Daniel Jacob Self (he/him)
MA (Counseling and Somatic Psychology), LMHCA
daniel@intrepidtherapy.com
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Deep inside of you is the awareness of what you need to heal. I help facilitate and unearth that inner wisdom with individuals, couples, and groups. Together, we'll practice tuning into your own unique embodied awareness. From there, we can translate that increased clarity into tangible action that aligns with your greatest, most authentic wellbeing. Our bodies exist within larger systems — many of which can disconnect us from ourselves and each other. We'll look together at the messages we've internalized from these systems in order to unearth the ones that are no longer helpful.
Utilizing the latest nervous system research along with traditional practices going back thousands of years, we can explore a broad range of tools together: including breathwork, dance, ritual, and creativity. We can also simply talk: honoring the transformative power of sharing things we've never fully acknowledged or felt safe enough to share.
Whether you're struggling with relational conflict, anxiety, depression, self-esteem; or whether you seek to find greater accountability and healing around issues related to shame, gender, race, identity, or other Overculutural forces; our work together can help to release old patterns of fear and pain toward newly embodied resiliency, joy, and wholeness.
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I have found that healing and change occur most readily when we elicit the cooperation of the unconscious. I consider my job to help facilitate and unearth that inner knowledge. To help you learn to listen to what that deep part of you already knows.
This is a direct contrast to the “expert model” wherein I – as an expert – think I know what’s best for you: that my job is to get you to see what I already know about you. I find this way of working to be both unethical and ineffective. A part of us always knows when someone is trying to change us to be what they want us to be and it usually resists!
At the same time, I have had so many experiences of sitting with someone who I’ve turned to for help and all they do is sit there and empathize with me! It’s nice, but it doesn’t always get the job done.
I am here to be an active, engaged part of the process– offering tools, ideologies, prompts, explorations and experiments designed to help you move through what you’re struggling with, better understand that wisdom deep inside of yourself, and find particular breakthroughs in areas that may have felt stuck for a very long time.
Whether you’re struggling with anxiety, depression, self-esteem, shame; or whether you seek to find greater integrity, accountability, and healing around issues related to conflict, gender, race, neuronormativity, or other Overculutural forces; our work can help to release old patterns of fear and pain toward newly embodied resiliency, joy, and wholeness.
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My first professional career was as a professional musical theatre dancer. Thru my own journey of healing I found my way to Somatic Therapy and Restorative Practices — discovering greater wholeness and reconnection to our inherently interdependent natures through sitting one on one and in circle with folks, sharing authentically and exploring deeply, and coming to realize that all the parts of myself I thought so shameful, or felt so burdened by, were trying to keep me safe given the systemic beliefs and ideals I had subconsciously internalized my whole life.
In our work together, I will invite us to explore, through the present moment experience of our bodies, all that we've taken in to try and survive, and what of that might be ready to be let go of and shifted in favor of more healthful and nourishing mechanisms.
I work to balance emergent, deep exploration with practical, hands-on tools and skill building to help move you closer to your intended goals and greatest manifestation
I am a liberatory, nonpathologizing practitioner. I believe in the inherent healing power of authentic human connection. I believe we have all been deeply harmed by the violent patriarchal, ableist, white supremacist, hyper-capitalist systems within which we are entrenched — and that this harm has been experienced disparately across gender, race, ability, and other elements of positionality.
I believe shame is corrosive and no human being is defined by their worst action. I believe that our collective liberation is bound up together, and in order to help heal the outer woundedness of our world we owe it to ourselves and each other to look deep inside— and to work together to heal what we find there.
I believe in the words of Krishnamurti that "it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" I seek never to ignore the sickness of the outer world, but to seek to cultivate greater resiliency and rebellious joyous connection for the sake of healing it.
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Men’s Work / Accountability & Shame – Those of us socialized as men exist at a pivotal time of transition. On one hand, we can see more clearly than ever before the damaged and damaging templates we were handed: the stories about what it means to be a man that have cut us off from the fullness of our emotions and humanity, taught us toxic messages about what strength is and what power means. But on the other hand, we tend to be on the receiving end of a lot of shaming and attacking – rather than being given the safe space and the support to help heal the damage done within us by this toxicity, and to create and practice new ways of being men so that we no longer act out of that damaged place and cause more harm to others. Thorough my work as a Restorative Justice facilitator, I have experienced life changing grace and care in my own ongoing journey of healing the gendered wounds in me, and I am deeply committed to continuing that work with other men who care to be agents of change and healing in this world. I am equally passionate about working through related issues around Whiteness, Ableism, and Neurodivergence.
Conflict / Relationship Work – Being human is hard. Being human together is really hard. And, of course, it’s where the vast majority of the joy, pleasure, and excitement of life abides. In the words of Maladoma Some, "Conflict is the spirit of the relationship asking to deepen." When we are at odds, it can be the most potent opportunity for us to expand our awareness of how we can best advocate for ourselves, heal our past wounds, and see just one more piece of the greater whole thru another's eyes. In this culture, we are so often isolated in conflict: locked in the grips of trying to advocate for our own needs while wanting to show care for someone we love. I believe we all need and deserve support in working through the dance of being human together. I am passionate about helping those struggling with conflict and navigating challenges in intimate relationships to find their way back to loving connection, and to clear mutually beneficial ways forward that serve the individuals and the relationship as a whole. I am polyamorous and find the tenants, practices, and frameworks of ethical non monogamy to be extremely beneficial to whatever form of relationship you most align with.
Grief – Within traditional, intact cultures, grief is an active part of how we go about our daily lives and tend to our wellbeing. Cultivating our skillfulness with grief is a powerful means by which we can maintain better wholeness, connectedness, and even greater access to joy. When we are in a place of great loss, we experience a moment of great possibility. Possibility to achieve greater access to the fullness of our being, to the depths of our love for each other, and connection to that which is greater than us as individuals. Such moments offer a threshold: on the other side we will be different than before, but we get to be a part of determining how.
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I received my MA in Counseling Psychology, Specializing in Somatic Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. My studies specialized in the connection between Inner and Outer Circle Work: the ways in which coming together in council – as our ancestors have done since the beginning of us peopling together – can be both a personal and a communal practice. A way of honoring our individual and our collective bodies. All the parts within us that have different opinions about how to best keep us safe can each be given a voice, just as each individual member of a group or community can each be invited to share their wisdom.
This synthesis came from my simultaneous training and work with the Berkeley-based Ahimsa Collective – doing Restorative Justice facilitation and Circles inside prisons in the Central Valley of California: working with those who had caused (and often experienced) intimate violence to both heal their own wounds and become more deeply accountable for the pain they had caused others.
I am still a Core Family Member of the Ahimsa Collective, facilitating circles between those in conflict and those seeking to be accountable for harm.
For my “field training” as part of my degree, I worked as a Grief Counselor at Pathways Home Health and Hospice in Oakland, CA: supporting those who had just lost a family member or loved one. This work, too, has deeply impacted the foundations of how I see and approach all of the work I do. I have seen how tending to Grief as a foundational experience at the heart of so much of what we go through has the potential to unlock depths of presence and transformation almost nothing else can access.
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I am and will forever be a dancer: creativity and expression through the body will always being a core part of who I am and what I care about. I am an old soul– which to me mostly means that I’m a bit of an old man: never quite having ever felt particularly hip with the cool kids. I am an introvert that most people think is an extrovert. I am an aspiring Vegan who may never be able to give up sushi. I am infinitely more awkward talking about sports and the weather than the depths of human nature, pain, suffering, and resiliency. I have a humorously large aversion to competition and ultimately wish everyone could win at sportsball! My favorite boardgames are the ones where everyone wins in the end. I am, to the core of me, a clown: which – unlike the horror appropriation so common in our modern culture – means that I always relate to the slightly awkward, earnestly well meaning, never-quite-getting-it-right, bumbling parts deep within us all. The parts of us that metaphorically walk confidently across the meticulously clean floor we just spent hours scrubbing, and yet somehow manage to slip on that one, fatefully slick banana peel we somehow managed to miss…
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Online Psychotherapy and Therapeutic Coaching
$140 session fee
Insurance: out-of-network
Schedule directly through online scheduler.
If you’re unable to find an available time that works for you, please reach out to daniel@intrepidtherapy.com
