ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thad Harshbarger

I have devoted my working life to two related professions: teaching and psychotherapy – beginning with teaching. After getting my degree, I served on the education faculty at New York University and then the psychology faculty at The City College. 

My specialties at that time were statistics, testing, and research design. I quickly became a local statistics guru, mainly because most other faculty didn’t want to teach those courses, and most students didn’t want to take them. However, a main reason for student reluctance was that the theory and formulas that they were taught had no relation to anything else they were supposed to learn. From their perspective, the course was about memorization without a purpose. I re-designed it to be about problem solving, focused on problems in psychological research. That was at least more meaningful. And I wrote a text, Introductory Statistics: A Decision Map, designed to help them solve research problems. The book was organized using flow charts that helped students find the path to solve any problem that they might encounter in the course. 

While I was at The City College, I began postgraduate training as a psychotherapist, and in 1979 I left the college for a private psychotherapy practice. I have remained in practice since then, working with individuals and couples, as well as supervising other therapists. 

Over the years, I have taught a variety of subjects – computer programming, research in social work, working with stained glass, and Kenpo karate. For several years, I put my two professions together by serving as a lecturer, supervisor and training analyst in the Long Island Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy and the Suffolk Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. 

Psychotherapy and teaching both involve sharing knowledge, perspectives, and ways of doing things to help people find effective paths to their goals. And there is overlap: psychotherapy can involve a certain amount of teaching, and teaching can benefit from psychological awareness of students. 

Once again, I am combining psychotherapy with teaching, to help you identify and treat your difficulties in sleeping and find your own path to better sleep. Once again, I am using flow charts to organize the material, to make your path more efficient. Once again the details can’t be predicted: you must make your own diagnosis and adapt the teaching to solving your own insomnia problem. 

I hope you find it helpful. Please send me your reactions and suggestions in the blog section of this site.

Thad Harshbarger, Ph.D.