ith a strong reputation spanning nearly four decades, David has been a leader in innovative and successful policy-making, design, training, launching, and professional support for behavioral health, mentoring, and wellbeing initiatives and programs across tribal, community, clinic, and school settings.

His seasoned experience includes organizational consulting to decrease stress and improve intercultural teamwork, cohesion and morale in schools, clinics, and nonprofit service organizations. David is an expert in providing “deep dives” to develop better psychotherapists and counselors whether working with metaphor, talking circles, and group process, or existential, psychodynamic, grief-work, depth-oriented, CBT, and solution-focused approaches … all while continuously emphasizing intercultural awareness, empathy, and attunement.

David has a particularly strong background in working with youth in crisis and foster care settings, and has been a strong advocate for youth healing and recovery at many points in his career. Additionally, his many years in neuropsychological and special education assessment include training others in skills from comprehensive evaluation to screening for brain injury, subtle TBI effects, and neuropsychological syndromes. After all, he’s been a core faculty member for psychologist and other behavioral health provider training, a frequent conference presenter, and author of numerous well-regarded, peer-reviewed articles on these topics.

Most importantly, David is a learner and scholar with an open mind, heart, and spirit. He’s always ready to learn from others – to question his own assumptions and carefully learn what’s needed before digging in – alongside anyone who shares his passion for intervening in human suffering and enhancing individual, family, and community healing.

“Then there will be truthfulness, and they will uphold hope and charity, so that it is peace that will unite all of the people, indeed, it will be as though they have but one mind, and they are a single person with only one body and one head and one life, which means that there will be unity… “

~ Deganawida, Iroquois prophet, circa 1450 CE

Click here to review David’s CV.

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Mutual accompaniment means moving alongside individuals and communities toward a better world. This valuable phrase describes David listening, learning, allying, and offering professional assistance for free. David brings heart, spirit, intellect and proven abilities to this pro bono activity to honor his ancestors, Indigenous teachings and his Baháʼí Faith.

Mutual accompaniment might entail (but need not be limited to) such possibilities as:

• Joining a community circle to listen, learn, and provide knowledge or suggestions
• Co-facilitating a community circle toward promoting creativity or proactive decision-making
• Researching and reporting information or opinions on a topic of interest to a community’s wellbeing
• Offering an original song or poem
• David has participated in countless mutual accompaniment gatherings over many years with tribal communities, nonprofit groups, and community support organizations.

Mutual Accompaniment services are always free.

True trauma-informed education means creating deep knowledge, awareness and strategies for circles of people to maximize learning and thriving against the tragedy of individual, family, community, and generational violence and oppression. Such an important goal cannot be achieved through one-size-fits-all training programs or reading books. As a lifelong educator and psychologist, highly experienced in both special education and working with educators and their allies, David brings a process-oriented approach to helping colleagues safely reflect and learn about traumatized experience while planning custom strategies and solutions capable of engaging learners and shifting with emerging needs. Such a process often involves community members first looking within and among one another – in safe ways – and then collaborating toward build trusting, compassionate relationships that can be turned toward supporting the challenges facing those they serve.

• A “Process-Oriented Approach” means David uses collaborative consultation methods with providers and administrators to understand “what is needed and what is not,” following this collaborative process toward innovative training solutions that can better fit the particular, specialized needs of schools, programs and communities.
• Past clients include tribal and public schools, community colleges, substance and behavioral health providers, state, federal, and nonprofit social service providers, foster parents, juvenile justice law enforcement, and front-line crisis workers.

David’s alliance, consultation, and facilitation with your circle of wellness providers will help inspire new heartfelt visioning, deeper thinking, improved strategies, better outreach and engagement, and exceptional outcomes. Over the course of his career, David has designed and managed multi-targeted behavioral health programming for hospitals, clinics, agencies, and schools. His breadth of expertise extends across neurorehabilitation, psychotherapy, foster care, education, youth, elders, and culture-centered services. He’s also a recognized national authority on the checkered history of and critical needs for improving so-called “mental health” services in Native America.

• “Mental Health” Revisioning is an important new idea pioneered by Deena Metzger, writer, healer, teacher, and elder with whom David and treasured colleagues collaborated in offering a powerful experience for holistic physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, and allied professionals seeking healing from the broken systems within which they work and try to help others.
• “Mental Health” Revisioning is not an intellectual or strategy-making exercise. Its sole purpose is creating a safe space for opening and healing broken hearts, restoring spirit, and forging strong, positive connections between the participants – people who give of themselves to others everyday and can sometimes feel depleted and wounded by their efforts.

David’s consultation skillset includes helping circles of colleagues in social and wellness services to surface and safely resolve competing or opposing demands, miscommunication and conflict, problems with cohesion and disunity, burnout and commitment difficulties, and other work-relationship issues. Working together in circle, David can help others to heal and reengage with renewed focus and mutual support.

• What is the point of attempting to “drive better results” or reformulate strategy if people feel alienated from leadership or one another?
• Organizational mirroring and simulation gaming help people to dismantle their “factions” and develop mutual healing, better relationships, and stronger teamwork.
• Past clients range from nonprofit boards of directors to global corporate teams to tribal organizations.

David consults carefully first with educators, administrators, counselors, and behavioral health colleagues before designing and delivering a custom experiential learning event that empowers and reinvigorates as much as it informs and teaches. Break the mold of training as “checking a box,” and bring renewed purpose to everyone on your team by retaining David to deliver what you and your colleagues want and need to learn in order to thrive in your work.

• What are the emotional and cognitive roadblocks impeding progress towards goals everyone says they want to achieve? How might they be addressed and resolved?
• What does it mean to “learn” in a given educational setting? What does it mean to “heal” in a given therapeutic program?
• How might reconnecting with meaning and purpose in one’s own work serve to motivate students and clients toward their own success?

David can come to your program or group practice or meet virtually to offer psychotherapy and youth support services consultation to your circle of colleagues. Your clients are human beings, not “cases,” and your role as therapist and helper can be isolating and overwhelming. David’s extensive background as an insightful and caring psychotherapy mentor and youth services helper combine with his commitment to ally closely with you as you seek to understand, support, and assist the psychosocial wellbeing of people you serve. Additionally, David can help you restore your own balance, work proactively with secondary grief and traumatic stress, and better manage your own care and wellbeing.

• Tuning in more closely to metaphors within yourself, your clients, and your circle of colleagues that lead to greater work satisfaction and teamwork.
• Learning to be less afraid and more effective when clients want to talk about suicide or self-destructive behavior.
• Dealing with countertransference “triggers” and difficult, entrenched clients who seem resistant to change.
• Discovering powerful, real-time approaches to intervening and activating genuine, collaborative transformation with clients.
• Being more attuned to nuance and subtlety in yourself and your clients that can lead to breakthroughs.
• Screening for client features that might suggest TBI effects, neuropsychological syndrome, or a need for further medical evaluation and treatment.

In addition to the above services, David maintains a part-time, virtual private practice in individual psychotherapy for adults you can read more about.

Download David’s Curriculum Vitae