Chuck Jones (he/him)

I am a retired Episcopal priest and single father to two adult boys. I have worked in the LGBTQ+ community for more than 40 years and decided to return to graduate school to become a therapist when I realized that a sedate retirement wasn't for me. In 1982, at the advent of the AIDS crisis in New York City, I was among a group of gay men who founded the Gay Men's Health Crisis which is where I was first inspired by the social work volunteers who met the needs of newly diagnosed People With AIDS. I have worked in many different settings but the LGBTQ+ community has always been my "tribe" and where I feel most at home. I've had many close gay male friends who happened to be survivors of sexual abuse and informally, I began educating myself about the condition twenty years ago. When I decided to get the education to become a psychotherapist, I knew from the start where I wanted to focus my practice. And now, as an "elder" gay man, I bring both my experience and passion to this work.

I believe that we all have a natural, inherent drive toward health and physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual well-being. The 'work' of therapy is to bring forward that tendency toward healing by developing a safe therapeutic relationship that nurtures the true self. We each have unique experiences that all too often have been discounted or even abused and we carry the pain of those wounds into our relationships with others and most significantly, with ourselves. Self-compassion can give rise to the blossoming of hopes and desires that have been subsumed by the dysfunction in which we are raised or the traumas we have survived. Therapy is the process of regaining the original fundamental person that is within each of us, even though the path there is sometimes painful. My goal with each client is to give them a setting that will allow the conditions for healing to take place. I believe that is there for all of us, regardless of our condition.