About DrDeb & This Site

My Ph.D. is in Marriage and Family Therapy (MFT), a specialized field that has the capability of psychology and counseling to understand individuals while also being able to understand the relationships between all of the people in a family. Being an MFT is kind of like being a juggler. First you handle one ball, then you add another, then another. Each one counts; you can’t drop any of them, and you have to know how they all go together.

MFT is a non-judgmental, non-blaming approach to solving couple and family problems. When you’ve got so many balls, going, it makes no sense to point a finger at only one of them because the problem is in how they relate to each other. MFTs don’t think in terms of diagnoses. They don’t ask themselves, “What’s wrong with this person?” My thought is, “What’s right with this person? What are his strengths? How has she overcome challenges?” and the answers to those questions become my tools to help you.

I graduated Nova Southeastern University’s doctoral program in MFT in 2001 after spending ten years doing research on emotional, verbal and physical abuse for my dissertation. I got my master’s degree from Drake University in 1978, having written a thesis about prison counseling. I did honors research abroad on the effect of the mental hospital culture on patient recovery while attending Queens College in New York. I graduated in psychology in 1970. I have been actively practicing in the field for 35 years.

I’ve had six articles published in peer-reviewed journals [see below]* and given presentations to other therapists, published and presented dozens of times to the public, edited the mental health section of a paper run by the Miami Herald, and was an editor for the Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association.

Several years ago, I discovered Internal Family Systems (IFS) and fell in love with it. It is the most non-blaming and pleasant of the therapies which heal trauma and it applies to individuals as well as couples. I’ve completed Level 1 (basic) and Level 2 (couples therapy called Intimacy From The Inside Out, IFIO) and am due this Fall to take an advanced IFIO course. To get into the details on what IFS is, watch my podcast on youtube or listen to it on

I’ve completed basic and advanced hypnosis levels at the New York Milton H. Erickson Society for Psychotherapy and Hypnosis. To quote from their website:

“Hypnosis is an empirically-supported therapeutic tool to help people access inner resources to heal and grow. NYSEPH is dedicated to using hands-on, in-depth, and long-term training to help practitioners integrate hypnosis into their clinical work.”

See more information on their website and read my take on it as well. My 2003 article and my 2013 article are useful.

I am licensed in New York. My New York license number is 004678-01. Go to http://www.op.nysed.gov/opsearches.htm and click “mental health counselor” and then spell my name, last first, with no comma. Note correct spelling: HIRSCHHORN DEBORAH

I am a clinical member of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists
and before I moved out of Florida, I was an Approved Supervisor in Florida for Master’s level Counselors and Marriage and Family Therapists.

In 2016 I got frustrated with the state of the art of my field.

A summary of that New York Times article is that “traditional” therapy doesn’t work and when it fails, therapists often send clients to the divorce court because they don’t know what else to do. There is a lot of research, however, on new techniques in therapy, such as Sue Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy. This goes beyond behavior contracts to get at underlying emotions. This is excellent – until she encounters an abusive spouse. Sue Johnson states, “The emotionally abusive behaviors of those partners were not evident or reported at the time of intake and would have been considered a contraindication for EFT” (Journal of Marital & Family Therapy, July 2008).

Sigh.

The Times article reported on Dr. John Gottman, an eminent researcher and clinician, who believes that if you help people learn to fight better, you will have happier couples. I agree with him there, but there must be more. What about joy, intimacy, and happiness?

I wondered: Would it be possible to work with larger numbers of people in a group and serve them well? The answer is that many marriage programs have come about using this group-coaching format. But the problems with those are that they are

• too short
• lack sufficient follow up
• lack sufficient one-to-one contact

What if a program were created that kept the emotional focus of Sue Johnson’s EFT, the common-sense piece of John Gottman’s learning how to fight, the positive orientation of solution-focused therapy and coaching, covered all the skills needed to become truly happy with ONESELF – which is the key that everyone else seems to miss – could be learned in a relatively brief time and yet had the follow-up that everyone needs, and did all this with the one-to-one element still intact? What if?

So I created it. For more, please see the Masterclass for Couples or the Masterclass for Individuals.

Then, when you’ve absorbed that, please be sure to take a good look at the Course Offerings.

There are Offerings for Individuals wanting to Love Themselves (or whose partners do not want to participate), and there are Offerings for Couples who are Committed To Connecting, finally.

*Hirschhorn, D. S. (1997). Tailored supervision. In C. Storm (Ed.), Reasonably complete systemic supervisor resource guide (pp. 87-89). Needham Heights, MA.: Allyn & Bacon. (Reprinted from The SupervisionÊBulletin, 7(2), pp. 3, 8, 1994.)

Hirschhorn, D. S. (1998). Non-Normative Systemic Therapy in a Case of Intergenerational Enmeshment. The Journal of Psychology and Judaism, 22, pp. 115-128.

Hirschhorn, D. S. (1998). The Mrs. K’negdo/Mrs. Opposite assignment: A Biblical injunction for Orthodox Jewish couples and Christian couples. In L. Hecker & S. Deacon (Eds.), The therapist’s notebook: Homework, handouts, and activities for use in psychotherapy (pp. 229-233). New York: Haworth.

Hirschhorn, D. S. (1999). Postmodern Ethics and Our Theories: Doing Therapy versus Being Therapists. Journal of Systemic Therapies, 18, (4), pp. 18-41.

Hirschhorn, D. S. (2001). Business building: Why making psychopharmacology referrals is shooting ourselves in the foot. Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association, 4(6), p. 21.

Hirschhorn, D. S. (2001). Physical Abuse: Screening and Treatment. The Annals of The American Psychotherapy Association, 4, (5), pp.15-17.MFriendlyTh