What to Expect
I'm a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in independent private practice, working with adults across North Carolina and California by telehealth. I studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and have been doing clinical work for nearly twenty years, the last several of them in private practice.
Most of my caseload sits in three rough groups. I work with attorneys, people running their own practices and small businesses, and other high-performing professionals. I work with people in the music and creative industries, often through MusiCares and Backline. And I work with fathers in the first few years of parenting, a period when many of the assumptions about what fatherhood would feel like start to come apart.
I use mindfulness-based approaches, particularly for anxiety and the kind of existential questioning that doesn't respond well to problem-solving. I also work from cognitive-behavioral and humanistic frames, depending on what the moment needs. I'm wary of clinicians who've decided in advance which modality will solve every problem, and I think the field overdiagnoses some things and underdiagnoses others. The work I do is collaborative and pragmatic — we figure out what's actually going on, name it accurately, and work on what's workable.
My practice is affirming of LGBTQ clients across identities and orientations.
The hardest part of finding a therapist is usually deciding to look in the first place. A consult call is a conversation, not a commitment — fifteen minutes to see whether we're a fit.
Justin Powell
Therapist