John Viola

I began my professional career in January 1969 as a substance abuse counselor/educator in public schools. While completing my Social Work education, I developed community counseling centers in Glen Cove & Port Washington on Long Island and a multimodal substance abuse treatment program for Long Island Jewish Hospital in the NYC hospital system. At Adelphi University School of Social Work, while teaching, I secured NIMH grants to convert NYC SRO hotels into treatment centers for aging alcoholics that doubled as field placement sites for graduate social work students. I also created and managed off-campus sites for MSW students in NYC hospitals. In 1980, I moved to California and was hired as a Child Abuse Investigator in San Bernardino County. In 1982, I passed the written and oral board examinations and received my California LCSW professional credential. I opened my private practice in 1984. In 1992, co-founded the Desert Psychotherapy Institute. I understand humans as neurobiopsychosocial beings. Feelings come first as preconscious sensations of energy inputs from our surrounding situation or releases of electrochemical energy from our organ systems. In 1/20th of a second, these feelings (energy transfers) trigger changes in our arousal state and become preconscious emotion. In 1/2 of a second, psychosocial consciousness kicks in and feeling energy can get put into words. Indeed, conscious emotion can then be expressed as language, behavior, attitudes, moods, and strategies and skills to fulfill the needs and desires our feeling energy informed.

My foundational base is psychoanalytically oriented developmental psychotherapy. Seasoned over the decades by Gestalt Therapy, Buddhist Psychology, Psychodrama, Family Systems and Structural Therapy, Attachment Theory, Hypnotherapy, Neuroscience, and Interpersonal Neurobiology. To me, humans are neurobiopsychosocial beings with an "I" (identity), your evolving composite of inculcated, learned experiences, and a "Me" (your system of personality self-portraits). Your "I", a private self, rarely gets fully shared. Your "Me" can express your personality self-portraits through preconscious emotion or consciously choose the right portrait at the right time as you try to fulfill needs and desires that your conscious feelings inform. In a conversational style, I create a secure base by listening empathically for inculcated self-doubt and self-defeating behavior patterns, and respond compassionately with corrective learning potential. In our therapeutic alliance, we grow your Wise Consciousness of self, others, and situations, and promote your practice of Skilled Habits for self-soothing, self-validation, positive attitudes, and stable mood to eliminate self-doubt and inculcated pathogenic labels, to support the mental health and self-confidence you've always deserved.

I'll be gathering information about why you're seeking therapy, as well as pertinent details about your identity and personality development within your family and communities of origin. But the most important thing is assessing whether I'm the right therapist for your introspective work. I'll show you how I process and interact so you can get a sense of how I work. With simple interpretations of your here-and-now self-doubting attitudes and self-defeating behaviors, and complex interpretations of how those here-and-now processes are related to your past, conscious perceptions of self-doubt, and patterns of unskilled habits.