Author Bio

Justin Hillman is a 4th  year doctoral student in Counseling Psychology at the University of Maryland College Park, working under the mentorship of Dennis M. Kivlighan, Jr. His research interests include psychotherapy process and outcome, with a focus on attachment processes and the therapeutic relationship. For his master’s thesis, he examined the relationship between the development of clients’ attachment to their therapist and treatment outcomes in psychodynamic psychotherapy. Additionally, he is interested in how therapists engage their clients in the here-and-now to facilitate interpersonal change with skills like immediacy. Justin has supported studies of deliberate practice for immediacy and is currently developing a measure to assess barriers to using immediacy. He is passionate about psychodynamic and interpersonal approaches to therapy, and currently conducts open-ended psychotherapy on externship at the Maryland Psychotherapy Clinic and Research Lab. As a graduate teaching assistant, he enjoys incorporating interpersonal approaches into his teaching style. He has served as primary instructor for undergraduate coursework on peer counseling skills and mental health advocacy, and as a lab instructor for graduate level helping skills training.