Background Return to Questions
Credentials. My Ph.D. is in psychology from U.C., Berkeley, and I am licensed as a psychologist to practice in New Mexico (0965) and California (PSY4223). I have been a practicing psychotherapist and clinical psychologist for over 40 years.
Professional Work. I began my professional career as a Research Psychologist for the Institute of Development at the University of California, Berkeley. Following that, I held a two-year full-time Visiting Lecturer position at California State University at San Francisco and then a full-time Lectureship at the University of California, in the Psychology Clinic.
From there I worked eight years as a Clinical Psychologist at the Contra Costa County Hospital. During that time I held positions as Clinical Director of the therapeutic inpatient ward, Therapist and Training Director for the Mental Health Clinic, and the Psychologist for two interdisciplinary medical clinics, the Pain Clinic and the Psychosomatic Clinic.
I left that job to begin full time private practice in Berkeley in 1980, working with individual adults and couples, treating a mixture of normal life problems and serious disorders. In 20006 I moved my family to the town that we had fallen in love with - Taos, New Mexico. Here I continued to work with California clients by phone until 2008, when I opened my practice to the people of Taos and the surrounding communities.
Professional Training. My academic training was in psychological research with a heavy emphasis on scientific thinking and method. My clinical training has been post-graduate and highly eclectic, integrating opposite points of view within psychology as well as various disciplines outside psychology. Besides many seminars on various approaches, methods and problems, my more extensive training includes Gestalt Therapy, Reichian and Bioenergetic therapy, hypnosis, Energy Psychology, EFT, the Diamond Heart approach, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), biofeedback, and, most recently, Coherence Therapy and Internal Family Systems Therapy.
Life experience. My formative experiences involve growing up in Kansas, being an ardent boy scout, singing in high school and church choirs, wrestling in high school, dreaming of becoming an inventor as I experimented in my basement workshop, aspiring to be a minister until my world view changed in college, apprenticing in a trade as I worked my way through college, getting turned on to knowledge for the first time at a Midwestern university, learning intellectual competition at Berkeley, hitch-hiking through Europe and the Middle East.
The next phase involves completing a Ph.D. in psychology at U.C. Berkeley through most of the sixties while supporting a family of five, doing consulting on multivariate analysis, running a large research project, teaching psychology at Berkeley and at San Francisco State during the years of student protests, free-lancing as carpenter and house painter for the two years I dropped out of psychology, doing body/mind training through martial arts and meditation for many years, spiritual work for seven years with Hameed Ali (aka A.H. Almaas), playing guitar and flute badly, studying constantly, camping and running white-water rivers, marrying, divorcing and remarrying, raising four children into adulthood.
I have been married to the same woman for 36 years and have four grown children from two marriages. Our latest adventure has been moving to Taos, adjusting to the change from a metropolitan area to a small rural town, making new friends, and enjoying the natural beauty of this magical land. Things I do for fun are reading, watching cable news and comedy, date-night with my wife, farmer’s market, gardening, skiing, hiking, archery, white-water rafting, and sitting on my back porch swing sipping coffee in the morning and a martini in the evening.
I sometimes think that my many years of experience have brought me wisdom. Just as often, I feel like I am still struggling to comprehend the basics. The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know, so I still approach each new client somewhat as if he or she were my first. Each client teaches me something new about life, therapy, and myself. I am constantly learning and experimenting with new ideas and methods, which keeps me in a continual process of discovery and renewal. This adds to what I can offer my clients, and keeps me excited about my work. Return to Questions
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