Dr. Hersh is a licensed clinical psychologist and holds a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a diplomate of Comprehensive Energy Psychology, certified through the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology. Dr. Hersh is also a certified master therapist in Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) through the Rosenzweig Center for Rapid Recovery. He is certified mindfulness meditation teacher through the Mindfulness Institute for Emerging Adults and has been a consultant instructor with the Center for Wellness and Health Promotion at Harvard University since 2012. In keeping with his mind-body integrative approach, Dr. Hersh is also certified as a YogaBody® Breathwork coach.

Prior to opening his private practice in 2012, Dr. Hersh completed two specialized post-doctoral training experiences through Children’s Hospital Boston/Harvard Medical School and Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. He completed his clinical internship in Psychology at Children’s Hospital Boston/Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Hersh maintains several areas of expertise and approaches to therapy to suit the needs of the individual seeking services. Dr. Hersh has been trained in cognitive-behavioral therapy, mindfulness-based therapies, Energy Psychology, hypnotherapy, and Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART, a trauma processing approach). He has special interests in integrating positive psychology and self-compassion oriented approaches into his work with clients.

Dr. Hersh trained with many different populations within graduate school and then further specialized in helping those with anxiety-based challenges. This includes individuals suffering from diagnosed disorders such as Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Panic Disorder and/or Agoraphobia,  and Social Phobia. However, as life is more complex than single diagnoses or disorders, Dr. Hersh flexibly works with clients as they may need help for a variety of difficulties and may have many different goals to work toward.

As Dr. Hersh has witnessed many common themes and patterns in his work with his clients over the years, using a mind-body integrative approach to stress and anxiety made more and more sense. Our bodies cannot be ignored in the experience of stress, anxiety, and even worry. Our bodies are intimately connected to the way our brain processes information, the way our mind interprets and expresses this information, and the way our awareness observes it all happening inside and outside of ourselves.

In fact, there are more internal highways of communication from body to brain-mind than the other way around. We must therefore “mind the body” as we observe the embodied mind. One simple but powerful question we can ask ourselves with curiosity is: “What am I actually experiencing right now?”, as we add color and dimension to how we are sensing any given moment.

Dr. Hersh has trained for 25 years in a personal practice of mindfulness meditation (in the Vipassana, or “insight meditation” tradition). Dr. Hersh has participated in mindfulness-based education through the Duke Center for Integrative Medicine as well as the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center, attending classes and retreats, participating in workshops, and engaging in ongoing dialogue with mindfulness practitioners and researchers alike.

This training helps to inform Dr. Hersh’s experiential and research-based knowledge about how to assist others in incorporating such mindfulness- and acceptance-based practices into their own lives. Dr. Hersh has been facilitating mindfulness and meditation groups to local institutions like Harvard University (Center for Wellness and Health Promotion; Kennedy School Public Leadership program) to help enhance participants’ self-care, stress management, and mindful leadership, to name a few.

Dr. Hersh has been involved in a number of research endeavors that revolve around themes of how emotions are socialized in children, adolescents’ tendency to use substances to cope with difficult emotion, and therapeutic interventions that integrate cognitive-behavioral with mindfulness- and acceptance-based approaches for youth and adults. While at Children’s Hospital Boston, Dr. Hersh helped to develop a mindfulness-based parenting skills intervention for parents of children with behavior problems.

He was also a past contributor to Phase2Parenting, an online resource for parents of children approaching and moving through their teen years. More recently, Dr. Hersh has co-authored articles on ethics, self-care, and well-being for psychologists, an area of interest that is now supported by his online resource and book, The Thriving Therapist. Dr. Hersh now gives webinars, workshops, and in-services on the topics of burnout prevention, sustainable self-care, and well-being for fellow mental health practitioners.

Awards

Dr. Hersh was the 2023 recipient of the Mid-Career Practitioner Award from the Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, a division of the American Psychological Association.