We hope it inspires you in some small way. I was born in Hawarden, Iowa, but I grew up outside of Alcester, South Dakota, on a dairy farm, which my family owned. I'm the fourth generation, so we have long history and roots in the area. I think that's an important component of my development because I grew up in nature, I grew up around animals, and I grew up around a family business.
All of those things developed my work ethic and how I work, which plays a direct role into this business. I went to high school [in Alcester], and then I went to University of South Dakota, where I got my undergraduate degree in psychology. During my last year of my undergraduate studies, I went to Europe for six months, where I studied philosophy before coming back and graduating from USD.
This program is one of the few psychodynamic-oriented psychotherapy programs in the United States, so, I feel very fortunate to have had that experience. Freud was the originator, but there have been generations of psychologists who have continued to develop his original theories.
Freud was a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, and was practicing at a time before neuroscience existed in the way it does today. Freud saw the limitations of science to study the brain during his lifetime, so he sought an alternative route to understanding human psychology, which is known as psychoanalysis. A lot could be written about what psychodynamic means. From a more personal standpoint, psychodynamic psychotherapy, for me as a practicing therapist, is the only section in the field of psychology that describes what human experience is.
For me, it's like the poetry of psychology. It goes in-depth into trying to understand, explain, label inner psychic processes and the human experience. It addresses meaning in human experience and existential struggles inherent in the human condition. In addition, it looks at the developmental nature of human psychology to understand how childhood experiences impact adult functioning intrapsychically.
