Michael Dunbry, MA, LMHC, NCC, CMHS
Child & Family Therapist, Licensed Mental Health Counselor, National Certified Counselor, Children’s Mental Health Specialist
(he/him)
WELCOME
Hello! Welcome, and thank you for being here. While it’s certainly possible that you enjoy reading therapist profiles just for fun, it’s more likely that you are here looking for help of some kind. Without being indifferent to your suffering, please allow me to say, congratulations! It can be uncomfortable to admit that you are not feeling your best and to decide to ask for help. You can be proud of yourself for making it this far.
CONTACT ME
Now that you’re here, your next steps are simple (though perhaps not so easy). You can contact me either by phone or email; please send me a message with your name and contact information to let me know you are interested in a consultation. Then, I will get back to you within a few days for a quick conversation. I’ll tell you a little bit about myself, you can tell me a little bit about yourself, and we’ll iron out some key details - like making sure that our schedules work out, figuring out billing and insurance (therapy can be expensive), and ensuring this is a good fit for you.
GETTING STARTED
While every client is unique and no two sessions are exactly alike, there are some things you can reliably expect in therapy with me. I greet people warmly and enthusiastically; I want to make getting started as painless as possible. Once we’re settled in, how we spend our time is largely up to you. I believe that between the two of us, you are the expert on your own experience, whereas I am the expert on therapy, and together we can find a way to set goals and work towards them. I don’t expect you to know exactly what you need or what to talk about every week - if you already knew that, you probably wouldn’t be in therapy! Usually, given an open, caring relationship and a bit of patience, what’s important has a way of naturally bubbling up to the surface. Some people call this “nondirective” or “client-centered” work; I like to think of it as having faith in my clients and the human capacity to heal.
MY APPROACH: SAFETY FIRST!
Safety first! And the best way to keep you safe is to figure out what is dangerous in your life. Fortunately, humans naturally attend to threats. If two things are coming towards you, one of which is familiar and safe, and the other is unfamiliar or unsafe, you will probably pay more attention to the latter. Good! Attending to danger keeps you safe. Starting therapy, you may presently be in danger, or perhaps you were in danger earlier in your life. Not all dangers are violent or acute; simply having your needs go unmet may constitute a major developmental challenge. Getting clear about what is (or was) threatening to you, your loved ones, and your future is crucial for mapping a safe path forward. As a therapist, I follow a professional ethic to do no harm, so I emphasize safety early and often in my practice.
MY APPROACH: STRENGTHS-BASED
I am a strengths-based professional. If you are still breathing, you are already doing a lot of things right. By identifying what you do well, building on good habits, and adding helpful and constructive tools to your life, you can crowd out the more negative or detrimental patterns that are holding you back. Of course, problems are also important in therapy. We won’t ignore the very real and significant challenges in your life - even a very fancy sounding solution can be useless if it doesn’t address the right problem, after all! So I aim for a balance between investigating concerns and developing solutions.
MY APPROACH: EMOTIONAL CONGRUENCE
Therapy is also emotional work. Not every session has to be built around a problem and a goal. Oftentimes, part or all of a session may be spent just processing feelings. Emotions are critical sources of information for us. They give us information about ourselves, and they convey information about us to others. Our more positive, enjoyable emotions signal that we are living our best lives, whereas our more negative and unpleasant feelings may indicate that we are moving away from our values. Regardless, it can be a relief to bring all of that to therapy and dump it on your therapist and make it his problem. We’ll laugh, we’ll cry, we’ll rant and rave. That’s what I’m here for!
MY APPROACH: INDIVIDUALITY
We are all organized differently when it comes to expressing ourselves and managing relationships. In therapy, we may spend some time exploring the strengths and challenges in your personal and family relationships and especially in our therapeutic relationship. You will likely find that I respond and act differently than most people in your life. That’s what makes therapy … well, therapy. Some people are more inhibited around their negative emotions - holding back, bottling up, isolating and keeping things to themselves. While others may feel that their emotions are too big and take over their lives - you may be given to throes of anger or tearfulness or held captive by crippling fears. Through learning about how you are organized and exploring your emotions in a new relational context (i.e., therapy), you can personally and emotionally recalibrate to bring balance back to your life.
SPECIAL SERVICES: ADULT ATTACHMENT INTERVIEW
The cornerstone of my clinical practice and the most impactful tool I have ever studied is the DMM-AAI: The Adult Attachment Interview revised by the Dynamic Maturational Model of Attachment and Adaptation. What a mouthful! This interview is 1-2 hours long, recorded, transcribed (down to every “like,” “you know,” “umm…,” st- stutter and - - pause). It is then annotated, coded, and classified according to a strengths-based model of attachment built on the science of information processing (the DMM). What does that mean for you? This interview does a great job of not only collecting a lot of relevant history (e.g. who were the most important figures in your life), but also revealing key patterns in how individuals survive, how they respond to dangers, and ultimately how they make meaning out of the world around them and come to find their place in it. Spending a few weeks reviewing this assessment is a powerful way to begin treatment, and it can be a wonderful way to restart stalled treatment when things get stuck. I have dedicated years of my life to studying this tool and these models; it has been simultaneously the most challenging and rigorous course of study I have ever undertaken, and also the most rewarding and revealing. It is my pleasure and privilege to share this with my clients!
Areas of Focus
Attachment - especially the Adult Attachment Interview (reach out to learn more!)
Trauma & Post-Traumatic Stress
Family of Origin
Parenting
Anxiety
Depression
Self-harm
Neurodivergence and development
Academic Counseling
Teens/Adolescents
Fees
$250/session
Reach out for information about Attachment assessment packages
Insurance
Out of Network
Location
Virtual
Scheduling Information
Call (two zero six) 651-5502 or e-mail michael at adaptiveattachment dot com for a free consultation and to schedule.
“In good treatment, nothing is lost except shame and secrets.”
— Crittenden et al., 2014, Attachment and Family Therapy