Paul DelGrosso, LICSW, LCSW-C
Director of Membership
A clinician who treats resilience as something to be cultivated, not assumed.
Paul DelGrosso has been practicing psychotherapy since 2006, after earning his MSW from the Catholic University of America’s National Catholic School of Social Service. The years since have been spent on the kind of intensive post-graduate training that some clinicians eye for a season and then quietly let go of. He kept going. Schema Therapy, attachment-based family therapy, family systems theory, and clinical hypnosis: each was pursued not as a credential to collect but as a different way of understanding how people actually change. The result is a practice that rests on depth and breadth rather than on any single theory of the person.
The clinical toolkit took years to build, and the layering is deliberate.
Paul is an Advanced Certified Schema Therapist, Supervisor, and Trainer, and a Certified Attachment-Based Family Therapist. Certification in clinical hypnosis is currently in progress. Four years of post-graduate study in family systems theory and psychotherapy at the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family round out a training history that translates into real flexibility in the room. Schema therapy, attachment-based work, systems thinking, and hypnosis each offer a different doorway into the same territory. With individuals, couples, and families, the choice of doorway depends on the person sitting across from him.
The clinical stance, underneath all of it, is collaborative.
Paul does not assume that one model can fit every person or every problem, which is the kind of position that takes years of practice to earn. Working with clients to discover what resonates, what feels safe, and what genuinely helps tends to produce more durable change than insisting on a single approach. The range of methods on offer is less a menu than a set of options held loosely, ready to be matched to the work in front of him.
Running through all of it is resilience, treated less as a trait and more as a process.
Resilience, in Paul’s clinical thinking, is not something a person either has or lacks. It develops across a lifespan and can be cultivated deliberately. None of us can rewrite our histories or the conditions we grew up in, but the meaning we give those experiences and the skills we build in response are open territory. A common discovery in the work is that people carry more resilience than they recognize, having minimized capacities they have been using all along. Naming those capacities and then strengthening them is part of what therapy makes possible.
Building resilience matters as much as processing the painful material.
Self-worth, confidence, and emotional flexibility get steady attention in the work, because facing a difficult life requires a sturdier internal base than most people start with. Whether the focus shifts toward developing the Healthy Adult mode in schema therapy, building ego-strength in clinical hypnosis, sharpening the ability to recognize mental states in self and others through mentalization-based work, or expanding a sense of agency and voice in attachment-based family therapy, the underlying direction is the same. Greater resilience. Greater self-acceptance. A life lived more in line with what the person actually values.