Timothy Vojta, LPC

How I got here.

I became a therapist because I was frustrated with my own experience in therapy. Years of talk therapy and various types of interventions produced short-term results, but they didn’t last. I hoped to find a way to help those who had experienced the same. I also would come out of a typical cycle of therapy asking…now what? While not everyone who sees a therapist wants or needs guidance, there were clients like me who wanted to exit therapy with some structure, a framework for living with key things to keep my eye on so I stayed positively engaged with the world and healthy. I wanted something that I could keep in my back pocket to return to when I needed grounding, inspiration, and tools to help me chart a path forward no matter what obstacles I faced.

I left a 20-year business consulting career to become a therapist, determined to focus on interventions that produced measurable, durable results. Twenty years in business consulting taught me to think in systems and measure what matters. That orientation never left me and I found a way to integrate that into my practice.

I learned about, and eventually practiced Brainspotting first. It worked well for many clients. And at the same time I found it counterintuitive. I felt that while there was some benefit to revisiting the past and the trauma many of us have experienced, I did not see the value of wallowing in it and continue to have clients perseverate on every negative thing in their lives. There must be a path out of that and a way to provide forward progress and hope for people. I also kept encountering clients who struggled to meaningfully engage, not just with Brainspotting, but with traditional therapeutic approaches in general. They were stuck. And it was more than just behavioral choices. I kept thinking: there must be something missing for these clients, but what?

Then I got lucky. A colleague at a Brainspotting training introduced me to Neurofeedback, and everything clicked. Here was a way to work directly with the brain's electrical patterns (a client’s physiology) and a tool that could reach people who needed a different kind of intervention. Five plus years later, with more than 100 hours of training, it is my primary focus, combined with a deep dive on a client's lifestyle outside the office. An unfortunate gap in a counselor’s initial training is that there is not nearly enough emphasis on lifestyle: sleep, diet, movement practices (notice I didn’t say exercise), our social circles, our relationships, and our engagement with community. These are factors that are scientifically proven to be correlated with longer, more satisfying lives. While I am not a doctor, it is within my scope of practice to monitor these variables and ensure that clients are keeping an eye on them. Please expect me to get up in your business (nicely) about them. There is no amount of talk therapy, or Neurofeedback/Biofeedback for that matter, that will overcome a sleep disorder. I take seriously my responsibility to use your time and your treasure wisely. That’s why I adopted Photobiomodulation (PBM), which seems to be accelerating the postive impacts of Neurofeedback and Biofeedback.

The work I do often unlocks the door for many clients to return meaningfully to a talk therapist or some other helping professional, like a coach. Often the work we have done together, Neurofeedback/Biofeedback/Photobiomodulation, and some incremental lifestyle changes, is sufficient for clients to move on to better, more satsifying lives.

The Junction came out of my own experience. I am constantly scanning for best practices. Whether it be neuroscience, philosophy, I am interested in the science of how people actually change. That search led me from the psychology of useful and practical self-improvement (Mark Manson deserves credit here) to Ryan Holiday and the modern Stoic revival, and from there directly to the source: Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, Aristotle and others. A year of daily reading later, I was not only studying philosophy, I was living it. I searched for connective tissue between the wisdom of our ancestors and the tools provided by modern science. What struck me was how naturally it complemented my clinical work, and later my coaching and brain optimization focus. Neurofeedback provides the neurological scaffolding by regulating the brain's electrical patterns and clearing the interference that keeps people stuck. The wisdom of our ancestors provides a roadmap for how to live after we get unstuck. Science provides the tools and the means to travel that road.

When I'm not mapping brains, I'm training with macebells — I'm a certified mace instructor through the Dutch Flow Academy — clubs, and kettlebells, practicing rope flow, playing pickleball, drawing, studying the game of Go, and reading widely across fiction and non-fiction. I spend the rest of my time with my lovely wife and our two cats.