Colin Christman

Colin Christman is licensed in Connecticut as an LCSW (licensed clinical social worker), credential CT LCSW 58.013911. He completed undergraduate studies at Yale University in Political Science and Applied Mathematics and pursued graduate training at the University of Connecticut. Over five years of clinical work have focused largely on intensive care settings - primarily inpatient and residential programs - addressing severe behavioral health concerns.

His clinical experience includes treatment for substance use disorders, self-harm, suicidality, complex trauma, and eating disorders, as well as other behavioral health problems such as gambling disorder, sex addiction, compulsive dishonesty, and kleptomania.

Christman has substantial experience working with co-occurring trauma and behavioral health disorders alongside personality disorders and mood or anxiety disorders. Because many presentations are complex and involve family systems, he frequently engages partners, parents, children, and siblings as part of care.

He has training in Internal Family Systems (IFS) and trauma-specific interventions. His overall therapeutic orientation is psychodynamic, drawing on ideas associated with Alfred Adler and Eric Berne. At times sessions may include Emma, a certified emotional support dog.

Christman views many mental health problems as diseases of absence rather than diseases of presence. Using his analogy, influenza represents a condition created by a harmful presence, while scurvy results from a prolonged lack of vitamin C. In therapy he aims to identify what is missing in a person’s emotional nutrition - examples include safety, interpersonal connection, a sense of identity, community, purpose, capability, and structure - while recognizing there may also be biomedical factors.

The therapeutic work then explores why those psychological needs remain unmet and how unmet needs drive self-destructive or maladaptive patterns. He frames thoughts and feelings as mechanisms the brain uses to translate understanding into behavior, and uses them to uncover underlying beliefs that generate excessive negative emotion, insufficient positive emotion, or actions that conflict with a person’s values, goals, or wellbeing.

Initial questions in his work are straightforward: Who are you? What matters to you? What is wrong in your life and what would it mean for things to be right? Therapy, in his view, is a process of challenging and changing beliefs to move toward healthier relationships with others and, most importantly, with oneself.