Tis Himself
About Me
I, too, am a multi-faceted and conflicted human. I seem to be a verb at the intersection between psyche, persona, and synchronicity. I like wine and poetry and laughter and seriousness and science. I don't know how I'll feel until I feel it.
I completed my doctorate from Adler University in Chicago in 2013, with a dissertation on hypnosis and clinical training. I trained for a year at an in-patient unit for chronic headache pain; for a year at a dual-diagnosis IOP; for a year in private practice (with my mentor Edward J. “ Fast Eddy” Frischholz, Ph.D.) working with dissociation, conversion, and neuropsychiatric disturbances; for a year at a VA Medical Center in a Texas border town; and for a year at a residential treatment center for emotionally disturbed adolescents. It was a lot of training and a long time.
I taught and co-chaired hypnosis workshops through SCEH, ASCH, and the Chicago Society of Clinical Hypnosis from 2009 through 2013, and am a past president of APA Division 30, The Society of Psychological Hypnosis. I served on the editorial board of the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis from 2013-2021.
In 2019 I opened Psych Lab Psychology Center in Long Beach, California — a model-congruent group learning practice focused on deep, integrative, attachment-oriented psychotherapy.
I was first introduced to meditation at age 8 by Roald Dahl’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” and spent days on end trying to replicate those procedures. I studied hypnosis and psychoanalysis at the library on my own in those early days, and was practicing Zen and Transcendental Meditation by age 12. As a teenager I got heavy into existentialist philosophy and hermetic mysticism. As a young man I worked as a computer programmer and studied Carl Jung and Milton Erickson. Then, as a graduate student I was swept up into the professional hypnosis societies, where I learned more strongly than ever to think empirically and experimentally about the mysteries of life.
I’ve been studying and practicing Tibetan Buddhism in the Bön tradition since 2018, and at Psych Lab have led ongoing weekly study groups in Attachment, Buddhist Psychology, Person-Centered Psychology, and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy since 2020.
I’ve been writing and performing poetry since 1995, mostly in Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles. I don’t practice politics (or slowly get stoned). I do not believe anything.
I’ve been computer programming since around 1995 as well — first business software, then web software, then personal software just for myself and back-end tools to run my business.
I’ve read and thought a lot about culture and society, and mostly keep my mouth shut about it because nearly every one of you has gone mad with attention overload, carbon dioxide poisoning, and microplastics in the gonads. Anyway, it’s a lot sweeter to try to build things up than it is tearing them down. But I still may manage to cause a little trouble here and there.