Troy DuFrene Ph.D.

Troy DuFrene, PhD, BCBA, is a licensed psychologist and board-certified behavior analyst affiliated with the Center for Compassion Focused Therapy in New York. He is licensed in California, Oregon, Washington, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Hawaii, and Illinois; registered for telemedicine in Florida; and holds interjurisdictional practice authority through PSYPACT. He offers individual, couple, and group psychotherapy to older adolescents and adults.

After studying philosophy at Reed College and, later, linguistics and English literature at San Francisco State University, Dr. DuFrene spent nearly two decades in the seafood and wine industries and in psychology-book publishing before training as a clinical psychologist himself. He completed his PhD in Clinical Psychology, with distinction, at the California School of Professional Psychology in San Francisco, an advanced graduate certificate in applied behavior analysis at California State University, San Marcos, and an APA-accredited doctoral internship at UC Santa Barbara.

Dr. DuFrene is co-author of nine books, including Mindfulness for Two and Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong (with Dr. Kelly Wilson), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Eating Disorders and Living with Your Body and Other Things You Hate (with Dr. Emily Sandoz). His clinical training spans ACT, compassion-focused therapy, relational Gestalt, EMDR, CBT, and Ericksonian strategic therapy; he is trained to Level 3 in the Gottman Method and certified by the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis. As a board-certified behavior analyst, he has extensive training working with neurodivergent populations. He is also a longtime practicing Buddhist, and his approach to human suffering draws directly on that practice.

Dr. DuFrene's areas of clinical focus include anxiety and obsessionality, including performance anxiety, public speaking fears, sleep disruption, and professional performance blocks; the psychology of high achievement, including the isolation and interpersonal friction that often accompany elite professional drive; intimate relationships, family dynamics, and conflict; and existential reflection, career inflection points, and habit modification.

What to Expect in Our Work Together

Reaching out to a therapist usually isn't a small decision. For a lot of the people I work with, it comes after years of being the one expected to have the answers — at work, at home, in their community — while quietly managing everything else alone in the meantime. That kind of competence has a cost: a specific, hard-to-name isolation. Doing well by any metric that matters, and still more alone with it than anyone around you would guess.

Wanting less anxiety, less conflict, less of whatever's in your way is entirely reasonable. But often it isn't the thing itself that's held you back — it's the energy spent trying to make it disappear, and the narrower, more solitary life that results.

My work draws on two things at once: acceptance and commitment therapy, which keeps the focus on values and forward motion rather than symptom-chasing, and relational Gestalt, which uses what's actually happening between us, in real time, as the clearest material we have. I don't offer passive reflection back at you. The work is active, direct, and occasionally uncomfortable — that's usually where real movement happens.

Compassion matters just as much to how I practice, though I think of it less as gentleness and more as a form of courage: intellectual honesty, and a willingness to sit with real suffering — yours and other people's — without flinching from it. A colleague I've long worked alongside calls this "fierce compassion," and it's a description I've come to think fits the work exactly.

If you think back to a period when you felt strong and capable, it probably wasn't free of problems either. What was different was that you were still moving toward what mattered, mistakes included, and you weren't doing it entirely alone. That's the target: not comfort for its own sake, but a life that's actually expanding, with room in it for someone else to know what's really going on with you.