Background/Experience:
Personal: I was born and grew up in the Panama Canal Zone and have lived in Europe and Africa. As a result I’m easy with getting to know people of varied backgrounds and am pretty familiar with the experience of feeling at home everywhere and nowhere. I jokingly like to tell people, “I live among you, but I’m not one of you.” What this means to me ultimately is that we all are foreigners on this planet and that our real home is a spiritual quest and an eternal journey into the discovery of the soul. That can get complicated and may sound unduly fuzzy, so the important thing to remember as far as therapy goes is that this journey is more difficult and maybe impossible if you’re carrying too much baggage. A good part of therapy has to do with unloading the baggage. We all have it and I’m still working at getting lighter myself. The journey, if you are on the right path, should be challenging and at the same time absorbing and joyful. At times there is sadness and pain. These feelings also should be part of therapy that’s working.
Professional: This is a hard section to write without turning it into psychobabble. I have a BA degree from Davidson College. The school was by far the most academically difficult of the schools I’ve attended, and probably what I learned there was how to deal with academic challenges. I also have an MA degree from Boston University that I got while I was in the US Army overseas, and a Ph.D. from Univ of Texas at Austin. The last one was motivated by a need to know more about how to understand clinical work and how to do it. I also couldn’t see how my family would survive if I stayed in mental health work with a master’s degree. So that’s the formal education synopsis.
My work history is heavy on the psychotherapy practice dimension. From about 1973 until the present, that’s been my primary focus and interest. I’m still fascinated by individual growth and freedom, and find that I experience an excitement myself when clients are making progress. We really are in the game together after all. Most of these years I have worked for the Dept of Veterans Affairs in a combat trauma program, but I would emphasize that in some ways everybody has their own combat trauma experience albeit usually less intense and less graphic. The last four years at the VA have involved primarily supervising a large number of other clinicians plus putting on training workshops and providing presentations. Since 1980 I’ve also run a small private practice in Boulder. Teaching interns and students has been a regular part of my job for a long time, and in the last couple years classroom teaching of doctoral students at DU has been a rewarding and different addition to my professional experience. I think what I would want a client to know is that I’ve put a lot of time and energy into learning how to be good at this business, and my great joy in the work world is having a client use my efforts to enhance their own life. The monetary exchange is relevant only in the sense that it is a reminder that we live in a world that has its own requirements, and that we both must answer to those requirements as well.
Personal: I was born and grew up in the Panama Canal Zone and have lived in Europe and Africa. As a result I’m easy with getting to know people of varied backgrounds and am pretty familiar with the experience of feeling at home everywhere and nowhere. I jokingly like to tell people, “I live among you, but I’m not one of you.” What this means to me ultimately is that we all are foreigners on this planet and that our real home is a spiritual quest and an eternal journey into the discovery of the soul. That can get complicated and may sound unduly fuzzy, so the important thing to remember as far as therapy goes is that this journey is more difficult and maybe impossible if you’re carrying too much baggage. A good part of therapy has to do with unloading the baggage. We all have it and I’m still working at getting lighter myself. The journey, if you are on the right path, should be challenging and at the same time absorbing and joyful. At times there is sadness and pain. These feelings also should be part of therapy that’s working.
Professional: This is a hard section to write without turning it into psychobabble. I have a BA degree from Davidson College. The school was by far the most academically difficult of the schools I’ve attended, and probably what I learned there was how to deal with academic challenges. I also have an MA degree from Boston University that I got while I was in the US Army overseas, and a Ph.D. from Univ of Texas at Austin. The last one was motivated by a need to know more about how to understand clinical work and how to do it. I also couldn’t see how my family would survive if I stayed in mental health work with a master’s degree. So that’s the formal education synopsis.
My work history is heavy on the psychotherapy practice dimension. From about 1973 until the present, that’s been my primary focus and interest. I’m still fascinated by individual growth and freedom, and find that I experience an excitement myself when clients are making progress. We really are in the game together after all. Most of these years I have worked for the Dept of Veterans Affairs in a combat trauma program, but I would emphasize that in some ways everybody has their own combat trauma experience albeit usually less intense and less graphic. The last four years at the VA have involved primarily supervising a large number of other clinicians plus putting on training workshops and providing presentations. Since 1980 I’ve also run a small private practice in Boulder. Teaching interns and students has been a regular part of my job for a long time, and in the last couple years classroom teaching of doctoral students at DU has been a rewarding and different addition to my professional experience. I think what I would want a client to know is that I’ve put a lot of time and energy into learning how to be good at this business, and my great joy in the work world is having a client use my efforts to enhance their own life. The monetary exchange is relevant only in the sense that it is a reminder that we live in a world that has its own requirements, and that we both must answer to those requirements as well.