Richard’s Story
I’m most at home in the outdoors, close to the seasons and the wildlife of Western Massachusetts. I live near Amherst with my wife and our 2 children. We ski as a family and my son and I are into birds. Summers lead us up the coast to Mount Desert Island, Maine. I was a distance runner for years, but I converted to CrossFit in 2018 and haven’t looked back.
My childhood was in the UK and in boarding school before coming to the States for high school in 1986. I can see culture from the outside, which is helpful with understanding the range of other’s life experiences. This allows me to connect with people who have grown up internationally, but it is also helpful with other experiences like adoption. Being a long-standing transplant helps me be aware of my own cultural perspective and boosts cognitive processes like re-framing and out-of-the-box perspectives to unstick stuck thinking. I am a passionate intellectual, “slightly exotic,” with a good bed-side manner. I facilitate people to be both vulnerable and direct, as it mirrors the way that I am. I am prepared to disrupt circumstances that will quickly or slowly bleed people dry or to death.
Professionally, I am a clinician who has a varied perspective of the therapeutic continuum within the private pay treatment world. I came up through Outdoor Education and non-therapeutic wilderness programs in the late 90s. I worked within State-based Americorps programming for inner-city teens and young-adults in the early 2000s. I completed a Master’s in Counseling Psychology through Antioch University of New England in 2008. My clinical work experience includes teen and family PHP, psychiatric unit (adult and adolescent), Therapeutic Boarding School clinical counseling, and anxiety focused interventions for admission to a Residential Treatment Center before going independent with Clinical Intervention in 2014. I gravitate towards Narrative Therapy and Existential Therapy modalities.
