Stephen Vernon, MFT

Stephen Vernon is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with over 35 years of experience in providing counseling services to individuals, couples, and groups in Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito, Oakland, and the East Bay area. He is a Jungian psychotherapist who believes that our deep interior selves, the psyche, wants us to learn more about ourselves and our relationships. With this foundation, he draws from several theoretical approaches, focusing on clients' feelings and beliefs, and has often witnessed the importance of the emergence of the symbolic in our lives.

Therapy and Counseling

Therapy provides a still point from which we can more deeply experience and learn the dance. Our deep interior selves, the psyche, wants us to learn more about ourselves and our relationships. With this foundation, Stephen draws from several theoretical approaches, focusing on clients' feelings and beliefs and has often witnessed the importance of the emergence of the symbolic in our lives. Stephen has extensive clinical and managerial experience in public health and academics. Among other experiences, he has been a counselor, Clinical Director and Executive Director for Fort Help Substance Abuse Clinic; HIV Mental Health Director for California Pacific Medical Center; Behavioral Health Director and Executive Director for different Family Service Agencies. He teaches Graduate Psychology courses and provides clinical supervision for graduate students and employee interns.

People Stephen Works With

Stephen works with a wide range of clients, including couples, men, adolescents, and mid-life and elderly of both sexes. Each are addressing important problems and/or growth stages in their lives. Our work can be fearful and fearless, exciting and/or slow and always the challenge of facing painful disruptions, interpersonal conflicts, not-knowing, and ourselves.

Services Offered

Stephen provides counseling services for a variety of issues, including:

• Relationships/Couples
• Depth/Soul Work
• Children/Play Therapy
• Adolescence
• Mid Life
• Men
• Men's Groups
• Seniors
• Trauma
• Stress/Anxiety
• Substance Abuse/Addictions

Therapeutic Approach

Stephen's therapeutic approach is relational and emotionally based. He sees this work as usually mid or long-term, as the psyche takes its own time to reveal itself. Of course, there are problems, people and circumstances that do lend themselves to briefer problem-solving approaches. If this is indicated, then that is what they will do. Stephen is a patient therapist, he encourages his clients to be patient toward all that is unsolved in their heart and try to love the questions themselves. He believes that the point is to live everything. Live the questions now, and perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.