News and Insights

It finally happened, Basic Steps Mental Health now has a waiting list. All I can say is that I am honored by your testimonies and your recommending us to family and friends. Because of this, the way that we have been providing time during the sessions will need to change. From the beginning, we have always used the full 60 minutes to treat people. The beauty of our approach has been to allow...

With a heavy heart, one of my staff members is leaving the nest and moving to Florida with her family in a few days. We have been together for six years and after supervising her during her college years and while she was working to obtain her counseling license we had grown very close. I am well aware of the fact that people enter and leave our lives, but that doesn’t prepare you for the...

They gave us an assignment in graduate school to create our own healing strategy. At the time I didn’t take it very seriously and came up with something cute to impress all the ladies. Well, that was 25 years ago, and from that moment I’ve asked myself the same question, what is the best strategy for a person to heal? I’ve learned many psychological approaches and tools that to one degree...

In 2012 as the world worried about extinction, I took a gamble. Since my ten-year relationship just ended, I wanted to get out of Los Angeles and explore my horizons. Ultimately I took up an offer to open up a Residential Treatment Facility 1,000 miles away. Moving from my family, friends, and steady job was a gamble, but I decided to roll the dice and hoped it didn’t come up snake eyes....

12 years ago I moved up to this area to open up a residential treatment facility unlike any other. No, not another 12-step facility, mine was using clinical psychology with a smattering of spirituality which had incredible success at the first Mental Health Urgent Care Center in the country. The residential facility had a pretty good run for a number of years but seeing the limitations of...

Last week my father-in-law passed away. The tricky thing was he lived 30 miles away from the nearest neighbor, just north of Joshua Tree National Forest in California, and all by himself. It was a miracle a delivery person found his body or his dog Max would have been lost too. Peter was a young 82-year-old, who walked 5 miles a day but had a problem with smoking.   The desert oasis he lived...

For 11 years I worked at the first-ever, mental health urgent care center in the country. I was fresh out of graduate school with a crisp new, Doctoral degree, and trying to prove myself. This was the first facility of its kind, established to take pressure off of the local jails and emergency rooms and we had no clue what was going to enter our unit. My friend Patrick, who graduated with...

There are some interesting experiences as a therapist, which have aided me in being the best therapist I can be. When life and death situations presented themselves in my practice, I wasn’t that prepared to deal with them. As a college intern, my first placement was at Tarzana Treatment Center, a facility just north of Los Angeles. My position was counseling individuals suffering from HIV...

I’m sure you’ve heard the expression: “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” Have you ever considered what is the best thing that can happen? In graduate school, we were shown how to map out everything we wanted to happen through visualization and affirmation. The premise was, that if you can visualize it taking place, you can attract it into your life. For years I created these “Ideal...

My sister Samantha bought me the greatest birthday gift ever, a Karaoke machine. Little did I know at the time how much that machine would enhance my livelihood.  This was when I was working with the learning disabled at an independent living facility that taught young adults how to perform the normal duties of life, including cooking, cleaning, shopping, and paying bills. We’d gather at...