New to Grow
I'm Ross Grossman, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, California-based, with nearly 40 years of clinical experience and enough personal history to know that therapists need therapy too. I specialize in working with people who are intelligent, self-aware, and still somehow stuck. Anxiety, depression, relationship dysfunction, major life transitions, addiction recovery, cultural identity, emotional health - these are my lanes. I use REBT, ACT, and Ericksonian Hypnotherapy, which means I'll challenge your thinking, work with your resistance, and occasionally use a story to get past the part of your brain that's been arguing with itself for years. I'm direct. I'm warm. I will not nod silently for 50 minutes while you wait for an insight to fall from the ceiling. I believe therapy should actually change something - and I've spent almost four decades figuring out how to make that happen. If you're ready to do real work with someone who takes the work seriously but life with humor, I might be exactly what you've been avoiding.
The first session is an intake but not an interrogation. I want to understand what brought you here, what you've tried before, and what "better" actually looks like for you specifically. We'll talk about your history, your current situation, and what's been getting in the way. I'll also be honest with you about what I'm noticing and whether I think I'm the right fit. Good therapy starts with a good match, and I'd rather tell you upfront than waste your time and money discovering it six sessions later. You don't need to prepare anything. You don't need to have it together. You just need to show up.
Nearly 40 years of clinical experience means I've sat with a lot of pain, and I've learned to tell the difference between what needs to be witnessed and what needs to be challenged. I do both. My training spans multiple modalities, which means I'm not ideologically married to one approach. I follow the client, not the model. I'm also a stand-up comedian, which is either a red flag or the best possible credential for sitting with human suffering -probably both. I'm particularly effective with high-functioning people whose competence has become a hiding place, men who were never given permission to have an interior life, couples navigating cultural or communication differences, and anyone in recovery who wants more than sobriety. They want an actual life. My greatest strength might simply be this: I take you seriously without taking you too seriously. That turns out to matter more than most people expect.
You're smart, possibly too smart. You've read the books, downloaded the apps, and can explain your attachment style at dinner parties — and you're still stuck. Maybe you're a high-achiever who's quietly exhausted. Maybe you're a man who was handed emotional illiteracy at birth and never got a refund. Maybe you're navigating a relationship where two completely different cultural operating systems are trying to share one house. Maybe you've been in therapy before and left feeling merely listened to — which is lovely, but not enough. My clients tend to be people in transition: careers, relationships, identities, sobriety. They're often funny — humor as armor is something I understand personally. They're curious, a little stubborn, and somewhere underneath the competence, they're carrying something they haven't said out loud yet. If you want comfortable, I'm probably not your guy. If you want effective — and occasionally laugh while getting there — we should talk.
Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy
REBT was created by Albert Ellis, who basically looked at Freud's couch and said, "What if instead of blaming your mother for five years, we just challenged the belief?" It's a direct, no-nonsense approach to the irrational thoughts that fuel anxiety, depression, and the kind of rage that gets blamed on traffic. Spoiler: it's rarely the traffic.
Acceptance and commitment (ACT)
ACT is the therapy that tells you to stop trying to think your way out of your feelings — which is terrible news for people who are very good at thinking. Developed by Steven Hayes, it's built on a simple but annoying truth: the harder you fight your anxiety, the louder it gets. ACT teaches psychological flexibility — the ability to have your difficult experience AND still do the thing that matters. Radical? A little. Effective? Embarrassingly so.
Hypnotherapy
Milton Erickson was a polio-surviving, color-blind, tone-deaf psychiatrist who revolutionized hypnotherapy by realizing that the unconscious mind is not stupid — it just doesn't take orders well. Neither do most of my clients. Ericksonian Hypnotherapy works with that resistance rather than against it, using story, metaphor, and indirect suggestion to create change that the conscious mind would have argued with for years. It's therapy for people whose brains are too smart for their own good.