Peter Geiger

I'm a highly interactive therapist. Interactive also means I engage with you by listening to you as deeply as I can. I try to understand your predicament—how you come to be talking to me about the things we're talking about—and to hold up a mirror to you so that you can fully see how things are. Fully seeing how things are then leads to seeing how things can be different. I'm happy to talk to you about the therapy process and about the theories I find most useful and effective. My theoretical matrix is developmental, and humanistic. In terms of self-development, I practice self psychology, so that you develop self and resilience and choice. Through studying and teaching developmental counseling and therapy (DCT) I've learned to pay particular attention to the way you think, process, and make sense of things, and whether your heart and head are aligned, or in conflict. But the self doesn't exist in a vacuum: self psychology is about empathy and attuning each to another. In general, more and better empathic attunement, experienced both ways, fosters good relationships and builds character and resilience. Ultimately, it's all about relationship satisfaction. This is where my work draws heavily on family systems, family patterns and scripts. The good news is that an adverse familial cycle can be broken. The other concept I really like is congruence. Person centered therapy defines congruence as where what we show to others fully matches what we're experiencing. You could say that we're all engaged in the same lifelong struggle to avoid incongruence…like saying yes when we mean no, or no when our truth would be to say yes.

Private practice since 2016 Oxford Symposium in School Based Family Counseling since 2001 USF Adjunct Faculty 2006–2013 USF Center for Child and Family Development 2003–2013

GRADUATE EDUCATION CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF INTEGRAL STUDIES April 1992 to December 1996 90-unit Masters Program in Integral Counseling Psychology; 4.0 GPA Supervised practicum