Build the Future on a Better Foundation
Substantive, focused therapy for men, executives, couples, and adolescents navigating trauma, depression, anxiety, and addiction. Insight and clarity for individuals, couples, and families ready to find confidence, purpose, and stronger relationships.
Dave is a West Los Angeles LMFT with offices near UCLA and telehealth available for California Residents. Billing is private-pay with PPO superbill reimbursement.
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 Therapy techniques and Imago Therapy for improving connection, understanding, goal-setting, 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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Therapy addressing the psychological cost of leadership at the clinical level, including leadership identity, anxiety, pressure, stress, and relational patterns that performance demands create.
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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 for Intelligent Clientele
You may find yourself stunted and hampered by a society of rigid pathways, glass ceilings, and closed doors. Internal voices from past failures damage performance, and noise reduces your mental resources. Markets, culture, competitors, bureaucracy, and others hold you back. You may have come to believe that you are inconsequential and in danger of rejection – a mental death sentence. Your problems aren’t performance-based, they’re psychological issues that need clinical work, not more pressure. I bring organizational and clinical training to help your intelligent, capable mind get unstuck. We'll examine what drives your patterns, and help you adapt to the challenges you face so you can reclaim the best version of yourself.
Relationship Improvement
Most people don’t come to couples therapy because things are bad but because they’ve tried everything they know how to do and it keeps failing. Fights and distance become repetitious, and we feel alone. 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 Imago Therapy, Nonviolent Communication, Active Listening, Emotionally Focused Therapy, and more, we will identify what’s driving the rupture together and address it directly. We will assess past patterns and grow new behaviors. We will strategize strong, lasting bonds that allow you to become become better lovers, better friends, better leaders, and better parents.
Men’s Therapy Support
Dave S. Wallace specializes in therapy for men. What does that mean? Men are creatures of intention, built for useful, even grand purpose and meaning. Yet many therapists project their own pain onto their clients, or hold men accountable for their personal trauma. This can make finding a supportive therapist difficult for men, and also leave women struggling to move from emotional processing to action. When we experience compassion, confidence and competence come online with power, creating a better world. Our goal will be to cultivate your deep insight while exploring and defining the internal blocks preventing action, whether stress, anxiety, anger, grief, depression, family, ADHD, or more. We will catalog and activate your strengths, then break down limiting beliefs, internal resistance, and unresolved past memories to build a better future.
Religious and Cult Abuse
Dave is experienced in supporting recovery from institutionalized, religious exploitation and the misuse of power hierarchies and beliefs. This includes evangelical, christian, and muslim cults, fundamentalist misuse of Asian traditions for dominance, and other groups where expulsion or excommunication is a risk.
Medication-Compliant Bipolar
Dave has experience working with bipolarity in both inpatient and outpatient treatment settings, and has effectively helped medication-compliant, bipolar men maintain mental and emotional stability as well as improve function with regular therapeutic 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, physical injury by age 10. I had to develop insight early, and fast. Others came to rely on that 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
Frequently Asked Questions
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I am a private-pay practice with rates at $250/hr. PPO insurance plans receive significant reimbursement with OON (Out Of Network) support. Clients typically recoup 50-80% of the fee, making therapy more affordable than a HMO co-pay in some cases. I provide superbills each month.
More information about insurance and fees can be found HERE.
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Meetings are available in West LA subject to availability or virtually by telehealth conferencing. Appointments are one-hour weekly (insurance-hour model, 50 minutes) or more frequently if requested by the client and the therapist is available.
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Short, single-issue treatments usually run 4-12 weeks. Comprehensive care or trauma treatment usually takes longer. I find it takes 6 months to define a set of problems with a treatment strategy, 6 more months to implement when there is resistance, and 6 months to affirm change. Clients frequently move to intermittent or ad-hoc sessions at the 6 month or 2-year marks.
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Collaborative, honest, and straightforward. I’m here to guide the process, bring ideas to the table, and keep things moving. If you're not sure where to go, I've got a ton of resources to help direct us.
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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.
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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 someone trained in Organizational Psychology.
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Getting started is simple. Reach out through our contact form or schedule a call—I’ll walk you through the next steps and answer any questions along the way.
