Faculty Spotlight: Larry Miller
“In this profession, we’re forced to be humble,” shared Dr. Larry Miller, a 2001 graduate of the Wright Institute’s Clinical Psychology Program and current Half-Time Institute Faculty member. “We’re also forced to be flexible because we don’t know where the path is going to lead us.” Humility and flexibility are both qualities that Dr. Miller exudes, as a clinician and as a professor.
Dr. Miller was born and raised in Long Island, New York, the youngest child of Orthodox Jewish parents. Although his sister was only four years older, they weren’t close growing up and Dr. Miller often felt like an only child. In their family and religion, there was a huge emphasis placed on helping the less fortunate. “I remember one Rabbi said ‘he who saves one person saves the world’ and I loved that,” he recalled. Dr. Miller carried that message with him from an early age and it has informed his work throughout his career.
After graduating from high school in Brooklyn, Dr. Miller followed his older sister’s example and attended the State University of New York at Albany where he majored in psychology. “Unlike some of my current students, who knew they wanted to be psychologists from a very young age, I didn’t know if I wanted to be a psychology major,” he laughed. “I just knew that I didn't know much of anything and being a psychology major allowed me to take a lot of interesting classes.” The psychology program at SUNY Albany at the time was very research-based and Dr. Miller’s favorite professor was studying how chickens respond to trauma. He also enjoyed taking courses in political science, philosophy, and poetry and playing intramural sports. “I met people there who lived upstate and I started to follow the Grateful Dead and became kind of a hippie,” he reflected. “I loved living with friends and having a good time - we were pretty serious about learning, but we were also serious about having fun.” In 1987, Dr. Miller graduated from SUNY Albany with a BA in psychology.
Before beginning his career, Dr. Miller decided to spend a year or so traveling the world. He visited Spain and Portugal with a friend, then joined his girlfriend for a while in England and Ireland. Next, he connected with another friend who was studying in Japan. “He had lived there for 3 years, learning Japanese, studying poetry, and translating classic Japanese poems into English,” Dr. Miller explained. “He was living in Kyoto and I stayed with him for a month and got to see all these beautiful shrines and temples. It was just magnificent.” They explored Thailand together as well, then the money ran dry and it was time for Dr. Miller to return home. He moved back in with his parents and began work as a waiter and a short order cook, looking for his next opportunity.
Fortunately, many new opportunities were on the horizon for Dr. Miller. Not long after he’d moved back home, a friend called to say she was moving to Boston to work at the Erich Lindemann Mental Health Center and they had more positions available, so Dr. Miller left his parents’ home and moved to Boston. “I worked on an inpatient unit, which really was the start of my psych career, and it was such an overwhelming experience, both great and scary,” he admitted. “My job as a mental health worker was to connect with patients and help them feel like they had somebody to talk to if their therapist wasn’t available.” This was a teaching hospital connected to Brigham and Women's Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard, and Massachusetts General Hospital, so there were excellent professors and guest lecturers coming through to teach the psychiatric residents. Mental health workers, like Dr. Miller, were able to sit in on these lectures and his passion for the field began to grow.
After two years in Boston, Dr. Miller drove cross-country to California and settled in the Bay Area for what was supposed to be a one year trip. As often happens, he fell in love with California and has lived there ever since. Dr. Miller’s first job in San Francisco was at Westside Community Services, working in their Youth Awareness Center, primarily with young men who had been arrested for selling drugs. “I had no experience working with people who sold drugs and no experience with substance abuse, but we had a really great community of mentors and advocates,” he recalled. “I worked there for about a year and really learned about the struggle that young men in that part of San Francisco were having at the time.”
Dr. Miller’s next position was working as a milieu therapist at the Adolescent Day Treatment Center, an outpatient program in San Francisco for teenagers struggling with severe emotional disturbance. “It was one of those experiences that shifted my whole career because they had a psychoanalytic way of working with teens and their families,” he reflected. “I thought of psychoanalysis as, you know, people being on the couch, but this was a way of working with people and thinking about their unconscious conflicts and family dynamics.” When Dr. Miller told his supervisor that he wanted to learn more about psychoanalysis, he suggested San Francisco State University’s clinical psychology program.
From 1992-1994, Dr. Miller attended San Francisco State University, where he earned an MA in clinical psychology. He described the experience as “like night and day” compared to his undergraduate studies, noting that “when you’re interested in something, so many more things are interesting to you.” At the time, SFSU had small cohorts and a unique program setup that Dr. Miller found to be very beneficial. “They would divide the cohort into groups of 3-4 and each group would be sent to a site to do their clinical work alongside a professor from SFSU,” he explained. “You would have case conference and supervision on site, then go visit your clients.” For his placement, Dr. Miller got his third choice, which was working at an old age home. While he was initially reluctant, he found the work to be extremely rewarding and shared that it helped him to understand his own grandparents and older family members. The professor assigned to supervise Dr. Miller’s group was Dr. Harvey Peskin, who became his long-term mentor. “He was so helpful in developing my professional career, my ethics, and my way of teaching,” he shared. “Dr. Peskin was my first supervisor, my master's thesis reader, he was on my dissertation committee, and then, once I had my PhD, we taught together at the Wright Institute.”
In 1994, Dr. Miller enrolled in the clinical psychology program at the Wright Institute. “After two years at SFSU, I felt like I knew very little to help people and needed more training,” he reflected. Dr. Miller is now very grateful that he continued on to earn his PhD as it is crucial to much of the work he does today. He chose to attend the Wright Institute at the recommendation of his mentor and many of his supervisors. “When I had my interview, it just seemed like a program that cared about social justice, although I don't know if they called it that back then,” he explained. “And it was great that it was accredited, but I didn't even know what that meant.” Many things combined to bring Dr. Miller to the Wright Institute, but once he began his studies, he felt right at home.
During his time as a student at the Wright Institute, there were several professors who had an impact on Dr. Miller. The first was Dr. Terry Kupers, whose forensic and human rights work he admires greatly. Dr. Miller’s Case Conference leader, Dr. Jimmy Turner, was an excellent example of how to listen to clients in a respectful way and approach cases from a humanistic perspective. He enjoyed classes with Dr. Denise Scatena, who taught him about assessment in an accessible manner, and Dr. Brian Derrick, who brought the material to life in
Dr. Miller’s doctoral dissertation was titled “Impacts of treating torture survivors on psychotherapists' personal and professional lives.” This work was inspired by three people in his life. The first was Dr. Gerald Gray, a guest speaker at his internship site, St. Mary’s Hospital. Dr. Gray was running an organization called Survivors International, which provided psychotherapy to refugees and trauma survivors. The second was his wife, who had done human rights work in Guatemala and the final inspiration was his mentor, Dr. Harvey Peskin, who wrote about the impacts of the Holocaust on later generations. “I started to think, everybody's talking about secondary trauma and vicarious trauma, but nobody's really asked all of the these clinicians at Survivors International what the impact is on them of working with torture survivors from all over the world,” he recalled. “So rather than asking how they were vicariously traumatized, it was more like ‘What was it like to work with these people? What was the impact on your personal life and your professional life?’” Dr. Miller interviewed clinicians at Survivors International and a similar organization in Chicago called the Kovler Center. His main finding was that, when clinicians work together in the same building like at the Kovler Center, they are much more able to support one another than when working independently like the clinicians at Survivors International.
In 2001, Dr. Miller began a post-doctoral internship at Child Haven, Inc. in Fairfield, CA, providing psychotherapy to children, adolescents and adults. “In those days, there was no assistance at all to get a postdoc,” he recalled. “I had a very good friend who was working at Child Haven and introduced me to their director, Gail Shea-Everage.” Thankfully, they were able to bring him on, and the following year, he began working as a Staff Psychologist there. In those first couple of years at Child Haven, Dr. Miller worked mostly with young boys and girls, doing family reunification work. However, after two years of carrying a full caseload, Dr. Miller decided he wanted to make a change in his role to allow more time for his private practice.
After graduating with his doctorate in 2001, Dr. Miller opened his own private practice in Berkeley, working with all ages. His areas of specialty are trauma, depression, anxiety, medical disabilities, grief, and personality disturbances, all drawn from his practicum experiences during his graduate studies. Working in private practice can be very challenging and Dr. Miller offers two main pieces of advice. “Get on as many insurance networks as you possibly can because a lot of people are in need and the amount insurance is reimbursing isn’t bad,” he explained. “The other thing I would say is to find an area that you really love, that you're willing to write and make presentations about, and get to be known in that area.” Above all else, Dr. Miller says it’s important to stay connected with your professors and colleagues because you’ll need them for consultation and they will be the source of many of your referrals.
Dr. Miller was the Post-Doctoral/Practicum Training Director at Child Haven, Inc. from 2003-2022, developing their program from the ground up. “The students learned a lot about doing child work with mostly traumatized children,” he explained. “I think they really got a lot out of working with the clients, their families, and the other staff.” The entire process was very rewarding for Dr. Miller and he was clearly very good at his job - many students asked to come back for a second or even third year. Dr. Miller clearly thrived in this role, but the Covid-19 pandemic turned everything upside down at Child Haven. “We couldn't see the kids and the families face to face and a lot of the families did not want to meet on Zoom because they did not want us to see their houses,” he shared. “All of the sudden, we made a lot less money, so that was a big hit.” As a result, they unfortunately had to end their training program.
From 2002 to present, Dr. Miller has worked/volunteered for several organizations that support refugees: Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants (CERI), Refugee Treatment Group, and Survivors International. “Growing up, I was really exposed to refugee experiences because many of my families were refugees and I have family that died in the Holocaust in Poland,” he recalled. “So there was this idea that you could either circle the wagons or you could acknowledge that people have gone through terrible things and they need help.” Dr. Miller is happy to spend some time giving back to the community. “I was given so much free time by supervisors in clinics and people have been so generous,” he reflected. “So I think giving back to those who can’t afford it is my small way of trying to make the world a slightly safer place.”
Since 2008, Dr. Miller has served as an expert witness and child abuse mitigation expert. His entry into this field was happenstance, the result of a friendship he formed with another dad at his children’s preschool. This new friend worked on appeals for death penalty cases and asked Dr. Miller to come to his place of work and give a presentation about attachment in children. After seizing that opportunity, Dr. Miller was hired to assist them on a case. “They had a client on death row who committed heinous crimes, which they thought were the result of what happened to him as a child, but he wouldn’t talk about it,” he recalled. “I was hired to try to get him to talk about it and to write a report about his childhood traumas and how those traumas impacted his development.” This was the beginning of his career in forensic psychology and he has since become an expert in the field.
Dr. Miller returned to the Wright Institute as an adjunct faculty member to teach a few courses in the 2000s and 2010s. Two of those courses, “Treatment of the Survivors of Torture and Trauma” and “Disorders of Dehumanization” were taught alongside his mentor and colleague, Dr. Harvey Peskin. In 2022, when Dr. Miller left Child Haven, he was interested in continuing his teaching career. Thankfully, the Wright Institute had a position available and Dr. Miller applied. He has been a Half-Time Institute Faculty member since that time, teaching Case Conference, Supervision and Consultation, and Intervention: Psychodynamic Theory courses along with supervising dissertation research. “The great thing about teaching is that it pushes you to keep up with research and innovation in order for classes to be up to date,” he reflected. “The deeper impact is that the students challenge my thinking and so make me a better clinician and teacher.” He appreciates the fresh insights and new ways of thinking that his students bring to the table.
Looking back on his career thus far, Dr. Miller has had many impressive accomplishments. “I am most proud of having started a training program at Child Haven in Fairfield, focusing on child and family work with underserved communities,” he shared. “In the course of creating the program, me and the other supervisors had opportunities to teach future generations of psychologists from the schools in the Bay Area.” Dr. Miller also did very impressive work with Survivors International, establishing pro bono treatment programs with refugees. “I am also proud of aspects of my Forensic work where my contributions may have helped some people have their prison sentences reduced,” he reflected. “That means a lot to me.”
Outside of his work, Dr. Miller makes time to explore his personal interests and hobbies alongside his family and friends. He and his wife, Patty, enjoy traveling and exploring the outdoors. Dr. Miller loves cooking with his older daughter, Gigi, and playing guitar with his youngest daughter, Naomi. “I enjoy having large dinners with friends and starting my newest hobby of writing poetry,” he shared, although he was quick to add that his poetry is only for his family’s eyes at this point.
Dr. Miller had a few pieces of advice for current and prospective Wright Institute students. First, he urged them to get as many clinical experiences as possible, but not to burn themselves out. Second, he emphasized the importance of building connections in this field. “Get to know some professors because they will be your mentors and get involved at the Wright because it's going to be your community even after you leave,” he advised. “Be as engaged as you can, ask questions, and don’t accept things that don’t sound right.”