Rik Isensee, LCSW
Rik Isensee is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker License # LCS 10773 who has worked in a variety of mental health clinics and settings since the 1970s. He has specialized in working with gay men, and also enjoys working with a variety of issues and populations: both women and men, of various cultural backgrounds and sexual orientations.
Education
Rik has a Master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Hawaii, 1979. His B.A. is from the University of California, Santa Cruz. The creative process is an ongoing interest, which led Rik to get a second Master’s degree (in Creative Writing) from San Francisco State.
Office in San Francisco: in the midst of the Castro!
Rik practices psychotherapy in a brightly-lit and comfortable office on Castro St., conveniently located just a block from the Castro muni station at Market and Castro.
Mental Health Clinics
Rik has worked in a number of mental health settings, including his internship at Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu, where he worked in the outpatient mental health clinic; Homebuilders, in Seattle, a family preservation project; the Richmond Maxi-Center, in San Francisco, where he started a support group for glbtq youth, and worked with families in a multi-cultural clinic; the Center for Special Problems, where he developed the group program for male survivors of childhood abuse; and Psychological Services at City College of San Francisco.
Rik served as Clinical Supervisor for the Shanti Project during the early years of the AIDS epidemic.
Training and Professional Influences
Rik’s approach to therapy has been influenced by training and practice in both cognitive and psychodynamic approaches, Gestalt, psychosynthesis, emotional intelligence, and the positive psychology movement.
Rik has studied a form of psychotherapy called Hakomi, which is a mindfulness-based approach to somatic therapy. He has assisted in the Professional Skills Training for psychotherapists with the San Francisco Hakomi Institute. This approach encourages a physical, emotional, and cognitive awareness of core beliefs, and how we organize our experience.
He has also studied with Jon Eisman, one of the Hakomi trainers, whose approach to “Re-Creation of the Self” enables us to shift from negative patterns to our own inner resources. Rik also assisted Jon with his RCS training the following year.
Rik received coaching training from the GROW Training Institute, as well as Mentor Coach, both of which specialize in coaching skills for licensed psychotherapists.
Mindfulness Practice
Rik was introduced to mindfulness in 1974, during the first summer of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Joseph Goldstein and Jack Kornfield had recently returned from Thailand, and were offering instruction in Vipassana, a form of insight meditation. Rik joined a small seminar with Joseph for the summer. He has attended a number of mindfulness retreats at Spirit Rock, Mt. Madonna, Tassajara, and elsewhere.
He has also studied a Tibetan approach to mindfulness called Mahamudra, which integrates calm abiding with a deeper insight into the nature of self and reality.
Over the years, Rik has been integrating mindfulness into his psychotherapy practice, and wrote a book called Shift Your Mood (for a general audience), which shows how to release emotional tension, and shift to the source of your own love and inner wisdom. Mindfulness does not require any specific beliefs–people of any spiritual background (or none at all) are welcome! Anyone can benefit from the present-moment awareness developed through mindfulness.
Mindfulness not only enables us to be more present, it’s also becoming increasingly clear from various studies that moment-to-moment awareness can relieve stress, calm anxiety, and increase emotional well-being.
Click on Contact if you’d like to make an appointment. You can also reach Rik directly during regular (Pacific time) business hours by calling (415) 821-7665.
