Evening Virtual Intensive Outpatient Programming: North Carolina

Lead Psychotherapist

Michele Finkelstein, MSW, LCSW, C-DBT

Michele has a range of experience working with individuals struggling with depression, anxiety substance use disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bipolar disorder, and co-occurring disorders. Michele is formally trained and certified in dialectical behavioral therapy (C-DBT) and utilizes a trauma-informed lens to deliver multiple modalities including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), and narrative therapy throughout treatment. She has a background facilitating a variety of groups including DBT, Seeking Safety, music therapy, and Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT). Michele has been instrumental in the development of clinical programming for the Triad location and the North Carolina Virtual Intensive Outpatient Program (VIOP).

Michele strives to create a collaborative and safe space that is guided by client voice and self-determination. Michele also sees adults in private practice out of her office in Asheville, North Carolina. Prior to her clinical work, Michele had over ten years of experience working for social justice and grassroots initiatives. She received her master’s degree in Social Work from Seattle University and has an undergraduate degree in Peace & Conflict Studies.

Adjunctive Therapist

Amos Fisher, MT-BC

After an adventurous New York City career in all kinds of music and healing arts, Amos Fisher returns to his native North Carolina with music psychotherapy training from the seminal humanistic program at NYU Steinhardt.  His style is informed by the evidence-based Nordoff-Robbins improvisational approach, noted in the 1950s for its efficacy with nonverbal, multiply handicapped children; also by such composers as John Cage, Pauline Oliveros and R. Murray Schafer. He is currently launching a private practice in Winston-Salem called Empathetic Resonance Music Therapy, driven by his own foundational theory The Philosophy of Listening.

Under the tutelage of such pioneer music therapists as Alan Turry, Diane Austin, Ken Aigen, and Barbara Hesser, as well as Gestalt Therapy Institute president Frank Bosco, Amos learned to harness his deeply cultivated musicianship, sense of spiritual health, and interpersonal empathy toward reflecting clients’ own musical being back to them, nurturing a new dimension of self-awareness and confidence in life and self (Psychospiritual Maturation, Kass, 2015).  His clinical experience includes preschool-aged children with hearing impairment and speech delays, acute inpatient adult psychiatry, and adults and children with developmental disabilities, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and traumatic brain injury (TBI).  From nonverbal to intellectually verbose, Amos’s clients learn to listen to themselves and engage with their world in a new way, in a process ultimately transcendent of words.

Amos believes that music adds dimensionality to therapy, sinking deeper than words or concepts alone. He’s excited to offer this as part of the program at Pasadena Villa, at a time when we’re all fatigued with isolation from the pandemic. His mission is to create group cohesion in a clinical setting which can grow into genuine community in the world, fostering mass mental health from where it starts—in the individual’s listening.