The Alamo Psychotherapy and Training

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The Alamo Psychotherapy and Training Bringing back talk therapy
Keeping Eagle Rock & Highland Park weird
➰

Our team of warm and experienced therapists provide psychotherapy services for children, adolescents, adults, families, and couples looking to strengthen their relationships and lead fulfilling lives. Michelle Harwell founded the practice in 2011 to support families in the process of adoption through counseling, trainings, and consultation services. Since then, the practice has grown to serve wide range of clients seeking growth and restored relationships. Located in Eagle Rock neighborhood, we serve the residents in Northeast LA, Pasadena, and surrounding neighborhoods.

Satisfaction is no more the solution to frustration than certainty is the solution to skepticism.” ―Adam PhillipsAdam Ph...
08/14/2026

Satisfaction is no more the solution to frustration than certainty is the solution to skepticism.”
―Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips has built an entire career on the suspicion that we already know more than we let ourselves feel, and considerably less than we like to pretend. For four decades he has been writing essays that behave like our patients: elliptical, self-interrupting, prone to saying the truest thing moments before changing the subject. To read him closely is to be quietly rearranged. Certainties loosen. The tidy interpretation begins to feel a little embarrassed of itself. Gradually it becomes clear that Phillips is doing to his reader what a good analyst does in the consulting room: withholding the neat conclusion, tolerating the drift, trusting that something more useful than certainty will arrive. Read this way, he is not just a stylist. He is tutoring us toward an analytic posture.

Phillips writes the way he wants his reader to listen; reading him becomes a rehearsal in staying with something before explaining it away. For the developing analyst, this is the real curriculum. This five week course moves chronologically, watching an aphoristic young writer apprenticed to Khan and Winnicott grow into a critic willing to say in public what psychoanalysis has mostly preferred to whisper: that frustration is not a design flaw, that giving up can be a species of courage, and that sanity, properly examined, is the stranger of our two conditions.

Bring your own resistance. He will have theories about it.

This is a hybrid class, offered simultaneously in-person and online via Zoom. Readings will be provided by instructor prior to the start of the course.

Shrinks & Drinks is back this fall, and this time with CE credits!The best conversations in psychoanalysis happen in int...
07/23/2026

Shrinks & Drinks is back this fall, and this time with CE credits!

The best conversations in psychoanalysis happen in intimate rooms, between people willing to sit with uncertainty and say what they almost didn’t. That’s the whole idea behind this series: Friday evening talks where analysts open up their clinical minds and make room for the kind of dialogue that rarely happens.

This fall’s lineup:
🍸 Aug 28: Darren Haber, “Nothing but Footnotes: The Language of Obsessive Eroticism”
🍸 Sept 25: Wendy Bauer, “The Allure of Sharing Suffering: Emotional Resonance in the Face of Trauma”
🍸 Nov 6: Jimmy Fisher, details to come

Fridays, 4:30 to 6:30pm at The Alamo, Highland Park.
$15 general / $40 with 1 CE credit. Both include beverages and snacks.
Come as you are, wherever you are in your training. We provide the shrinks and the drinks. You bring the appetizing case material.
Registration link in bio.

This three-part seminar explores substance use disorders through a sustained psychoanalytic lens, drawing from classical...
05/29/2026

This three-part seminar explores substance use disorders through a sustained psychoanalytic lens, drawing from classical and contemporary theory to deepen both conceptual understanding and clinical responsiveness. Rather than treating addiction as a symptom alone, the course examines what psychoanalytic thinking uniquely illuminates: the relational, developmental, and unconscious dimensions of compulsive use, and what these reveal about the inner life of the patient sitting across from us.

Equal attention is given to the theoretical and the clinical. Participants will leave with a more nuanced framework for understanding substance use presentations and greater confidence in bringing analytic sensibility to this often challenging work.

Sunday, June 7, 202610:00–12:00pm PSTLocationOnline Course. Drawing from Lacan and Freud’s teach...
04/08/2026

Sunday, June 7, 2026
10:00–12:00pm PST

Location
Online Course.

Drawing from Lacan and Freud’s teaching, this course will explore the concepts of transference and countertransference. We will put emphasis on how Lacan extended transference beyond an emotional projection of the patient’s internal world and described the symbolic phenomenon and attribution of knowledge. We will discuss how the mobilization of the patient’s unconscious desire is a necessary “lure” that allows for the analysis of their subjective reality. We will also explore how countertransference is considered to be the projection of the analyst’s own prejudices, passions, and obstacles and it should not be used as an interpretative tool.

This course offers an introduction or refresher on Lacanian concepts for clinicians at all levels of training. Reading material will be shared with registrants before the course to deepen discussion.

Bibliography:

Fink, B. (1997) A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lacan, Jacques. ( 2017). Transference. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Oxford, England: Polity Press.

We parent from somewhere. And until we know where, our children often carry what we haven’t yet faced.This is a familiar...
03/18/2026

We parent from somewhere. And until we know where, our children often carry what we haven’t yet faced.

This is a familiar idea in theory and a surprisingly difficult one to work with in practice. Parent work is where many of us feel least sure of ourselves: uncertain how to engage what a parent brings without either managing it or getting lost in it, unsure how to be useful without becoming directive, and quietly aware that what the parent stirs in us is itself clinical information we don’t always know how to use. Many of us were trained to work with the child. The parent, their history, their blind spots, and their grief is often where our confidence runs out.

This workshop is for those clinicians.

Join psychoanalyst and educator Eileen Paris, Ph.D. for a full-day experiential workshop exploring the relational foundations of parenting and what gets in the way. Drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic theory, somatic awareness, and decades of clinical experience, Dr. Paris guides clinicians through the dynamics that most profoundly organize the parent-child relationship: intergenerational transmission, projective identification, somatic enactment, and the unconscious ways a parent’s own developmental history shapes what they perceive in their child...and what they cannot yet see.

At the heart of this work is a problem clinicians encounter constantly but don’t always have language for: a parent who cannot quite see their child. Not because they don’t love them, but because their own history is in the way; filtering their child’s behavior through the lens of their own unresolved experience, and making it genuinely difficult to distinguish what the child needs from what the parent fears, expects, or cannot bear. Learning to recognize this dynamic and to open a genuine reflective dialogue with parents about it is among the most transformative skills a child clinician can develop.

We’re back baby! Shrinks & Drinks is back. 🥂Three evenings. Three analysts. Three conversations worth having.Mar 13 — Ho...
03/05/2026

We’re back baby! Shrinks & Drinks is back. 🥂

Three evenings. Three analysts. Three conversations worth having.

Mar 13 — Holly Han on what substance use knows before language does
Mar 27 — Gabrielle Taylor on mortality, aliveness, and what we carry into the room
Apr 17 — Tiffaney Hale on gender, sexuality, and holding space for what resists resolution

Come as you are, wherever you are in your training. Tickets $15. All March 13th proceeds benefit The Malama Collective.
Fridays, 4:30–6:30pm @ The Alamo, Highland Park 🔗 Link in bio

Worlds are colliding!George Costanza’s panic echoed through that iconic Seinfeld episode—his carefully compartmentalized...
11/07/2025

Worlds are colliding!

George Costanza’s panic echoed through that iconic Seinfeld episode—his carefully compartmentalized life threatening to implode. Keep Relationship George separate from Independent George. Never let the worlds touch. Sound familiar?

How often we therapists do the same; keeping body-based, bottom-up approaches in one corner and relational psychoanalytic work in another. But what if, unlike George, we embraced the collision?

Join Jessica Richards and Michelle Harwell as they demonstrate why these seemingly disparate approaches should not just coexist—they need each other. Framed by a case presentation, Richards will respond through the lens of the NeuroRelational Framework (NRF), and Harwell through a relational psychoanalytic lens. We will see how the NRF accesses the nervous system’s wisdom through sensation, movement, and implicit memory while the psychoanalytic illuminate meaning-making, attachment patterns, and the co-created therapeutic relationship. Both will reveal how a dysregulated nervous system can’t access insight, and how insight without embodiment remains an abstract concept.

Watch as Richards tracks the nervous system’s underground rivers while Harwell illuminates the relational currents flowing between therapist and client. A body that feels safe enough to settle can finally access the insights waiting beneath, and psychoanalytic depth without somatic grounding leaves clients stranded in their heads. Together, we will see how these approaches don’t just complement the other, they complete each other.

Rather than keeping these worlds apart, Richards and Harwell will show how integration results in a more powerful and holistic therapeutic approach, enriching your practice and the healing of your patients and clients.

Link in bio

We are excited to announce our community summer series! In June, July, and August and September we will be hosting four ...
06/12/2025

We are excited to announce our community summer series! In June, July, and August and September we will be hosting four psychoanalysts who will offer a themed case consultation. We will provide the shrinks and the drinks, you bring the appetizing case material!

Friday, June 13th: Consulting Psychoanalyst Dr. Michelle Harwell will offer case consultation on contemporary relational approach to frame and boundary issues.

Friday, July 11th: Consulting Psychoanalyst Dr. Lilly Gallay will offer case consultation on parallel regression.

Friday, August 8th: Consulting Psychoanalyst Dr. Justin Shubert will offer case consultation on repetition compulsion.

Friday, September 12th: Consulting Psychoanalyst Dr. Aimee Martinez wii offer case consultation on the search for self within relational dynamics marked by asymmetry and longing.

For more info or to register, check out the link in our bio!

Join us for this immersive, in-person seminar where Dr. Philip A. Ringstrom, Ph.D., Psy.D., will guide clinicians throug...
04/18/2025

Join us for this immersive, in-person seminar where Dr. Philip A. Ringstrom, Ph.D., Psy.D., will guide clinicians through his innovative 6-step approach to relational psychoanalytic work with couples. This all-day intensive workshop combines theoretical foundations with practical applications, case presentations, and collaborative discussion.

Whether you’re an experienced therapist or newer to the field, this seminar offers valuable insights into the complex dimensions of couples counseling through a relational psychoanalytic lens. Dr. Ringstrom will explore essential themes including:

Self-actualization within intimate relationships
The dynamics of mutual recognition
Understanding “the relationship having a mind of its own”
Throughout the day, we’ll examine each of the six interlocking steps of Dr. Ringstrom’s technique and develop a deeper understanding of both symmetrical and asymmetrical approaches to couples work. You’ll leave with fresh perspectives on the transferences at play in couples therapy and renewed curiosity and engagement with your couples clients.

Dr. Ringstrom’s approach fills an important gap in contemporary psychoanalysis by offering a comprehensively relational framework for psychoanalytically oriented couples treatment. His model integrates ideas from numerous relational psychoanalytic thinkers while also drawing from other psychoanalytic traditions and social sciences.

The workshop will explore how developmental histories, gender, culture, and dissociated self-states impact couples dynamics, and provide practical strategies for facilitating self-actualization, mutual recognition, and relationship renegotiation. Dr. Ringstrom will illustrate his approach with rich case material drawn from over thirty years of clinical practice.

Join us for an intimate and meaningful dialogue about navigating our roles as practicing clinicians while we, too, carry...
01/15/2025

Join us for an intimate and meaningful dialogue about navigating our roles as practicing clinicians while we, too, carry the weight of collective trauma from the Los Angeles fires. This free community conversation will create space for clinicians to explore how we maintain our therapeutic presence while processing our own grief and anxiety, recognizing that our therapeutic encounters are inevitably shaped by this shared moment of community crisis.
Facilitated by Dr. Michelle Harwell in conversation with Dr. George Bermudez, who will share from his lived experience of losing his home to the fires, and Dr. Peter Maduro, whose voice as a fellow Angeleno clinician will help us navigate this tender terrain. This discussion aims to address the complex dynamics of being both a healing presence for others while acknowledging our own vulnerabilities and losses, how our own raw edges and vulnerabilities meet our patients’ suffering, and how these shared experiences of loss reshape the therapeutic relationship in profound and meaningful ways.
Our conversation will explore the parallel process of how our own grief lives alongside our commitment to our patients, and how finding refuge in our professional community becomes essential when collective trauma touches us all. We’ll reflect together on those moments when our own emotional world meets our clinical work - when shared suffering opens new depths in the therapeutic relationship, and when we struggle to hold the delicate balance between being both container and contained. Rather than a didactic presentation, this will be an opportunity for authentic dialogue and shared experience, grounding ourselves in the understanding that healing happens within and through relationships.

Link in bio!

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Los Angeles, CA
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