About Dorian Kondas, MA, PhD

Therapy Helped Me Find My Own Signposts Of Direction. I want to help you find yours.

I first sought therapy to understand my trauma, the conflicts in my family, and the experience of oppression on both an individual and collective level. Being in therapy helped me work through my own relationship attachment issues and understand how to repair the hurts and ruptures I’d experienced. This gave me the insight that I needed to become a therapist myself.

I came to love the deeply intimate work of sharing in another person’s soul-recovery. I found meaning in helping people unearth their life’s purpose. The great poet Alice Walker said that we have all been misguided and must find our own signposts of direction. As a therapist, it’s my goal to help clients find their own signposts of freedom, transformation, intimacy, and empowerment. My clients are my ultimate teachers—they’re the ones who challenge me to grow, expand my knowledge, and find joy in the midst of life’s storms. They are the reason I do what I do.

My Relational Approach To The Healing Process

I believe that we are hardwired to be relational from birth. Neuroscience confirms this. Relationships are the source of our psychological stability—just as they can cause trauma, anxiety, and sorrow, they can endow our lives with security, warmth, and joy. Healing, therefore, requires healthy relationships. A healthy relationship with me as your therapist can expand outward to heal ruptures with family, friends, intimate companions, and even the sacred or God.

In counseling sessions, I aim to provide an atmosphere of warmth, gentleness, genuineness, and deep listening. I will prioritize and respect your boundaries and your autonomy from me, since I want you to lead the way. Your values, your beliefs, and your choices will take precedence. You will challenge me to drop my agendas, look at my own biases, and meet you exactly as you are—not as I want you to be.

Additionally, I believe that therapy can be fun—it doesn’t have to be gravely serious all the time. I find that there is great power in humor, as it can provide a soothing balm in difficult times. It eases tensions, interrupts depressive thinking, and makes possible a larger perspective. In this way, my approach to the healing process is not overly focused on the negative. I want to bring lightness, joy, and serenity into my sessions, acknowledging the absurdities of life while finding pockets of happiness along the way.

I Specialize In Treating Trauma, Relationship Problems, And LGBTQ+ Issues

I know what it means to heal from trauma, recover from abuse, reckon with grief and loss, and face the disapproval of those around me. My therapeutic specialties reflect the issues I have lived through myself. Today, I specialize in treating trauma, grief, anxiety, relationship concerns, men’s issues, aging and mortality, and religious and cult abuse.

As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, I am also deeply passionate about working with other queer folx. I am heavily inspired by queer and civil rights leaders and anyone else fighting for positive change in the world. I believe that for therapy to be effective, it has to take systems of oppression and injustice into account.

I draw from a wide variety of trauma-informed approaches in my work. To help clients heal the wounded parts of themselves, I often use an approach called Internal Family Systems (IFS). And to help them reduce the emotional impact of trauma, I often utilize Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing (EMDR), in which I hold certification. No matter what approach I use, my mission is to promote positive change one person at a time in therapy. I believe that healing empowers by its very nature and leads others to initiate change in their own lives and relationships.

Who I Am Outside Of Therapy

Outside of my work, you can often find me spending time with family and friends, hiking, playing tennis, sitting on a meditation cushion, attending a book club, or watching cat videos on YouTube (I am tragically allergic to the very creatures I adore).

I have published in the field of queer psychological care. In 2008, I published a case study for The Gestalt Review called “Existential Explosion and Gestalt Therapy for Gay Male Survivors of Domestic Violence.” The article makes the case that releasing strong emotions in therapy doesn’t need to be re-traumatizing as long as the therapist stays in close emotional contact with the client.

I also published a chapter in the book A Mental Health and Counseling Handbook (with editors Joy Whitman and Cincy Boyd). The chapter, titled “The Aging Transgender Client: Mapping the Acceptance of Experience,” illustrates one approach to helping transgender individuals welcome distressing emotions for the purpose of healing in therapy.

By providing therapy with compassion and an inclusive, trauma-focused approach, I am confident that I can help you liberate yourself from the pain of the past and connect with a larger purpose. While I have not walked in your shoes, I believe we can use our shared experiences to join forces and initiate healing in your life.

Dorian Kondas is a licensed psychologist in Columbus, Ohio. He has a PhD in Counseling Psychology from Penn State, an MA in Transpersonal (Spiritually-Informed) Counseling Psychology from Naropa University, and a BA in Religious Studies from Indiana University. Dorian is fully EMDRIA certified in EMDR for the treatment of trauma, anxiety, and other mental health challenges. He is certified in Gestalt and Applied Existential Psychotherapy. Dorian has a strong background in group psychotherapy, working with university students, LGBTQ+ individuals and military veterans, religious and cult abuse survivors, spiritual emergencies and people struggling with chronic pain and illnesses such as HIV/AIDS.