About Joe  

There are few things in the world as wonderful as a Golden Retriever.....but I digress.  Let me try, in this short space, to provide some idea of my background and values.

      

I am a marriage and family therapist. I am also a lawyer. Sometimes these two professional identities get mixed up in people’s minds – “What are you? A lawyer or a therapist?” That’s an excellent question and here’s the answer:

I am a counselor and mediator, who also provides certain limited legal services. My main practice involves individual/couples counseling and mediation. I blend my legal and therapeutic experience in my mediation work. However, I still hold onto a small corner of the legal work I have done over the years. I would describe this service as providing support and counsel to people who are facing divorce, or therapists who need legal/ethical advice around their practices. These clients seem to appreciate the therapeutic education and skills I bring to this work. Today, I would say that about 75% of my practice is mental health and mediation related and the other 25% involves limited legal services. Perhaps a little biographical information will give you a better sense of who I am and what has brought me to this particular place.

In 1971, I received my B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and in 1974, my law degree from the University of Southern California. I was admitted to the California Bar that year. After a time working as a legal aid foundation attorney, I spent a number of years both challenged and fascinated by personal injury litigation, primarily representing individuals who had been harmed by exposure to drugs and other products, such as asbestos, DES and sulfites. It was the heyday for this kind of work - in the state that was ground zero for legal innovation.

However, by 1988, I had come to the conclusion that litigation exacted far too great a personal and economic toll on all participants - except, of course, for the lawyers - and because I had enjoyed a very positive counseling relationship, I left my practice and entered the Master’s Degree program in Marriage and Family Therapy at the California Family Study Center (now The Phillips Institute) and received my M.A. in Marriage and Family Therapy in 1989. I was licensed as a marriage and family therapist in California in 1991.  My area of greatest interest at the time was marital therapy as informed by the systems thinking I studied in my graduate program and clinical training.  I also drew from many of the approaches utilized in Gestalt Therapy, Transactional Analysis and Voice Dialogue. I began to build a psychotherapy practice in Southern California.

One of my strongest memories after passing the California Bar was visiting a law school buddy and his wife in Seattle. Their home was in the Leschi neighborhood and to this day I remember waking up in their guest bedroom and gazing at Mt. Rainier out of one window and Lake Washington, below us, out the other. Seattle was the most beautiful city I had ever visited, in this country, and I resolved one day to make it my home.

In 1995, following through on this dream, I relocated to the Puget Sound, passing the Washington State Bar Exam and becoming a Washington marriage and family therapist that year, as well. I also participated in the 40-hour mediation training conducted by John Allen Lemmon, Professor at San Francisco State and Past Editor of the Mediation Quarterly, the profession’s principle journal. 

Almost immediately, it became clear to me that family mediation was a felicitous combination of my legal experience and therapeutic sensibilities – and while starting a family law practice was, initially, the most sensible economic move, my real passion always lay with the counseling end of the work. My therapist’s training found expression for the first few years, here, in working with couples as they struggled to disengage from their failed marriage with integrity. From the outset of my work, I saw divorce as a journey, and emotional healing as the goal. I would often be aghast at the damage inflicted by the litigation process and grieved as I witnessed good people diverting their vital life energy from creation of the next chapter of their lives to licking the wounds gouged by an often-brutal process. My own professional energies became increasingly engaged in counseling people through their transition. In 2002, I began lecturing the Washington State Family Law Bar about the psychology of divorce, in their annual conference each year.

At the same time, I became deeply involved in the special challenges faced by lawyers, themselves. I devoured the literature discussing the state of the profession and the forces that erode the sense of well-being of these (mostly) wonderful people who, of course, had been my own group of colleagues for years. Beginning in 2000, I wrote frequently for the King County Bar Journal about how lawyers can take better care of themselves. Many of these columns can be found on this website. I taught yearly classes at U.W. Law School on Interviewing and Counseling and co-developed a class on how to start and maintain a law practice. The theme of these classes always circled around the message, “Who are you? How can you find satisfaction in this work that is consistent with your own set of personal values?” As my work in teaching, counseling, writing and mediation bloomed – I still felt bound, for purely practical, economic reasons, to a conventional family law practice, albeit to a lesser extent every year. Not feeling comfortable completely abandoning this profession which I had pursued for over 20 years, I still was increasingly disheartened by the harm it visits on people. Then Collaborative Law came into my life.

Starting around 2000, I began reading a good deal about this extraordinary approach to helping people navigate the rocky passage out of their marriages called Collaborative Law.   I recall reading these articles and thinking, “Well that’s a great way to do things, but you can’t do this alone – you need another collaborative lawyer to make it work.” Then in 2002 a couple of lawyers went to an out-of-state training, returned to Washington and planted the seed. I immediately became actively involved in the “movement” in our local community, serving on the board of the principle collaborative law organization in Seattle/Bellevue (the only one in Washington for quite a while) and eventually becoming one of the principle trainers in basic collaborative law for lawyers, therapists and financial professionals here in Washington. During this time, my facilitative mediation practice was growing as was my counseling work.

Yet, as solid and supportive as these avenues are for people ending an intimate relationship, you just can’t avoid the fact that divorce is a great tragedy in peoples’ lives.  Sometimes it is just unavoidable and in those cases, for most people, either collaborative law or mediation is by far the best approach.  If litigation is the course people have chosen, I work with individuals to help them manage their emotions, deal with their estranged spouse and communicate clearly and effectively with their lawyer about their needs. However, in recent years, I have been drawn more insistently to the very important work of helping couples in distress salvage their relationships.  I immersed myself in the work and training of University of Washington’s John Gottman.  I became absorbed in the approaches of other masters of the art, such as Dan Wile of Oakland, California and William Doherty at University of Minnesota.  Speaking with colleagues in the field, I was drawn, like a magnet to the North Star, to the current gold standard in marital therapy, Ottawa’s Dr. Susan Johnson and her Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy.  I have become trained in this approach and continue to deepen my commitment to this profoundly healing work. So the work that now absorbs me – and which will likely be the focus of the next, long chapter of my professional life – is the support of people through every phase of their relationship lives: Counseling couples who wish to heal and revive their intimate relationships; helping individuals who are struggling with whether to stay or leave or who are seeking to learn what they can do to strengthen their bond and working individually to support those people who are transitioning out of an intimate relationship. In the past year, I have found a new and exciting tool to assist people who are seeking emotional balance and relief from internal distress, Neurofeedback. This approach is described elsewhere on this website.

So that’s my professional story.  On a personal level, I do indeed have a Golden Retriever who is a sprightly (but slowing) 10 years old.  My 17 year old daughter remains the light of my life and if it weren’t for her sweetness, incandescent wit and pure life-force-energy, there’d be a big empty place in my heart and our home.  Her mom is also a therapist in Bellevue, having worked in the field for over 30 years.  Together we make a sweet small family that enjoys long walks either on the beaches at Moclips on the Olympic Peninsula, or along Denny Creek, near Snoqualmie Pass; entertaining at home, reading by the fire, making or listening to music, kayaking around the Sound and traveling.  I also love writing and I wholeheartedly invite you to visit other sections of this site to read some of the other stuff I’ve had to say over the years. 

Thank you for visiting this website.  I hope you can find something of value while you are here.

 

Lectures, Presentations & Workshops