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POSITION: Associate Professor of Counseling
DEPARTMENTS:
School of Social Sciences and Professions
Graduate Counseling
LOCATION: Main Campus, Harrisonburg | SB 027
PHONE: (540) 432-4324
EMAIL: greg.czyszczon@emu.edu
Gregory Czyszczon, Ph.D., LPC is a Licensed Professional Counselor, clinical supervisor, educator, and musician. He has been working with children, adolescents, individuals, couples, and families in the fields of education, social work, and counseling for over 30 years. In addition to his Ph.D., he holds Master’s degrees in Special Education and Community Counseling, and an Ed.S. degree in Community Counseling. Since 1995, he has held a postgraduate professional teaching license in Virginia with endorsements in History, Special Education (ED), and School Counseling.
Having worked in higher education since 2000, Dr. Czyszczon is an Assistant Professor of Counseling at Eastern Mennonite University. His main focus is both the technique and process of clinical mental health counseling. He also teaches Human Growth and Development, Internship, and Addictions. Through his courses, he blends experiential learning with here-and-now felt sense encounter to illuminate a lived and embodied experience of healing and change.
Dr. Czyszczon’s scholarly interests and pursuits are many. Specifically, he is interested in the many ways that parent/child attachment inform human experience throughout the lifespan. He is a phenomenologist at heart and values ways of knowing that privilege lived experience. He is the founder and director of the Restoring Connections Research and Practice Lab at Eastern Mennonite University, an initiative whose mission is to investigate, through a critical participatory action paradigm, how human beings form, maintain, and repair intimate human relationships using the framework of attachment theory in the Bowlby/Ainsworth tradition. At present, two projects are in motion including an investigation of the effectiveness of Transformative Couples Therapy® (TCT) and a grant-funded project called Conectere in partnership with the Seminary at Eastern Mennonite University and the Divinity School at Yale. Future directions include an initiative called Fostering Forever Families that will introduce the practice of alloparenting to meet the extraordinary needs of children in the child welfare system. Dr. Czyszczon is an active Executive Board member of the Global Association for Interpersonal Neurobiology Studies (GAINS) and is frequently in dialogue with leaders in the field of IPNB including Bonnie Badenoch, Dan Siegel, Iain McGilchrist, James Finley, and Rhonda V. Magee.
Clinically, Dr. Czyszczon specializes in working with people who have experienced trauma. For working with children, he is certified in the Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics metric from the Child Trauma Academy and has training in the SITCAP® model from the National Institute for Trauma and Loss in Children. Dr. Czyszczon is an experienced play therapist and has published in Guilford’s Play Therapy: A Comprehensive Guide to Theory and Practice. He has presented at the Mid-Atlantic Play Therapy Training Institute. He uses multiple modalities to engage children and adolescents in therapy including sandtray, art, music, and movement. With adults and couples at his private practice called Innerwork Counseling, Dr. Czyszczon specializes in Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) and is currently a Lead Experiential Assistant for the AEDP Institute and serves on the TeachAEDP committee. Dr. Czyszczon is also a co-principal investigator, with Dr. Anne Stewart, for the TCT research project as well as a seasoned practitioner of the TCT model.
In terms of supervision, Dr. Czyszczon is a lead clinical supervisor for the Secure Child Program which provides attachment-based, trauma-informed intervention for children and parents involved in the child welfare system. Dr. Czyszczon is the founder and Executive Director of the Harrisonburg Center for Relational Health, a counseling agency working from an interpersonal neurobiological and holistic perspective to offer low-cost counseling services in the local community. His agency has had partnerships with various local organizations to provide services in the local area that were either not present or in great demand. These have included partnering with Shenandoah Women’s Health to provide the only clinical mental health service specializing in Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders (PMADS) in the region and partnering with Strength in Peers to provide clinical oversight and clinical mental health services for two grant-funded programs addressing the needs of individuals struggling with substance use, homelessness, and a host of other risk factors.
Prior to the pandemic, Dr. Czyszczon had been part of an effort, in collaboration with representatives from the child welfare, mental health, education, and juvenile justice systems, to establish a local Trauma-Informed Community Network in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, Virginia. Dr. Czyszczon has published and presented in the areas of families in crisis, family play therapy, and the professionalization of in-home counseling. He is particularly interested in the integration of attachment, family therapy, and play therapy to build individual, family, and community resilience.
In his free time, Dr. Czyszczon plays the piano, guitar, and sings. Many years ago, he was part of a musical group called Sons of Icarus. He is in the process of recording a series of new songs having taken piano instruction from Dr. David Berry, Elmo Peeler, and Matt Rollings. He makes active use of music in his clinical work and finds the themes of musicality and the themes of healing to be powerfully integrated.
BA, James Madison University (History)
MED, James Madison University (Special Education)
MA, James Madison University (Community Counseling)
EDS, James Madison University (Community Counseling)
PHD, James Madison University (Counseling and Supervision)
