After growing up in the scenic Austrian lake area called Salzkammergut, I went to Vienna to study educational sciences. In the mid 1980s, I moved to California, where I attended a master's degree program in Marriage, Family, and Child Counseling at San Francisco State University, starting my journey as a psychotherapist. I gained further experience in short-term therapy and systemic family therapy with Paul Watzlawick at the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute and in hypnotherapy with Carol Erickson, director of the Erickson Institute at Berkeley. I also engaged in personal experience as a client with couple and family therapy, as my wife Claudia and I were seeking support while starting our patchwork family over 30 years ago.
We moved back to Austria in the 1990s, where I received my psychotherapy license in 1993. After our youngest daughter was born, I began my academic career at universities in Vienna. Over the years, I was also involved in various therapeutic and counseling activities. In 2002, I came across Imago therapy. My wife and I went to Imago Couples Therapy, participated in a two-year group for couples and attended many workshops before we both got trained as Imago therapists ourselves and started our own practice with a focus on working with couples and families. With further training in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, I expanded my approaches for supporting couples, methods I integrate in my therapeutic work today.
My increased interest in working with couples and engaging with the dynamics in relationships is fostered by my conviction and personal experience that couples therapy can make a significant difference in developing loving and nourishing interpersonal relationships. On a daily basis I experience that professional support helps clients resolve conflicts and promotes their personal growth.
For some time now, I have also supported generation pairs through facilitating emotionally engaged dialogues between a parent and her/hisadult daughter or son. Together with my wife Claudia I also offer Generation Dialogue® workshops in Vienna. And in recent years we held these workshops in Sweden, Slovenia, Croatia, California, Texas, New Jersey, and South Africa.
In our practice in Vienna we also offer the Love Makes Sense - Hold Me Tight® seminar for couples. I regard these seminars as great enrichment. They promote personal growth through encounter and foster connection and closeness.
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