I received my Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin and completed my Psychology Internship at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. I am currently a Licensed Psychologist in private practice in Austin (TX License #33430).

Expertise in Gender Issues

I have a longstanding interest in women's and gender issues and have served on a national task force for the American Psychological Association to create a new set of guidelines for counseling women and girls. These guidelines were recently adopted by the APA (February 2007). My work on gender and sexuality has also been published in a number of journals and books, including Psychology of Women Quarterly, Women & Therapy, The Counseling Psychologist, and the Encyclopedia of Women and Gender (Academic Press, 2001). For a list of selected publications, go here.

I have been seeing individual clients since 1998 and have co-facilitated a number of therapy and support groups related to domestic violence, coming out, mood management, family issues, and women's academic performance. I also have experience working with transgender and HIV-positive clients.

My Approach to Therapy

My theoretical orientation is a blending of a number of approaches, including feminist, humanist, gestalt, cognitive-behavioral, narrative, and psychodynamic. I view my work with clients as a collaborative process that empowers them rather than one that fosters their dependency upon me. I also situate client difficulties within their sociocultural context, which means that I attend to such factors as sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, classism and other societal forces that contribute to human suffering.

Copyright 2008 Carson Rader, PhD. All rights reserved.