Welcome to My Private Practice Website/Infomercial

Come on in.  If you are a former client, I hope you will say hello by e-mail.  I may be on sabbatical but I will continue to maintain this website and answer emails and my home telephone (although, depending on my travel, it may be weeks or months before I will get your message). If you would like a referral to another therapist, click here for the names of therapists that I have worked with for years. If you have questions about psychotherapy, try FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions). If you are curious about trends in Psychology since you took Psych 1, read Carol Tavris'  alarming and accurate article on the erosion of critical thinking among psychotherapists.  If you are looking for specific information on some aspect of psychology, try PsychLinks. If an interest in gerontology brought you to this website, try GeroNews and GeroLinks.   If you are wondering if you should use your managed health care plan to cover psychotherapy, check out (Managed Insurance for the short version) or click on the shark for a more thorough analysis of what's happened in health care. Finally, the Vaso-Vagal Online Discussion Forum has been visited so often that I had to add a Vaso-Vagal Forum Archive for previous years' visitor contributions. 

If you are actively looking for a therapist and that's what brought you to this page, then let me introduce myself: My name is John Herr and for the past twenty-nine years, I was a psychologist in private practice in the heart of the Silicon Valley.  Over that time, I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with hundreds of individuals, families and teen-agers.  Following in the best tradition of "those who can do, and those who can't teach,"  I published in the area of  family therapy and the psychology of aging, early in my career.  Being an international authority on something I wasn't very good at wasn't as rewarding as I had hoped; I ended up in therapy myself.  It was that positive experience which made me realize what had been left out of my writing.  Before I could set the professional world straight about what I had learned, working with my clients (and especially the clients themselves) became much more interesting for me.  In fact, it started to feel like I was learning more from my clients than they were from me.  About the same time, my clients began to report our sessions were getting much more useful.  I am happy to say it's been that way for some time and I hope it will remain that way when I return from sabbatical..