Heal the Past & Build the Future
Reconcile and relax, building insight, confidence, and purpose. Find strength to manage challenges, be present, and create lasting change in your life and those you love. The world is better when we have someone next to us.
Virtual therapy for California Residents or offices by UCLA in West Los Angeles, specializing in men and high-intelligence clientele, including executives, doctors, lawyers, artists, musicians, and gifted adolescents.
Services
Individual Psychotherapy For:
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Support for the challenges of anxiety and depression, including future concerns, past traumas, sadness, and difficult circumstances. Family and relationship support. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Psychodynamic work, with elements of Solutions-Focused and Narrative Therapies.
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Support for understanding, processing, and healing of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder related to violence, intimate partner violence, combat, crime, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and death.
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Support building goals and addressing the difficult present and past circumstances or patterns which cause addiction. Involves interpersonal psychotherapy, psychodynamic exploration, and cognitive behavioral interventions. Especially useful for men and women with military, armed forces, security, legal, or police officer backgrounds. Appropriate for alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, videogame, or excess marijuana use.
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Support for individuals struggling with codependent behaviors and toxic family systems. Support for love addiction, changing behavioral patterns, self-acceptance, regret, self-hatred, internal criticism, and mood disorders.
Family Psychotherapy For:
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Use of Gottman techniques for improving connection, understanding, goalsetting, sexual reconnecting, or separating amicably.
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Support for the struggles and challenges of adolescent boys, including anxiety, depression, failure to launch, attention deficit, hyperactivity, scholastic achievement, and performance. Appropriate for middle school and high school, and college; may or may not include family therapy.
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Focus on conscious and unconscious behaviors affecting your children and the fears and concerns disrupting effective parenting.
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Support for individuals experiencing divorce, custody challenges, and legal conflicts. Includes coming to terms with past experiences, failures, and traumas as well as building a better, brighter future.
Professional Support For:
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Support and training for leadership development and management best practices. Includes help with understanding and improving transformational leadership and team management, whether for personal development, productivity, or overall success.
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Support for entrepreneurial leadership, start-ups stressors, and cultural leadership. Support for individual and organizational psychological development, as well as best practice consultation.
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Support for individuals seeking to become successful in entertainment and creative endeavors, including actors, musicians, composers, producers, and writers. Special focus on personality development and creative workflow.
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Support for career transitions and long-term job improvement, including understanding workplace culture, personal presentation, external behaviors, and career pathways.
Action-Focused Growth and Support for Intelligent Clientele
We are intentional beasts of action, in a society of roadblocks, rigid pathways, and closed doors. Internal voices from past failure, defeat, or sabotage undercut our performance and reduce our mental resources. External forces like markets, culture, and competitors hold us back. We come to believe that we are small, inconsequential, and unwanted – a mental death sentence. We’ve always needed someone to have our back, but this is when we need someone in our corner most. Together, we can reclaim your strength and leverage your intelligence to adapt to the challenges we face. I will be the catalyst as we move towards a more relaxed, more powerful, and more grounded way to reclaim the best version of yourself that you can be.
Relationship Improvement
We are hierarchical creatures. We want a team to compete with, someone to compete against, and others to support. We want connections who see our value. We even want leaders to follow – actively or in spirit – and we often find ourselves leading others even when we did not intend to lead.
As your couples therapist, I will be your trusted sounding board so you can clearly see the forces connecting you. Using Gottman Therapy techniques as well as nonviolent communication, active listening, neurolinguistic programming, and psychoeducation, we will proceed through Imago Therapy exercises, reducing codependence, and emphasizing life meaning together. We will strategize strong, lasting bonds to become better leaders, better lovers, better friends, and better parents.
Men’s Therapy Support
Dave S. Wallace specializes in therapy for men. What does that mean? Men are creatures of action, built for grand design, for purpose and meaning. Too many therapists project their personal history onto their clients; they infantilize women with benevolent sexism, and hold their male clientele accountable for their personal trauma. This can make finding a supportive therapist exceptionally difficult for men, and even leave women struggling to make progress longer than necessary. Our goal will be to cultivate deep insight while exploring and defining internal blocks preventing action. We will catalog then activate strengths, move through limiting beliefs, internal resistance, and unresolved past memories, into a better future. When men experience compassion, their confidence and competence come online with power, creating a better world.
Religious and Cult Abuse
Dave is experienced in supporting recovery from institutionalized, religious exploitation or the misuse of religious power hierarchies and belief structures. This includes evangelical, christian, and muslim cults, fundamentalist misuse of Asian traditions for dominance.
Medication-Compliant Bipolar
Dave is experienced in working with bipolarity in both inpatient and outpatient treatment settings, and has been effective at helping medication-compliant, bipolar men maintain stability and improve function through regular psychotherapeutic treatment.
What People Are Saying
“I see people on autopilot, but after my time working with Dave, I’m awake.”
— S. L.
“He was right about everything – the path I was on, where it would lead, how it would end.”
— E. B.
“He has an incredible mix of insight, empathy, and an ability to inspire action. He helped me face new challenges with greater confidence and calm.”
– J. S.
Working with Dave allowed me to organize myself. He created a space to distill the greatest essence of everything I desire to be. I feel immense gratitude. He sees me. He’s led me to breakthrough after breakthrough.”
— S. C.
About Dave S. Wallace, MS, MA, LMFT
People have always trusted me to analyze problems and advise solutions. I had a difficult childhood, with food instability and religious punishments which gave me a limp and separated rib by age 10. I couldn’t rely on anyone, so I had to strategize ways to stay safe. Other people came to rely on my insight too. I graduated with honors and attended college on scholarship. I served as a juvenile treatment counselor, a health coach, and a sex-ed teacher. Then I changed careers to compose music in Hollywood and worked on award-winning projects. Yet privately, I suffered. I chose relationships poorly and felt like an imposter with too few resources to meet the demands of others. So I started over.
I now have an MS in Organizational Psychology (with honors) and an MA in Clinical Psychology from Pepperdine (also with honors). I have extensive experience with men, boys, and professional women. I’ve worked with entrepreneurs, producers, artists, doctors, lawyers, principals, and veterans. I understand career transition, business challenges, leadership, performance, stress, relationship conflict, legal problems, spiritual confusion, crises, trauma, depression, and anxiety. Much of my work focuses on overcoming obstacles in daily relational interactions, our internal beliefs, and problems with those we love.
Whatever you’re facing, we can face it together.
Qualifications
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, CA #161410
MS Industrial/Organizational Psychology (MSIO), Psi Chi Honors
MA in Clinical Psychology (MACP), Psi Chi/Summa Cum Laude
17 years of individual/group counseling/coaching experience.
Invited Speaker, Pepperdine University Graduate School of Education and Psychology, Los Angeles
Trained in Leadership Development, Trauma-Focused CBT, Addiction Treatment, Crisis Intervention, Gottman Couples Therapy Level 1, Transformational Coaching, and Breathwork.
Experienced with Ages 10-65, All Races, 1st & 2nd Generation Immigrants, Veterans, Professional Women, & Men/Boys Significantly.
Tech, Entertainment, Business, Legal, and Startup Experience.
Creatively Competent: 10 years as a composer in Hollywood
FAQ
What's Your "Secret Sauce?"
I have a Master of Science in Organizational Psychology and a Master of Arts in Clinical Psychology. This means professional psychological insights in the areas of business, social networks, behavior, development, personality, relationships, and disorders. I work in effective areas of validated research – beware of "secret sauce" promises.
Therapy or Coaching?
Therapy heals past trauma that is causing emotional distress or limiting behavioral problems. Coaching uses process to change present behavior for better futures, such as setting goals and solving life challenges. They are powerful together. Therapists can offer great coaching, but coaches cannot legally offer therapy, or trauma and psychological support.
What Makes a Great Therapist?
Fully developed and experienced individuals make great therapists. Intelligence (IQ) solves complex problems. Education gives access to knowledge, while on-the-ground experience tests action and understanding. Personal culture conveys the emotional quotient (EQ) we feel when supported. This combination compels life changes.
Executive Counseling or Coaching?
Executive counseling is concerned with the individual leader’s psyche, including confidence, stress, personal development, and relationship issues, because our business is a reflection of our mental state. Executive coaching focuses on goal execution, cultural improvement, and change management. It is best handled by an Organizational Psychologist.
What Makes a Mediocre Coach or Therapist?
Therapists are often limited in life experience, while coaches lack formal training and legal oversight, which is dangerous. Each compensates for their deficits with emotions. Coaches leverage enthusiasm and confidence to create faith in action, while therapists leverage emotional support and reflection to motivate insight and change.
When, Where, How Much?
Cash rates are $250/hr. Meetings are available in West LA subject to limited availability or by telehealth conferencing. Standard 24-hour cancellation policies apply. Appointments are one-hour weekly (insurance-hour model, 50 minutes) or more frequently if requested by the client and the therapist is available and covered by insurance.
