Hi! I'm a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC) based in Berkeley California and serving clients statewide via telehealth. I received my Masters in Integral Counseling from the California Institute of Integral Studies in 2019 and my Bachelors in Psychology from Reed College in 2010. I have over 15 years of experience in Community Mental Health and have been practicing as a therapist since 2018. I work eclectically, integrating a wide range of approaches including humanistic, relational, existential, somatic, gestalt, psychodynamic, transpersonal, motivational interviewing, ACT, feminist, IFS, polyvagal, somatic experiencing, narrative, NVC, and IFS. I support people to find greater connection, safety, agency, meaning, authenticity, stillness and joy in their relationships with themselves, others and the world.
What can clients expect to take away from sessions with you?
In our first session, we will make contact what is coming up in your life, your goals from therapy, preferred working styles and informed consent, and explore collaboratively how we might work together to fruitfully support you in your journey.
Explain to clients what areas you feel are your biggest strengths.
My greatest strengths are my grounded availability as a present, thoughtful and deeply caring person with human commitment to and belief in my clients, and my dynamic integration of many dimensions and perspectives on understanding life reflecting over 20 years of intensive intellectual/emotional and personal/professional inquiry into understanding trauma and human potential and the central question of what our core human needs are and how they come to be or not be met.
About David Volker
Serves ages
Licensed in
Accepts
Appointments
VirtualMy treatment methods
Humanistic
I believe truly listening and holding space to make contact with people exactly where they are is a fundamental human need. Our experiences are all different with deep contours of context, meaning and nuance and your experiences are unique, with unique meaning with regards to your needs. I see one foundation of my role as offering a field of compassionate presence to support your own field of compassionate, accepting awareness, which I view as an important seat for both wellness (healing internalized negative relationships with self) and the freedom for authentic agency. As Carl Rogers said, "the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change."
Trauma Informed Care
I specialize in supporting people healing through complex trauma, particularly relational trauma. I recognize that trauma of relational violation requires a healing relational experience. My therapeutic practice is founded in support for relational safety and client empowerment/self-determination, which I see as including (continuing) informed consent, client-led treatment goals and a co-regulating frame of collaboration, therapist transparency, an intersubjective view of reality and of therapy as existentially lateral/person-person and not hierarchical, pacing and time, and crucially relationship building. I hold three years of informal training in Polyvagal Theory and Somatic Experiencing as guides providing nervous system maps that help understand experience and illuminate pathways to healing as well as a vast and ever increasing toolbox of holistic and multi-modal somatic and experiential tools that support shifting from flavors of freeze, shutdown and mobilization to the social engagement system of safety and connection. I am influenced and inspired by many esteemed leaders in the field including Stephen Porges, Deb Dana, Bessel Van Der Kolk, Judith Herman, Peter Levine, and Pete Walker. I am as well particularly knowledgeable about intergenerational attachment trauma and the experiences of (adult) children who have grown up with a parent with Borderline and/or narcissistic personality disorder, and have spent over a decade studying these disorders as well as the mechanisms of narcissistic abuse. Finally, I hold narcissism as quite present in many realms of society and culture at large and understand that much of our human history is based on or adjacent to cycles of oppression, which persist in many forms of structural and internalized/externalized oppression including capitalism, materialism, sports, celebrity culture, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and racism. I see this illness and its healing as spiritual as well as somatic, emotional, cognitive, interpersonal and societal.
Relational
See "humanistic" and "trauma informed care." We are social beings and I believe safety in connection (attachment) is our most important need. Therefore, I believe that relational needs are relevant to if not components of much of symptoms of human wellness and suffering; life occurs in a relational context. While we may be experiencers of dysfunction, I typically do not see "dysfunction" as originating in or even residing within the individual, but rather as a function of the interaction between the individual and his/her needs and the environment/context of his/her past and present important relationships.
Attachment-based
See "humanistic," "trauma informed care," and "relational." I believe attachment is our primary human need across the lifespan. As such it has a prime importance in healthy development from our earliest experiences in infancy in establishing defaults for the level of safety, predictability, connection, and agency we experience in the world (called our "internal working model") as well as the very core of our experience of self including sense of identity, esteem and experiential coherence. How we are treated by our caregivers is the direct template for how we will treat ourselves as a default (called "internalization").
Existential
See "humanistic" and "trauma informed care." Rather than occurring within a box of what is "known" and "catalogued" I see life as vast and different for every person, with undefined parameters extending far beyond what any individual knows or what "popular knowledge" or "consensus reality" is. This is also a spiritual perspective. I see much of the tasks of life as involving to some degree a reconciling with topics like a lack of objective meaning and a need to create our own, vast freedom for ourselves that renders us and only us responsible for our choices or decision not to choose, our ultimate responsibility for our own lives and our experience regardless of agency and cause as only we have to live our lives, and the reality of impermanence and mortality for everything living and nonliving. I believe the notion of therapist as an authority who is able to meaningfully diagnose "disorder" is myopic and naive at best: I see "disorder" as symptoms that elicit or express distress or dysfunction and the naming of disorder as typically merely a naming of these symptoms as opposed to a meaninful understanding of their origins or meaning (which I view to often involve needs of some sort not being met, which include needs around experiences that are roughly expected, "normal" features of life)