Dan Isenberg (he/him/his)

As a white guy, I've experienced great privilege in my life. It wasn't until college that I even began to understand what that meant, and then in graduate school we really got down to business. I benefitted from privilege then also, when I had supportive others helping me through the process of white identity development. Although the work of understanding privilege and power is never done, I have supported many white folx who desire to better understand their place as a white person in the US.

Any therapist worth their salt is competent in treating depression. But "depression" doesn't really encapsulate what you need to be able to help folx with who are suffering. I would expand this entry to issues including low self-esteem, bipolar disorder, sleep issues, interpersonal concerns, attachment and boundary issues, trauma, grief/loss, body image/eating concerns, impulsivity, self-injury, suicidality, and others. All are relevant in this category, for which I have comfort in working.

Like depression, every therapist must be competent in helping suffers of anxiety. But this too includes many other concerns, including panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety, phobias, and separation anxiety, which come with a host of symptoms, some of which can feel like they're just part of your everyday life. Anxiety is a natural and important part of human experience, however, when it begins interfering in our daily functioning, therapy can particularly important.

My training as a generalist provided a breadth of therapy training, as opposed to significant depth in any one modality. Therefore, I have learned to draw from a variety of treatment modalities, including CBT, psychodynamic, culturally-focused, ACT, DBT, Gottman, Gestalt, existential, and systems theories. So, that's a lot, and I wouldn't claim expertise in any, but over the years I have learned how to use them to the benefit of a broad spectrum of clients and clinical concerns.

I completed some specific training in IPT, however, I don't use it in the manualized way in which it was designed. I subscribe to the notion that interpersonal events and relationships have significant influence on how we feel about ourselves and therefore how we make choices. Additionally, I believe the interpersonal patterns that emerge in the therapy process are critical to understanding the relationship patterns that exist outside the therapy room.

It is well accepted that the basic tenets of humanistic therapy are critical to any therapy modality. My training includes an emphasis on the common factors of therapy (the conditions that contribute most to therapy effectiveness), which include therapist modality, client factors, expectancy/placebo effects, and the therapeutic alliance. The last factor is the most critical for client change, which is the underlying condition of humanistic therapy. It is therefore a cornerstone of my approach.