SPECIALTIES

Addiction, Couples/Marital Issues

Credentials

PhD

About F. Michler Bishop

I grew up in a suburb of New York City but moved into the city right after I graduated from Yale.  I absolutely love its diversity and intensity.   My adventures as a young man had a major role in making me who I am.  A job as a deckhand on the Mississippi River was the fulfillment of a dream to follow in Mark Twain’s footsteps.   I later worked as a roughneck on an oil rig in Montana and went to Chile on my own at 19, winding up in the iron mines in the northern desert.  So, although I teach at a university, I have not spent all my time in an ivory tower.

At 40, I knew I wanted to do something different and more engaging with my life, which meant finishing my PhD (at 42), passing the NYS psychology license, and then two years of post-doctoral training at the Albert Ellis Institute.  Ellis had rejected psychoanalysis and created a new form of therapy, focused more on how to help people change.  He called it Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), an integrative approach and the first truly cognitive-behavioral therapy.  CBT and REBT have become the most popular and effective forms of therapy today.  Working with Ellis, I learned quickly how to do a more effective form of therapy, and over 20 years had the good fortune to run many groups and workshops with him throughout the country and overseas. 

At the same time, I have taught college to a wonderfully diverse, enthusiastic and bright bunch of students at the State University of New York, College at Old Westbury.  The introduction of computers, lcd projectors, YouTube and online, hybrid courses have keep such a long, on-going career continuously novel, engaging and often fun.

Right after college, I married, too young, but full of enthusiasm and hope and dreams.  That was not sufficient, and divorce followed.  The children stayed with me.  After too long a time, I finally found a beautiful, life-long partner – and more children followed, with the typical stresses and strains that of families.  Although not an AA member, all of this has helped me (or perhaps I should say, forced me) to figure out what I can change and what I had better accept I cannot. 

I have been helped along the way by the fact that psychotherapy has changed.  Good, effective therapy now focuses on how people can change.  The old focus was on insight.  Sometimes it worked.  Often, it did not.   Over the past 25 years, I have studied and learned how to more efficiently help people change and how to help them accept aspects of their lives that they cannot change.  It has been and is a challenging, engaging, and enjoyable profession, and I am still learning.