Our Staff: David Fish

David Fish, MA

Registered MFT Intern, IMF #53842
Supervised by Jim Meyers
Licensed MFT, # MFC 30215

Understanding is important, but if therapy just stays at an “idea” level, it usually doesn’t make much of a difference.  I find opportunities to help clients have experiences that can help them change.  Cultivating mindfulness—compassionate, non-judgmental, open, present awareness—is a unifying thread that runs though my work.

For almost twenty years I’ve been helping people reap the whole range of therapeutic benefits:  from increasing their capacity to experience connectedness and love (both with others and themselves), to developing their mastery and effectiveness in the world, to opening to mystery or spirituality. I also love working with couples— the joy and pain of relationship presents many opportunities for transformation, and therapy can make a profound difference. 

I work both with people’s hearts and with their minds. Good psychotherapy is responsive to our shifting needs. Sometimes we’ll turn towards emotions, bodily sensations, impulses, and fantasies to work with influences that aren’t always rational, or to tap your creativity.   At other times we may get more pragmatic: reality-testing your assumptions, or taking time to think through obstacles and to strategize.

My experience, training, and skill in a number of therapeutic modalities gives our work both flexibility and depth. For instance, in the course of our work I may draw upon:

• Hakomi:  taps both verbal and non-verbal experience and behaviors to gently access your most deeply-held beliefs about yourself and the world and to discover “the experience that wants to happen”. This can engender profound insight and change. I’m a certified Hakomi therapist, and have recently been asked to train to become one of the Hakomi Institute’s teachers.
  
• Dialectical Behavioral Therapy:  blends the change strategies of cognitive-behavioral therapy with the acceptance strategies of Buddhism to help people overcome anxiety, depression, and out-of-control emotions and behaviors.
  
• Relational Psychodynamic therapy: sheds light on why you get caught in painful emotional and interpersonal patterns and helps you use what happens in our unfolding therapeutic relationship to facilitate change.
  
• Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: is designed specifically to help people heal from trauma.
  
• Focusing and Gestalt therapy: can give a “felt sense” of our inner conflicting parts and open up room for dialogue between them—and integration.
  

Supervisors and Consultants:

Psychodynamic:  Jim Meyers, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, MFC 30215
Hakomi:  Scott Eaton, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, MFC23906
DBT:  Marian Cremin, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, LCSW 20471

© Blue Oak Therapy Center
3101 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705    Phone: (510) 649-9818
Clinical director is Stuart Sovatsky, PhD, MFT Licensed #MFC 19173.