At least I’ve had to come to that in my life, to realize that this stuff called failure,
this stuff, this debris of historical trauma, family trauma, you know,
stuff that can kill your spirit, is actually raw material to make things with and to build a bridge. You can use
those materials to build a bridge over that which would destroy you.
JOY HARJO
Career
Overview
Early in my career I worked at The Center for Contextual Change in Chicago, Illinois, a premier training ground for family therapists and mediators, and later at THE CENTER: Post-Traumatic Disorders Program at the Psychiatric Institute of Washington, DC., well-known hub for the study and treatment of dissociative disorders. Between 1998 and 2007, I managed addiction and mental health treatment programs in the Portland metropolitan area, where I promoted family therapy, mediation, and attention to trauma and adverse childhood experiences.
For the past six years I’ve had a full-time private practice in Portland, Oregon.
For seventeen years I taught clinical practice to graduate students in the School of Social Work at Portland State University.
You can look at my full CV with more publications here.
Since 1997 I have been licensed to practice clinical social work in the State of Oregon (L2532).
My
Recent Publications
The Therapist Who Sees Therapists: Working with the Trickiest Clients (The Psychotherapy Networker, March/April 2025)
The Silent Treatment: What I Wish I Could Tell My First Therapist (The Psychotherapy Networker, January/February 2025)
Top 6 Books Therapists Recommend to Clients (The Psychotherapy Networker, January/February 2025)
Finding Your Way as a New Clinician: Three Tips to Guide Your First Session (The Psychotherapy Networker, November/December 2023)
Exploring Consensual Nonmonogamy (The Psychotherapy Networker, May/June 2023)
The Divorce Announcement (The Psychotherapy Networker, January/February 2023)
More recently personal essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Sun, Poets and Writers, Huffington Post, and Salon, among others. My memoir, The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined, about a couple’s adventures in relationship therapy, is available from Black Lawrence Press.
You can follow my monthly microblog, Heart’s Imagination (on psychotherapy, healing, and the creative life), through Substack or my mailing list.
My
Education
I have undergraduate (Humanities, 1986) and graduate (Clinical Social Work, 1989) degrees from The University of Chicago, as well as a Master of Fine Arts (Creative Writing, 1995) from The American University in Washington, DC.
Contact Me About Therapy
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