Derek Hefner (he/him)

I have experience working with clients to improve their relationships, marriages, and parenting approaches. My approach tends to focus on self-differentiation, effective communication, emotion management, assertiveness scripts, and working through compromises and gridlock, mostly through a Gottman approach.

I have experience working with clients who have a history of depression or other mood disorders and who are actively struggling with depression. My approach tends to focus on building insights, skills, and supports to better manage depression symptoms and to help depression enter remission.

I have experience working with clients to manage generalized and more specific forms of anxiety. My approach tends to the insights, skills, and supports needed to reduce the distress and impairment caused by different forms of anxiety and to live one's life in line with one's goals.

I'm pursuing further training as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist beginning October 2024. An eclectic psychoanalytic/psychodynamic approach represents my preferred treatment style when applicable for a given client. This approach focuses on working through unconscious conflicts, repetitive patterns in relationships and life, developmental experiences, and the way a client relates to different aspects of their internal world.

I tend to employ DBT and related therapy modalities for clients looking for short-term or more solution-focused ways to address their mental health and relationship goals. With this approach, I help client develop the skills and supports needed to navigate distress, difficult emotions, mindfulness, and effective relationships.

I tend to employ the Gottman method for clients who want to improve their relationships, marriages, or parenting approach. Within this approach, I collaborate with clients to avoid negative relationship patterns, to regulate and communicate difficult emotions, to listen and validate effectively, to solve problems and miscommunication, and to bring out the best in one another.