Committed To Misunderstanding

About Committed To Misunderstanding

Committed to Misunderstanding is a podcast about history, accountability, and human behavior. Hosted by therapist Chuck Lenahan, the show examines erased histories and the patterns that allow harm to continue long after violence ends. Through a clinical lens and rigorous research, each episode explores how denial, minimization, and narrative control shape what we remember—and what we avoid. This isn’t sanitized history or performative outrage. It’s an examination of how societies justify harm, resist repair, and pass unfinished business forward.

Publisher

Chuck Lenahan

Category

history

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

8 Feb 2026

Latest episode

14 Aug 2026

Latest episodes

33 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   14 Aug 2026

   Every Religion On Earth Agrees On One Rule: Don't Be A D-Bag!!

   Eight traditions. Four continents. Twenty-five hundred years. Zero contact with each other. Every one of them lands on the same instruction: don't be a monster to the people around you. Tri-state licensed clinical mental health therapist Chuck Lenahan opens Season 2 by proving the premise, then handing you the eight-mechanism clinical toolkit — Albert Bandura's research on moral disengagement — that the rest of the season is going to run on. Season 2, Episode 1. New to the show? Season 1 is the American chapter of this story. Start there for the full case, or jump into Season 2 now. ──────────────────────────── COMMITTED TO MISUNDERSTANDING ──────────────────────────── Whitewashed history brought back to its technicolor reality. With receipts. Host: Chuck Lenahan | Tri-state licensed mental health therapist

2. 

   19 Jun 2026

   The Verdict Is In. Do Better, White America.

   Twenty episodes. Five arcs. One verdict. This season I built a case — Erasure, Extraction, Enforcement, Narrative, Responsibility — using primary sources, federal records, and receipts that have been sitting in the public record for decades. In this finale, I deliver the verdict the evidence requires, and I tell you exactly what that verdict demands going forward. This is not a summary episode. This is the close of the case. IN THIS EPISODE — The full season recap, arc by arc, receipt by receipt — The verdict: guilty, as a system, not as individuals — What the verdict requires — four specific, non-negotiable actions — Why "do better" without specificity is the comfortable version of this conversation — The clinical case for why the lever works and the variable has always been will — What comes next: the Season 2 announcement SOURCES CITED — Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), United Nations — Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Survey of Consumer Finances, 2019 — HR 40, 119th Congress, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA-7) — Full sourcing for all twenty episodes available in each episode description ABOUT THE SHOW Committed to Misunderstanding is hosted by Chuck Lenahan, a tri-state licensed clinical mental health therapist. Each episode applies a behavioral and clinical lens to under-taught or deliberately obscured American history. Whitewashed history brought back to its technicolor reality. With receipts. ALSO IN THIS SEASON E13 — The Moynihan Report: How Language Became a Weapon E17 — The Wealth Gap Is Not an Outcome. It Is a Policy Decision. E19 — Black America Doesn't Have an Inferiority Problem. It Has a Misdiagnosis.

3. 

   12 Jun 2026

   Black America Doesn't Have an Inferiority Problem. It Has a Misdiagnosis.

   For four hundred years, this country has handed Black America the wrong diagnosis. Not a character problem. Not an inferiority problem. A misdiagnosis, built into policy, enforced through law, and compounded through every generation that inherited the consequences. In this episode I am doing something I have not done in eighteen episodes. No historical event anchor. No primary source reading. No named human from a century ago whose story I am here to tell. Just the clinical framework that explains what a wrong diagnosis actually does to a person, what getting the right one finally makes possible, and what I am asking you to do with that information. This is the episode I built the whole season to get to. IN THIS EPISODE — What misdiagnosis does psychologically, and why the exhaustion, the hypervigilance, and the misattribution are not character flaws — The clinical research on race-based traumatic stress: Robert Carter, Thema Bryant-Davis, and Jude Mary Cénat — Why grief is the correct response to an accurate diagnosis, and why this country has built an entire vocabulary to shut that grief down — "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps." "It was over two hundred years ago." "My family never owned slaves." What those phrases are actually doing clinically — Why the anger is proportional, and what January 6th tells us about what proportional actually looks like — The guilt versus responsibility distinction, and why conflating them is one of the primary ways this conversation breaks down — What I am asking white people to do with what they now know — HR 40, the study nobody will authorize, and why the treatment conversation cannot start until we stop relitigating the diagnosis SOURCES CITED— Carter, R.T. (2007). Racism and psychological and emotional injury. The Counseling Psychologist, 35(1), 13–105.— Bryant-Davis, T. & Ocampo, C. (2005). Racist-incident-based trauma. The Counseling Psychologist, 33(4), 479–500.— Cénat, J.M. (2023). Complex racial trauma. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 18(4).— HR 40: Introduced January 3, 2025, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA-7). Referred to House Judiciary Committee. 102 co-sponsors. Never brought to committee markup. ABOUT THE SHOW: Committed to Misunderstanding is a history and social commentary series hosted by Chuck Lenahan, a tri-state licensed clinical mental health therapist. Each episode applies a behavioral and clinical lens to under-taught or deliberately obscured American history. Tagline: Whitewashed history brought back to its technicolor reality. With receipts. ALSO IN THIS SERIES E13 — The Moynihan Report: How Language Became a Weapon E17 — The Wealth Gap Is Not an Outcome. It Is a Policy Decision. E18 — She Organized 300,000 People for Reparations. The Government Called It a Crime.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Contact Committed To Misunderstanding

Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.