I claim expertise in the four areas in which I’ve published: depression, alcoholism, marital therapy, and hypnosis. Through my volunteer work at the Marjorie Kovler Center for the Treatment of Suvivors of Torture, I have gained much experience in the treatment of post-traumatic disorders, and over the years I have treated the full range of anxiety disorders, including panic attack disorder, agoraphobia, social anxiety disorder, and obsessive compulsive disorder.

My approach to treatment is present-oriented, problem-focused, short-term, and active–active in two senses: First, I engage with the client and direct the course of the conversation in directions I think will be productive, rather than remaining mostly silent as many traditional therapists do. Second, all the therapy I do is based on homework assignments that the client is expected to complete between sessions. (For those acquainted with alternative approaches to psychotherapy, I offer the following more
technical description of my approach: I was trained as a behavior therapist. Although not philosophically behavioral anymore–I now consider myself more of an experiential therapist–I am still operationally behavioral. I am experiential (i.e., cleint-centered, Rogerian) in the sense that I believe that the most important information for psychotherapy is in consciousness: relatively available to instrospection but inchoate and not verbally encoded. I do not believe in a Freudian unconscious, and do not believe in or
make use of any other psychoanalytic concepts.)

My approach to couple therapy is my own, of course, but it is closely related to Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT), developed by my colleague and contemporary, Dr. Andrew Christensen at UCLA. He and I traveled the same conceptual path over many years and arrived at the same conclusion: a couple’s level of compatibility sets a ceiling on their prospects for happiness. IBCT is an active, directive, short-term approach in which the therapist helps the couple accept their differences, effectively handle conflict, and celebrate their similarities and points of agreement.

In selected cases, I use hypnosis, which I learned about ten years after receiving my doctorate. Hypnosis can be a very effective and rapid means of treatment for anxiety disorders and for pain control. However, I feel about it the way I do about sundried tomatoes, to which I was introduced at about the same time as hypnosis: I don’t know how I ever lived without it, but I don’t use it on everything. For a detailed account of my use of hypnosis, see my 2006 article, “Hypnosis in the Desensitization of Fears of Dying,” published in the e-journal, Pragmatic Case Studies in Psychotherapy. (You can access the article from the Links page on this website.)