stories…

Picture this: You’re a program manager at Microsoft in 2012. Your inbox is flooded with hundreds of feature requests from engineers across the company. Most are complex, resource-intensive ideas that promise revolutionary changes to how Bing displays search results. Then there’s that email—a simple suggestion about changing how ad headlines appear. A few days of coding work, maybe less. You glance at it, shrug, and mark it “low priority.” After all, how much impact could tweaking a headline format possibly have? Six months later, that dismissed idea would generate over $100 million in annual revenue. The Signal Here’s what actually…

One persistent and damaging myth about narcissistic relationships is the idea that only the naïve, dependent, or psychologically injured get pulled into them. This belief not only misrepresents reality, but it also actively strengthens survivors’ shame and self-blame. In truth, strategies like gaslighting don’t work despite strength. Gaslighting works because of the strengths in the victim. Empathy, self-reflection, openness, and relational responsibility are all core traits essential for developing intimacy and a meaningful, purpose-driven life. And these traits are precisely what narcissistic dynamics exploit. Many survivors of narcissistic relationships are perceptive, capable, psychologically literate people who are used to examining…

The Adams family has become niche horror moviemakers who have accumulated quite a cult following. Their next feature, Mother of Flies, dropped its trailer today in preparation for its TV debut on Shudder.  The press release for Mother of Flies gives a little background to this horror family: John Adams, Toby Poser, and daughters Lulu and Zelda Adams (collectively known as The Adams Family) have been making films under the creative marquee of Wonder Wheel Productions since 2010. Features include The Deeper You Dig (2019, Dark Sky Films), Hellbender (2021, Shudder), Where the Devil Romas (2023, Tubi), and Mother of Flies (2025, Shudder). The family’s films have been…

Mae Martin’s Wayward opens with a kind of horror that doesn’t announce itself. There are no phantoms creeping down hallways, no dramatic stingers on the soundtrack; just the slow, suffocating dread of being perceived. From the pristine menace of Tall Pines Academy to the too-perfect small town that hosts it, everything looks ordinary enough to pass inspection. But the real danger in Wayward is never the setting; it’s the gaze that saturates it. The show understands that the most enduring queer terror isn’t supernatural at all, but social: the constant pressure to be visible, palatable, legible. Horror here doesn’t hide…

It is widely said that artificial intelligence will replace many of our jobs or turn them into something quite different. Anton Korinek, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia, for example, has predicted that AI systems could soon be powerful enough to replace much human labor. Within as few as five years, he warned in 2025, advances in AI could seriously disrupt the economic and social order by assuming many jobs and reducing the wage levels of others. Beyond the big question of how we will earn money if machines can do things exponentially faster and cheaper than…

Can anyone beat the Rams? Are the Patriots Super Bowl contenders? How much did the Packers’ injuries hurt their chances?Those are the questions Colin Cowherd has answers to in the most recent edition of the “Herd Hierarchy.” Remember, Cowherd isn’t ranking teams based on what they’ve done lately or their record. Rather, it’s an encapsulation of where each team in the NFL stands, holistically, taking into consideration which opponents each team has beaten, how healthy they are and their ceiling for the rest of the year.So, let’s take a look at Cowherd’s latest top 10 heading into Week 16 of…

Family rituals are routines and traditions that honor what is very important to the family (Rothenbuhler, 1998). Rituals include family traditions, such as the specific ways we celebrate holidays, birthdays, vacations, weddings, and graduations, or even our weekly family dinners and everyday bedtime rituals for children. Rituals are valuable when family members perceive them as current and meaningful (Braithwaite, 2022). A few years ago, my friend Kris was concerned that his family was losing their tradition of decorating the family Christmas tree together. Kris purchased their live tree the day after Thanksgiving so they could decorate their tree over the…

Early in her career, USA Today best-selling author Emma Grey felt like rejection would break her. Today, she’s made rejection something to reach for. The fear of rejection is evolutionary—we are hardwired to avoid rejection in order to survive and protect social cohesion. In fact, research shows that rejection triggers the same brain regions as physical pain (Kross et al., 2011). While fearing the pain of rejection can lead to self-doubt, hesitation to pursue our desires, and feelings of inadequacy and unworthiness, the experience of rejection can actually build resilience. Rather than leaning into a rash reaction to rejection, tolerating…