(he/him)
Hello and welcome. I'm David, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) based in Massachusetts. I have been practicing as an LMFT for the past 17 years, I have worked in several settings, I spent close to a decade of my career working for a non-profit community outpatient clinic where I started as a child therapist and then transitioned to seeing only adults. I worked for 18 months in a grant-funded position that tied together community health workers, a NP, and local community agencies with patients who highly utilized the ER and hospital in an attempt to decrease hospital use and improve health. When the grant ended I took a position on the locked mental health unit at my local hospital and worked 4 years with a patient population experiencing the highest levels of mental health dysregulation. For the last 3 years I have been working in a position supporting medical residents and fellows during their residency and fellowship years.
In the first session, I'll start by asking what brings you to therapy and why now. I'll fill out a genogram with you, which is like a family tree that includes additional details like relationships, family labels, and beliefs. This helps me to clarify with you the narrative themes in your life that we can then explore in the following sessions to address the issue that brought you to therapy at this time.
Establishing clarity in thought and feelings, creating accurate expectations, and instilling hope.
I really enjoy working with people who are in life transition, whether you are thinking about making a transition or you are currently in it, clarity in thoughts and feelings, accurate expectations, and hope are essential.
Eclectic
Trained in Marriage and Family Therapy, understanding a person through the lens of systems is at my core. Overall, if I were to rank (in no order) the top 3 systems theories I utilize I would say Bowenian, Contextual, and Narrative. I also like the MBTI or the Ennegram as tools to better understand I utilize the genogram to get an initial overview of my client and the characters in their life story. I use constructs from narrative theory to flesh out the story and develop an accurate, clear, and consistent theme. Then we look at the themes and decide which ones should be kept, which should be challenged, and which need to be deleted alltogther. Personality theories and Contextual theory are great resources in helping people to understand the programs that are running in the background of their mind that maintain the themes.