Porter-Cason Institute Board Members

Dr. Aponte has a private practice in Philadelphia. He also is a clinical associate professor in Drexel University’s Couple & Family Therapy Department.

He has publications on family therapy, training and supervision in therapy, working with disadvantaged families, and spirituality in therapy.

He has lectured and conducted workshops throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, Latin America, Europe and Asia.

He received postgraduate training at the Menninger Clinic, and worked there in a variety of capacities, including as a supervisor and teacher. From Topeka, he came to Philadelphia to work at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic of which he eventually became the director.

Dr. Aponte is a Fellow of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, and a Board Certified Diplomat in Clinical Social Work.

Among other honors, he received the award for Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy and Practice from the American Family Therapy Academy in 1992, and the award for Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Marriage and Family Therapy from the Association for Marriage and Family Therapy in 2001. He also received the I. Arthur Marshall Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Menninger Clinic in 1997.

Dr. Aponte received the Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters (honoris causa) from Drexel University in 2004, and the Degree of Doctor of Public Service (honoris causa) from the University of Maryland in 2006.

Books:

The Person of the Therapist Training Model: Mastering the Use of Self

Harry J. Aponte and Karni Kissil

Bread & Spirit: Therapy with the New Poor, Diversity of Race, Culture, and Values

Harry J. Aponte

I started doing couples therapy with firefighters and first responders and their spouses while I was also a firefighter. We were all trying to put the pieces back together after September 11th, and while there were plenty of therapists willing to work with individuals coming through the trauma, very few would work with couples. I know what it’s like to be in the fire literally, and I also learned how to be in the fire of guiding highly reactive and traumatized couples. I specialize in helping couples and therapists find their way through the intense heat and confusion of reactive relationships.

When I started counseling, I knew Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT) was the best model I could use, but I struggled knowing the right way to use it for me. I saw videos of Sue Johnson and then trained with her, and wondered how on earth I was going to make my College Point Queens, firefighter, tough guy voice sound anything like her sweet, soft tone. Over time I found my own way to be myself in the room with couples, and now I train clinicians all over the world to support their knowledge of EFT. I’m committed to helping clinicians find their own voice in EFT, so they can be the best possible therapists for the couples and families who need us. There is a clearer way to practice EFT, and I can help you find it.

Prior to a career in the field of mental health, George spent 20 years as a NYC Firefighter and NYC Police Officer.  George received his M.S. in Marriage and Family Therapy from Iona College, where he graduated at the top of his class. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from Queens College. His experience as a FDNY Peer Counselor, particularly following the events of 9/11,  sparked his passion to help those impacted by trauma.

He is a certified Trainer/Supervisor/Therapist in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and founder of the New York Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy where he serves as  President.  He is a Supervisor with the American Association for Marriage & Family Therapy (AAMFT) and teaches classes at the Ackerman Institute for the Family in Manhattan.  He is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist currently practicing in Connecticut and New York.  George is the director of training at the Greenwich Center for Hope & Renewal in Connecticut and is on the Board of the Porter Cason Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans.

George brings a unique and varied experience to his practice.  Whether he is providing marriage therapy to Wall Street executives, leading a conference for the United States Military or equipping therapists from around the globe, his ability to inspire is far-reaching.  George is also committed to bringing EFT to underprivileged populations and pushing the leading edge of effective therapy.

Books:

True Connection: Using the NAME IT Model to Heal Relationships

George Faller and Heather P. Wright

Sacred STRESS: A Radically Different Approach to Using Life's Challenges for Positive Change

George R. Faller, MS, LMFT and The Rev. Dr. Heather Wright

Emotionally Focused Family Therapy: Restoring Connection and Promoting Resilience

James Furrow, Gail Palmer, Susan Johnson, George Faller, and Lisa Palmer Olsen

For more than 25 years, Dr. James Flowers has been one of the most recognized and respected names in the field of chronic pain, pain recovery, and addiction. With his broad educational background and extensive experience in both the evaluation and treatment of chronic pain and co-occurring addiction, he is recognized as an expert.

Dr. Flowers has completed several fellowships in behavioral pain management complete with clinical rotations.

He personally developed pain and addiction recovery programs for some of the best-known healthcare and addiction treatment centers in the country. He directed programs integrating assessment and treatment planning with a course of treatment to promote successful recovery.

Dr. Flowers also co-founded several well-known, exclusive treatment programs in the state of Texas, dedicated to his passion – that of designing multidisciplinary addiction treatment with clinical protocols, to help individuals suffering from addiction, chronic pain and other underlying disorders, successfully recover. With a demonstrated commitment to create positive change in the lives of this clients, he is dedicated to progressive healthcare, human healing, and to developing healthcare systems which best serve this population.

Dr. Flowers has been arranging assessments and evaluations for many years, but in founding J. Flowers Health Institute, he has advanced the process to satisfy a great void - to provide truly comprehensive assessment and evaluation for those who need diagnosis, and to then develop post-evaluation treatment recommendations. Having spent over 28 years in the Texas medical and clinical community, Dr. Flowers is uniquely qualified to assemble some of the finest health care professionals in the world to perform these evaluations and treatment.

Over the years, Dr. Flowers’ passion and dedication to his clients, as well as his unique approach, has earned him an exceptional reputation as one of the nation’s premier experts. He is a popular public speaker and lecturer to audiences across the United States and abroad and has led an exceptional and distinguished career.

“Everything is about you.
Everything is about your health.”

Peter Fraenkel, PhD, is Director of the Ackerman Institute for the Family’s Center for Work and Family; Associate Professor of Psychology, Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology, The City College of The City University of New York; and former Vice President of the American Family Therapy Academy. He co-authored with Marcia Sheinberg The Relational Trauma of Incest: A Family-Based Approach to Treatment, and he has published widely and presented workshops internationally on the topic of prevention approaches to couple relationships and the impact of time, work and technology on families. Dr. Fraenkel is also in private practice.

At Peter Fraenkel, Ph.D., your mental health and well-being is important to me. I love helping my patients develop the tools they need to cope with all of life’s challenges, and I get great satisfaction from seeing them heal and thrive. Contact me today to see how I can help you and let’s discuss the wide range of options at your disposal.

Books:

The Relational Trauma of Incest: A Family Based Approach to Treatment

Marcia Sheinberg and Peter Fraenkel, Ph.D

Sync Your Relationship, Save Your Marriage: Four Steps to Getting Back on Track

Peter Fraenkel, Ph.D

No Fixed Abode: A Jewish Odyssey to Africa

Peter Fraenkel, Ph.D

Water Pumping Devices: A Handbook for Users and Choosers

Peter Fraenkel, Ph.D

Dan Hughes, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist with a limited practice in South Portland, Maine.  He founded and developed Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy (DDP), the treatment of children who have experienced abuse and neglect and who demonstrate ongoing problems related to attachment and trauma.  This treatment occurs in a family setting and the treatment model has expanded to become a general model of family treatment.   He has spent over 40 years helping children and youth reach their full potential and reconnect with others in their lives.

Dan has conducted seminars, workshops, spoken at conferences and guest lectured throughout the US, Europe, Canada, and Australia over the past 18 years.  He is also engaged in extensive training and supervision in the certification of therapists in his treatment model, along with ongoing consultation to various agencies and professionals.   He is a member of the American Psychological Association.  He is also president of the Dyadic Developmental Psychotherapy Institute (DDPI) which is responsible for the certification of professionals in DDP.  Information about DDPI can be found on their website, www.ddpnetwork.org. 

Dan has authored many books including Attachment-Focused Parenting (2009), Attachment-Focused Family Therapy Workbook (2011) and, with Jon Baylin, Brain-Based Parenting (2012) and The Neurobiology of Attachment-Focused Therapy (2016).  He has also written or been featured in many articles, many of which can be found atwww.ddpnetwork.org/resources/library/authors/hughes-daniel-a/.

Books:

Building the Bonds of Attachment: Awakening Love in Deeply Troubled Children

Daniel A. Hughes, Ph.D

Attachment Focused Family Therapy

Daniel A. Hughes, Ph.D

Attachment-Focused Family Therapy Workbook

Daniel A. Hughes, Ph.D

It Was That One Moment

Daniel A. Hughes, Ph.D

The Neurobiology of Attachment-Focused Therapy: Enhancing Connection & Trust in the Treatment of Children and Adolescents

Johnathan Baylin and Daniel A. Hughes, Ph.D

Brain-Based Parenting: The Neuroscience of Caregiving for Healthy Attachment

Daniel A. Hughes, Ph.D and Johnathan Baylin

Attachment-Focused Parenting: Effective Strategies to Care for Children

Daniel A. Hughes, Ph.D

Creating Loving Attachments: Parenting with PACE to Nuture Confidence and Security in the Traoubled Child

Kim Golding and Daniel A. Hughes, Ph.D

Tracy is a clinical psychologist and partner in Todd and Lewis- Todd, a multi specialty private practice providing individual, couple and family therapy to adolescents and adults. She has spent a good deal of her career in addiction and recovery clinical work.

William Madsen, Ph.D., is the founder and director of the Family-Centered Services Project (FCSP) in Massachusetts.  FCSP is a training and consultation effort designed to support the development of family-centered philosophy and practice through training, organizational consultation, ongoing coaching, and technical assistance.  FCSP uses an appreciative inquiry approach to help community agencies and larger jurisdictions develop institutional structures and organizational cultures that support more respectful and responsive ways of serving families.  

Bill provides international training and consultation regarding collaborative approaches to helping and ways to enhance organizational readiness to embrace family-centered work.  He has written numerous articles on these topics and is the author of Collaborative Therapy with Multi-Stressed Families (2nd Edition) and co-author of Collaborative Helping: A Strengths Framework for Home-Based Services, which highlights a simple inquiry-based practice framework for family support, outreach, child welfare and residential workers across many different contexts.  

Previously, Bill was the director of training at Family Institute of Cambridge and a senior associate at Public Conversations Project.  He has spent many, many years straddling the down and dirty world of frontline, public sector practice and the exciting, but more esoteric world of social constructionist, postmodern, and poststructural theorizing.  Most of his contributions to the field have resulted from attempts to negotiate the dilemmas that arise in this boundary spanning position.  The book Collaborative Therapy with Multi-Stressed Families was an attempt to adapt cutting edge family therapy concepts to frontline, public sector practice with marginalized families in a way that made these ideas both accessible and relevant.  The Family-Centered Services Project has been an organizational change effort to build institutional structures and organizational cultures that better support workers to embrace more collaborative ways of working (i.e. efforts to move from a focus on developing family-centered workers to a focus on developing family-centered agencies).  And the book Collaborative Helping represents an expansion of these previous efforts to a broader audience and offers a simple, but comprehensive map that can both help frontline workers think their way through complex situations and offer a structure to guide conversations between workers and families about challenging issues.

Books:

Collaborative Therapy with Multi-Stressed Families

William C. Madsen, Ph.D

Collaborative Helping: A Strengths Framework for Home-Based Services

William C. Madsen, Ph.D and Kevin Gillespie

She is the co-author of NASW publication: Empowering Social Workers for Practice with Vulnerable Older Adults. She teaches MSW practice courses and a course on clinical social work practice with older adults, and she is co-principal investigator for a Council on Social Work Education gero-ed project. Dr. Soniat also serves as a commissioner for the American Bar Association’s Commission on Law and Aging. She has worked in the fields of social work and gerontology for over 30 years. For over 20 years, her career effectively integrated clinical practice, research, teaching, and interdisciplinary field-based education of professional students. Dr. Soniat is the former long-time director of the George Washington University (GWU) and IONA Senior Services geriatric assessment and case management programs, where for over two decades she implemented collaborative partnerships between a university medical center (GWU), a public agency (the Washington, DC, Office on Aging), a private agency (IONA Senior Services), and several schools of social work (NCSSS, Howard University, University of Maryland, Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Alabama) and departments of psychiatry (GWU and Georgetown University). Through these endeavors, she has worked with many social workers, case managers, student learners, and colleagues to develop, test, modify, and refine models and tools for education, research, and practice with vulnerable older adults. Dr. Soniat has a strong interest in pursuing answers to practice-generated research questions. She is a featured speaker at national, international, regional, and local conferences and provides international training and consultation regarding collaborative approaches to therapy and the development of institutional cultures that support family-centered work.

Books:

Empowering Social Workers for Practice with Vulnerable Older Adults

Thomas Todd, PhD teaches in the survey courses, supervises trainees seeking MFT licensure, and provides advanced training of supervision. He also supervises doctoral Fellows at the Center who are pursuing their doctorates in psychology or marriage and family therapy. Dr. Todd received his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from New York University in 1970 and postdoctoral training at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic. His research on family therapy and drug abuse culminated in The Family Therapy of Drug Abuse and Addiction, and received the AAMFT award for outstanding research. He is the 2015 recipient of the award for Outstanding Contributions to Family Therapy, Theory, and Practice by the American Family Therapy Academy.

Dr. Todd has directed a comprehensive outpatient clinic and several training programs, and is the past Coordinator of the MFT Program at the Adler School of Professional Psychology, and is currently on the faculty of Argosy Graduate Program in family therapy.  He is an AAMFT Approved Supervisor, supervises clinicians seeking MFT licensure, and trains and supervises experienced clinicians wishing to become Approved Supervisors.

Dr. Todd maintains private practices in Evanston and Rolling Meadows, Illinois.

Books:

He is co-author of:

 Family Therapy Approaches with Adolescent Substance Abusers

 The Complete Systemic Supervisor, 2nd edition 2014.

Froma Walsh, MSW, PhD, is Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Chicago Center for Family Health, and is the Mose and Sylvia Firestone Professor Emerita in the School of Social Service Administration and Department of Psychiatry, Pritzker School of Medicine, at the University of Chicago. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and an AAMFT approved supervisor.

Dr. Walsh, an internationally respected leader in the field of family therapy,  is the foremost authority on family resilience. She has developed a resilience-oriented, community-based practice approach to strengthen families in crisis (e.g. major trauma; loss); in disruptive transitions (separation, divorce; migration); and facing challenges of persistent, multi-stress conditions (e.g. illness, disability; economic hardship; discrimination). Her research-informed Family Resilience Framework is widely applied in intervention and prevention efforts. She is also a noted expert on contemporary family diversity; on  multi-faith spiritual perspectives, and on the relational significance of the human-animal bond.

Her approach addresses developmental, systemic, cultural, and spiritual influences in suffering, healing, and resilience. Dr. Walsh is a frequent speaker and consultant nationally and internationally on resilience-oriented community mental health training, practice, and research.

Dr. Walsh is past editor, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy and past president, American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA). Among honors for her distinguished contributions to family systems theory, research, and practice are awards by AFTA; American Psychological Association (APA), Society for Family Psychology; American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT): American Orthopsychiatric Association; and the Society for Pastoral Counseling Research.

Dr. Walsh received a BA with honors in Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. After serving in the Peace Corps in Morocco, she received an MSW at Smith College, with fieldwork at Yale Department of Psychiatry and Yale Child Study Center. She received her PhD in Human Development and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Chicago.

With 120+ publications, her books include:

 Strengthening Family Resilience (3rd edition, October 2015); 

Spiritual Resources in Family Therapy (2nd ed., 2009); 

Normal Family Processes: Growing Diversity and Complexity (4th ed., 2012/2016); 

Living Beyond Loss: Death in the Family (with McGoldrick) (2nd ed. 2004); 

Chronic Disorders and the Family and Women in Families (with McGoldrick & Anderson). 

Her books have been translated into many languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.