Highlights of my credentials & experience
- Award-winning psychological researcher, educator, and author.
- Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology (2009), Certificate in Clinical Hypnosis (2009), and Doctorate in Clinical Psychology (2013) from the top-rated, APA accredited program at Adler University in Chicago
- Highly specialized training and more than 10 years of direct clinical experience:
- Conducting diagnostic evaluations
- Providing psychotherapy — primarily to survivors of childhood abuse or neglect, as well as combat veterans and victims of sexual assault
- Helping medical patients with chronic pain, IBS, metabolic disorders, and obesity
- Expert in hypnosis — I’ve given invited lectures to major scientific and professional societies, and served in major leadership roles in every professional clinical hypnosis society in the US
Who am I?
I’m a psychologist on a mission to understand our world. To figure out how we co-create this place out of our ideas and unconscious actions. How we each make a place for ourselves.
I’ve been studying esoteric topics like psychoanalysis, hypnosis, meditation, and spirituality for as long as I can remember, and I’ve translated that interest into a career where I help people recognize deeper connections within themselves, and greater potentials. Over the past decade, I’ve amassed a huge amount of specialized training and experience in topics like:
- Mind-body medicine – how mental and physical processes overlap to create powerful and often unexpected effects on health and well-being
- Hypnotic suggestion — how the form of a person’s communication alters the experience of those around them… whether they mean to or not (and for better or worse!)
- Transpersonal and existential psychotherapy – it turns out the “big questions” that philosophy and religion have been asking since the dawn of time are the exact same questions that modern people must ask to achieve their full potential and discover meaning in their lives
- Attachment, trauma, dissociation, “ego states” – when a person experiences a psychological trauma, what is it exactly that has been injured and how does that injury heal?
- Psychological testing – how to map out a person’s experience to truly grasp how they put themselves and their worldview together every day
Right from the beginning of my career in psychology, I’ve found myself surrounded by the types of far-out characters who travel the outer reaches of human experience — studying with Tibetan lamas, serving as expert witnesses in court cases about mind-control cults, and leading huge scientific studies that demolish the accepted medical knowledge of our day. I’m hungry for truth and I want to believe.
Who am I really?
I’m an inquisitive and creative person who had a confusing early life. I was brought up by some damaged people in a way that was hard to make sense out of. And so, I became preoccupied with figuring it all out. I developed a certain kind of vision… that makes it hard to not see the deep truth.
In everyday life, it’s really sort of isolating to be put together this way. I don’t usually have the luxury of buying into people’s bullshit. Of talking about the things people convince themselves they’re interested in — to deflect from the existential terror creeping in the shadows of every moment, in the echoes of every heartbeat. I’m always tuned in to the depths.
So, in my work I can be who I really am. I’m a person who sees through the “games people play,” and really just wants to build a better game… to craft the magic spells that unlock worlds of experience that were previously inaccessible. To cleanse the doors of perception and reveal the world as it truly is: infinite.
Why do I do this?
I conduct the business of psychological inquiry because, for me, there’s really nothing else to be done. Trauma is healed not by any other means than revealing and giving a voice to those feelings and experiences and states of being that have been hidden away out of sheer terror. It is a process of opening up the cage in which a person’s selfhood has been locked up. I do it because I can; I do it because I’m good at it; I do it because I have to.
So there’s my probably-too-honest bio page. I’ve written it this way because I can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t know who you’re dealing with…
I am someone whose main interest is to understand you, to help you feel understood, and to help you understand yourself. Sometimes, I move too quickly for comfort — I may show you truths that are difficult to look at. I may amplify feelings you’ve managed to spare yourself from so far. But ultimately I’ll bring you a message of hope:
All of those hideous crawling things hiding away in the deepest, darkest recesses of your psyche… no matter how ominous they may seem, and no matter how much pain is attached to them… they are things that you can handle. They’re all things that, given light and air and love, can grow up into parts of you that you will cherish.
That’s me. That’s my outlook, and my orientation, and my way of being. And the type of work I do is not for everyone. But if you think it might be for you, give me a call and we can talk it over. I’m at (562) 684-1305. If you’d rather email, I’m at dgodot@gmail.com.