Richard Fontenot
I am an Award-Winning psychotherapist (CAMFT, California Marriage and Family Therapist Association) trained to help you find your Happily Ever After, working with couples for more than 10 years. My couple clients include newer relationships, soon-to-be wed/prenuptial, as well as parents-children. My training sets me apart from most therapists, because I take a neuroscience therapeutic based approach to helping you achieve your optimum mental health and become more flexible in relationships and increase your self-awareness in how others may perceive you. I attended Duke University and trained in Clinical Psychology, Marriage and Family Therapy, Neuroscience for Business at MIT, and Narrative Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
The greatest strengths are not just academic, but deeply interpersonal, allowing them to foster trust and facilitate change, and one of the reasons I use Interpersonal Neurobiology in my sessions. Helping you achieve optimum health is my goal.
First session
We'll have a conversation about what events, thoughts, and feelings you're experiencing and what you're looking to achieve. After listening to your questions and having some dialogue between us, I'll explain how I can help you meet your goals.
Strengths
You'll meet with one of the very few Harvard, Duke, and MIT trained psychotherapists helping you achieve optimum self-awareness (controlling anxiety and/or depression) and improve your reaction to relationships using CBT, Gottman, and Interpersonal Neurological empirically proven methods. I have been told that I possess a combination of high-level emotional intelligence, clinical skills, and ethical integrity. The greatest strengths are not just academic, but deeply interpersonal, allowing them to foster trust and facilitate change, and one of the reasons I use Interpersonal Neurobiology in my sessions.
Ideal clients
I provide psychotherapy to those who are seeking caring support, change, or improvement in their lives as individuals, married couples, and families; want to establish stronger work, family, and/or team organizational objectives, assuaging anxious thoughts, depression, or stressors associated with life challenges. My expertise is working with patients presenting with anxiety, depression, substance abuse, school and career transitions, illnesses, family and marital issues, loss and grief, and co-occurring disorders. My patients include writers, actors, performers, creatives, doctors, teachers, students, married couples, and tech program managers (Google, Apple, Microsoft, start-ups) who are of diverse backgrounds.
Origin story
To bring couples and families together in celebration of each and everyone's unique identities. I recognized that there is a deeper level of change that can happen because of the therapeutic process and wanted to become a small part of helping someone achieve optimum health.
Treatment methods
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
It's important to calibrate our systems by integrating the left and right hemispheres of the brain by working through belief systems. When working with patients, I help them move from a place of stuck repetitive negative thoughts/beliefs a move to a more realistic picture of events that we sometimes don't see under the influence of depressive or anxious chemicals that flood our bodies. My goal is to help you to work through this, helping you discover more about yourself and achieve optimum health.
Interpersonal
Interpersonal Neurobiology: Daniel J. Siegel, M.D. is a pioneer in the field called interpersonal neurobiology (The Developing Mind, 1999) which seeks the similar patterns that arise from separate approaches to knowledge. This interdisciplinary approach invites all branches of science and other ways of knowing to come together and find the common principles from within their often disparate approaches to understanding human experience. Interpersonal neurobiology weaves research from these areas into a consilient framework that examines the common findings among independent disciplines. This framework provides the basis of interpersonal neurobiology. The mind is defined and its components necessary for health are illuminated.
Gottman method
Couples therapy method that I use because there are physiological markers that happen in conflict and these markers are repeated in research about couple's experiences. When couples feel overwhelmed or upset, so many things are said- which is about the content and not about the process. I like to break down events and go through the process of disagreements and look for evidence based solutions to improve relationships and overall mental health.
Location
Virtual sessions