Specialties  

Adolescent/Family/Marital

Substance Abuse

Health Psychology/Pain Control

Spiritual/Existential

Spiritual/Existential:  Those clients who have a natural interest in the spiritual/existential dimensions of their life often find that explicitly integrating spirituality into therapy enhances their personal work.  To that end, I have worked with priests, rabbis, ministers, monks and numerous lay persons who wish to make their spiritual beliefs and understandings central to their psychotherapy.  My background as a monk, my formal training in Religious Studies, and my life-long interest in Spirituality help me respect and understand the positions of my clients and enhance my dialog with them.  

Adolescent/Family/Marital:  My interest in Adolescents stems from years of working for Outward Bound in various roles:   field instructor,  Director of the Outward Bound Residential Treatment Center for Adolescents in Boulder, and Vice President (OBUSA)  for Program Development.  In addition, I was fortunate to be the Team Leader for the Intensive Therapy Team, a family systems-based multidisciplinary treatment team that used “behind the mirror” techniques for treating multiproblem families.

I have always loved doing individual therapy with teens but believe that in most cases, the adolescent benefits significantly from including a strong family component.  Teens often change significantly as the result of a high impact program but quickly relapse into problematic feelings or patterns when they return to their family environment.  In that sense, I believe that a family systems perspective is necessary both to sustain individual change and to remove blocks inhibiting such changes.   

Substance Abuse and Dependency:  When I worked in the inpatient substance abuse treatment program at the Seattle VA, my supervisor was Dr. Dennis Donovan, who along with his more well-known colleague, Dr. Alan Marlatt, was doing some of the early work on relapse prevention and controlled drinking strategies .  Later I worked with Outward Bound in their substance abuse treatment courses and supervised the Outpatient Substance Abuse Treatment Services at Sopris Community Mental Health Center in Colorado.  As a result of these experiences, I was able to gain a solid foundation in chemical dependency treatment and was also able to see and understand drug and alcohol addiction both from a traditional perspective (AA) as well as a variety of other models.  When appropriate I am willing to pursue controlled drinking and relapse prevention strategies with clients.  I also work with families of alcoholics/addicts and conduct interventions as appropriate.  Finally, while I often refer to AA,  I am aware that there are a variety of paths to sobriety.   

Health Psychology/Pain Control:  I did my dissertation on psychological techniques to control chronic headache pain.  When I first came to California, I worked with many Workers Compensation chronic pain cases and expanded my Health Psychology practice to include chronic illnesses such as MS, lupus, cancer, and chronic fatigue/fibromyalgia.  Working with clients with these types of issues requires tools and techniques such as relaxation, hypnosis, meditation, and psychoneuroimmunology;  just as importantly, the therapist must utilize advanced case management skills—coordinating everything from a team of health care providers, to assertive behaviors with insurance companies, to dealing with the family components of chronic illness.