In my personal life I’m interested in jazz music, poetry, food and wine, art, philosophy, photography, web development. To this point I’ve found it difficult to balance my presentation on the web between professionalism and personal expression, because I’ve tried to include aspects of both at a single location without allowing one to overwhelm the other. From now on I will keep up on my personal interests over at davidgodot.com, while keeping this site up-to-date with information about my professional life as a psychotherapist and doctoral student.

Professionally, I am primarily interested in the use of clinical hypnosis to improve the capabilities of both high and low functioning individuals. I am particularly interested in the potential for enhancing the performance of already highly capable individuals, such as athletes, entrepreneurs, and executives.

In terms of remediating mental illness, I have a lot of interest in using integrative schematic conceptualization to understand individuals’ habitual self-limitations, combined with hypnotic techniques to overcome those limitations and open up new possibilities. I am a self-conscious idealist when it comes to psychotherapy, and I refuse to get comfortable with the idea that any patient I see will merely “get better.” My goal is for every patient to end up better off than the average person, no matter what limits their personal history or present level of functioning may suggest.

On this site, you can expect to see news about my professional activities within the psychology and hypnosis communities, as well as samples of my academic writing that I think may be useful to the world at large. My goal for this site is to promote my career as a mental health professional, so I will focus on providing information that demonstrates my ability to benefit my target employers and business partners.