Jason Holley, M.A., LPCC

AB, Princeton University, Transnational Cultural Studies

MA, Southwestern College, Counseling

Jason is a psychotherapist in private practice in Santa Fe. Prior to entering private practice, he served as a primary therapist at the Life Healing Center of Santa Fe, where he helped to found its internationally-recognized sexual addiction treatment programs for men and women. He has taught locally and nationally on topics including sexuality, trauma, addictions, astrology, mythology, and psychotherapy. His specialty areas include addictions, trauma, sexuality, bipolar and mood disorders, gay and lesbian concerns, men’s concerns, and personality disorders.

Jason has also been a practicing astrologer for over 25 years. He actively mentors and supervises therapists in making use of the lens of archetypal astrology in the context of therapeutic and healing work. He is a faculty member of the School of Evolutionary Astrology, and his work has been featured in numerous online and radio venues. His educating experience also includes several years spent designing and teaching transformational leadership education courses for leaders in clinical settings across North America.

Jason currently teaches Addiction Assessment and Treatment in the counseling program at Southwestern College. In the past, he has taught Psychology of Consciousness; Applied Theories of Human Development; Healing Sexual Trauma; and Working Creatively with Sex and Relationship Addictions. He served from 2009-2011 as faculty representative to the Board of Trustees at the College.

Jason’s website www.jasonholley.net includes free mp3’s and presentation documents from presentations and workshops over the years including talks at Southwestern College.

Teaching Philosophy

Psychotherapy (from the Greek psyche “soul” and therapia “healing”) is a vocation, in the old sense of that word: a calling. “In teaching my aim is to empower students who are called to this path to confidently respond. Since the healing mechanism of psychotherapy is relational, it is our very humanness that qualifies us for the work. So in my classes I seek to empower my students to explore their own humanness: their gifts, weaknesses, sorrows and joys, heroism, vanities, needs and longings, patterns, addictions, and their life stories. This rich tapestry of experience, which every person carries, can be explored caringly and searchingly, revealing resonances with the patterns in consciousness that we study, and ultimately making us better able to relate to others from a steady, humble, confident, and well-resourced place within ourselves.

At the same time, I seek to empower students in the art of psychological perception: tracking the movements of Soul, as best we are able. I try to understand the perceptual orientations of each student, whether somatic, emotional, verbal, kinesthetic, imagistic, intuitive, and to encourage them in deepening and refining those which are primary, and developing fluency in those which are less so. I expose students to multiple systems which can support and improve our ability to truly see multiple dimensions of those with whom we work – particularly the frameworks and metaphors I personally use most: archetype and myth, complexity science, personality theory, attachment theory, and clinical diagnosis. In addition, because the capacity to track and creatively participate in the relational field is so essential in long-term psychotherapy, my classes typically focus considerably on this through active processing and reflection on relational dynamics as they arise in the class setting, whatever the topical material. I actively invite students to seek to know one another and to be known in the classroom, and in so doing to identify and work through barriers in themselves and others which obstruct authentic connection, the basis of healing relationship.

This path of psychotherapy is rich with rewards and we are honored daily by those who share themselves with us. At the same time, our work brings very real challenges and limitations. We are sometimes faced with intensely difficult dilemmas and choices, and we meet repeatedly with the reality of our own limits, powerlessness, and unpreparedness. As in any long-term commitment to a spiritual discipline, forms of sacrifice are often required along the way; our lives take a shape that may not match that which we imagined at the outset. How could it be otherwise that transformational work would not transform those who practice it? And so I also seek to offer my students a sense of the realities of this path, to enable them to become resilient, very human practitioners of this very human healing discipline.”