Dr. Gormally: Education, Professional Background and Experience

Currently, I have office hours 2 days a week and on the other 3 days, I work at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. I care for individual adults and couples in my practice, while my work at Walter Reed allows me to help soldiers who have been traumatized by the war. I also train our psychologists of the future at Walter Reed and at the University of Maryland.

After receiving a degree in math from Marist College, I taught math at the high school level. It was my informal counseling of my high school students that first interested me in a career as a professional psychologist.

I received my Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from Southern Illinois University in 1974. Counseling Psychology traces its roots to the post-WW II era, when the returning Vets needed job placement counseling. Since then, counseling psychologists have helped people make the kind of adjustments that most people face in the course of daily life. Besides techniques to help people make career transitions, we have also developed techniques to teach couples how to communicate their feelings effectively. A special attitude of counseling psychologists is a focus on the positive aspects of a person’s life and building on those strengths in counseling.

• Licensed and counseling individuals and couples since 1975.
• Board Certified in Counseling Psychology since 1996.
• Successfully completed a 2 year Post Doctoral Training Program for marital counseling.
• 21 publications; most of my studies were on communication training and the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral counseling.
• Instructor, Univ of Maryland, graduate Counseling Psychology Program.
• While on the faculty at the Univ of Maryland, I devised a psychological test that is widely used by researchers in the United States, Canada, South America and Europe.
• Special expertise in the use of psychological testing in a wide variety of settings including schools, inpatient hospitals, evaluating adults to be adoptive parents, screening candidates to be police officers, and fitness for duty evaluations.