About Michael Baugh, LCSW

I began doing clinical work as an undergraduate at Yale University, and since then I‘ve worked with couples, families and individual clients for 33 years. For the past 20 years I have trained and supervised Marriage and Family Therapist Interns as Clinical Director of Clement Street Counseling Center (8 years) and New Perspectives Center for Counseling (12 years), while maintaining a private practice on the side. During these years I’ve trained 160 therapists for at least a year each and supervised their work with more than a thousand clients.

In teaching a weekly didactic seminar on clinical topics all these years, I discovered the truth of the saying that the best way to learn a subject is to teach it. My students have challenged me to be clear in the way I think and speak about doing therapy, skillful in the way that I demonstrate therapeutic interventions, and up to date with the most effective new treatment technologies. The diversity of the thousand clients we’ve discussed and hearing about the effect of the interventions we’ve devised has informed my understanding of the human predicament and how to transform it in a caring and efficient manner.

In October 2005 I left the Clinical Directorship at New Perspectives (though I continue to do some teaching and supervision there), in order to concentrate on my private practice and create time for writing. I hope over time to share what I have learned with a broader audience of therapists and people who wish to be more happy and effective in their lives.

Although I see some clients individually for a variety of reasons, the majority of my clients come for couples work or for assistance in regulating distressing emotions and behaviors through Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Accordingly, I’ve set up this website to provide information about those areas of clinical work.

Training in the DBT model

Among the DBT links, I provide one to the national BPD support program, TARA, addressing the question of How to Choose a DBT Therapist. The TARA site recommends investigating whether a potential DBT therapist has been intensively trained and employs the complete protocol of procedures in the model for which positive research data has been obtained.

Because I agree with this recommendation, I want to list my training experiences in DBT and let you know that I am intensively trained and experienced in utilizing the full DBT protocol. I am a member of two intensively trained DBT consultation teams; one in Marin County with Marian Cremen, LCSW, David Fish, MFTI, Demi Rhine, PsyD, and Kari Wolman, PsyD, and another in San Francisco with Charles Jasper, PhD and Michelle Silver, MFT.

As far as I know, I am the most highly trained outpatient DBT clinician in San Francisco, having attended the 5 day Advanced Intensive in September 2006. I am in the process of setting myself up in the supervision program necessary for the soon-to-be-created certification process for DBT therapists.

DBT Trainings Completed:

DBT Trainings Given:

Training in the Gottman Couples Therapy Model: