Dr. Ron Alexander received his BA from the University of California, Riverside and his MA from California State University, San Bernardino. While his PhD was earned through the Department of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara in their Counseling Psychology program, he completed a clinical internship through the Ventura County Department of Mental Health.
A special interest in personality assessment led him to seek further training in the Exner Rorschach Scoring system. He also completed the three-year certificate program at the Gestalt Training Center of Santa Barbara and training in Hypnotherapy and Ericksonian Approaches to Psychotherapy at the Erickson Institute in Phoenix.
Dr. Alexander has worked in private practice as a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and licensed Psychologist, as well as a consultant and lecturer for nonprofit agencies and for-profit corporations. He has served as adjunct faculty in graduate psychology programs at Antioch University Santa Barbara, Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria and at UC Santa Barbara in addition to his position as staff psychologist at UCSB’s Counseling and Career Services (now Counseling and Psychological Services).
Special interests include research on and psychotherapy with LGBTQ individuals, persons with HIV/AIDS, and writers and other artists as well as issues of gender & gender roles, the integration of Gestalt psychotherapy with other practices, hypnotherapy, drug & alcohol dependence & addiction, hotline supervision & training, and poetry therapy,
Dr. Alexander has served as president of the board of directors of Pacific Pride Foundation and on the Santa Barbara County AIDS Task Force as Resource Allocation Committee Chair. He received the Humanitarian Award from the Greater Santa Barbara Community Association in 1990, a Certificate of Appreciation and Recognition for community work done on behalf of PWHIV/AIDS from Antioch University Santa Barbara in 1993, and the Drost/Chadbourne Award for 30 years of service to the PWHIV/AIDS and LGBTQ communities in 2014.
Finally, Dr. Alexander’s poetry has been published in various journals and anthologies. He has read widely and is founder and director of the occasional Whitman-Stein Poetry Fest / Poetry on a Slant, a celebration of LGBTQ poetry and poets. A short film inspired by his poem, “Zebra,” has been produced by filmmaker Paul Detwiler and is in distribution to LGBTQ and other film festivals as of February 2015.
