David Hafter MA, MFT (California)

David Hafter Quick Facts

Main Areas: men's issues (especially young men and adolescents), family therapy, substance abuse
Career Focus: Author, speaker/trainer, clinician, clinical supervisor, songwriter/performer

David N Hafter is a licensed marriage and family therapist in Davis, CA. 

 

Moving to first person writing now...

 

My career as a clinician has always focused on adolescents/young adults and their families.  Family therapy is my preferred medium for helping to foster change in the lives of adolescents; I also work with them one on one.  My clinical career began with an internship at a Veterans Administration In-patient setting, a county run out-patient clinic and a junior high school.

 

I moved on to specialize in family therapy and during my years in private practice, made it a rule to only accept teens as clients if their families agreed to family therapy, as well.  I moved from private practice to "a job" in the field after the birth of my son, Noah, now 15. I wanted a regular schedule to enjoy being a dad and after our ears of frustration trying to conceive, I was going to make the best of what became my one chance to do so.  Jobs took me North Idaho where worked with some of the richest kids in America in a mountain facility.  I also worked just outside Los Angeles -- in the San Fernando Valley -- during the height of the gang years with some of the poorest and most dangerous kids in America.

 

I found that despite the differences in opportunities available to the two groups, there were many commonalities these kids shared: a need to feel safe, noticed, appreciated, loved mentored and challenged.  All kids must learn how to figure out who to trust and how to persevere through adversity.

 

My frustration at noticing how many boys are growing up without mature male role models in their lives (let alone active fathers) led me to pen Growing Balls: Personal Power for Young Men. Freed for a time from my therapist role, I relished the role of mentor as I wrote on subjects facing young men growing up today.  The "balls" metaphor is for courage and integrity and serves as a grabber of a title to get the attnetion of young men who,admittedly, don't exactly exactly hang out in the self-help section of the bookstore.  However, their single mothers do and that is the route that often gets my book into the hands of a young man.

 

Essentially, I aim to get guys to stop and think before they act, especially when it comes to premature marriage and especially fatherhood. Many therapists have written books about young men; my book is written to them. 

 

Please visit www.growingballs.com to have a look at the book.  There is a snippet from each chapter as well as a link to a YouTube song video I did to accompany the book.  That alone is worth the trip...

 

I now run a program that provides mental health services to families in the San Joaquin Valley in California.  I have taken the major concepts opf the book and created a group therapy curriculum that is user-friendly and helps teenaged boys to talk about their struggles in areas like peer relations and pressures, drugs, violence, relationships with girls/women, self-respect and makng sense of their families.

 

I am also a Subject Matter Expert for the California Board of Behavioral Sciences and specialize in men's issues, child and adolescent treatment, family treatment, substance abuse treatment and (the psychological aspec) of fertility issues.

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