DBT & Mindfulness Certification Training

Charles Jacob, Ph.D., is a psychologist with over 15 years of clinical experience conducting and overseeing the delivery of mental health services to individuals with severe mood and personality disorders as well as their families. He is a past president of the Pennsylvania branch of the American Counseling Association and maintains a robust private practice in the suburbs of Philadelphia as a licensed psychologist, professional counselor and marriage and family therapist.

In addition to training in Dialectical Behavior Therapy for the treatment of borderline personality disorder, Dr. Jacob is an expert in Cognitive Therapy and a highly regarded clinician and scholar. He is a recipient of PCA's David W. Hall Advocacy Award and has been a featured interview in Counseling Today as well as NPR's The Pulse.

Dr. Jacob is a full-time faculty member in the Human Development Quantitative Methods Division at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. He received his PhD from The Pennsylvania State University and completed a year of additional training at the Center for Cognitive Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Debra Alvis, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and private practitioner with over twenty-five years of clinical experience. She specializes in an integrative approach bringing together polyvagal, neuroscientific, and somatic principles to treat trauma and co-morbid disorders.

Debra discovered that the polyvagal approach facilitates a mindful awareness of the biological reactions influencing the therapist/client relationship and the client's sense of safety in the world. Integrating physiological, brain-based, body-focused approaches with traditional psychotherapeutic orientations helped clients to recover more easefully and quickly from trauma. In addition, with an increased sense of safety and connectedness, clients more frequently practiced the strategies required through her work in private practice and as a clinical supervisor, educator, and consultant.

Dr. Alvis developed and led the Mind/Body Program at the University of Georgia where she now teaches health psychology graduate students to apply polyvagal, neuroscientific, and somatic approaches, serves as project director for federal grant focusing on integrative healthcare, and develops mindfulness-based research studies. A thirty-year personal contemplative practice and over a thousand hours training as a mindfulness and yoga teacher further enrich her presentations.

Click here for information about Debra Premashakti Alvis