Matthew Sorg, LMHC

Who I am

I'm a gay therapist practicing in Seattle. The clinical work I do is trauma-focused — EMDR, Brainspotting, Flash Technique, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy — held inside an existential-phenomenological orientation.

What that means to my work is that I work slowly, I attend to what's actually showing up rather than to what should show up. I treat the techniques as the form a particular kind of attention takes rather than as the work itself. You can read more about my existential-phenomenological approach.

That gay-therapist part shapes my work in ways both obvious and subtle: how I understand shame, embodiment, the particular weight of performing normalcy, the long aftermath of living edited. It also means I've done my own excavation around identity, desire, and belonging. For queer clients especially, this matters. It also informs how I sit with anyone whose sense of self has required negotiation.

How I came to this work

I started at Reed College studying English literature and film. My senior thesis was on aesthetics, queer identity, and self-construction in Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine — circling questions about how identity forms under pressure, how performance and authenticity coexist, how people survive by becoming someone the world will accept. Those weren't yet clinical questions; they were the questions I happened to find interesting at twenty-one.

After Reed, I did an MLIS at the University of Washington and spent over a decade in information architecture and scholarly publishing — ProQuest and then Scribd, in roles that grew from metadata librarian to senior project manager. My work was designing systems to help researchers navigate overwhelming amounts of complex information: organizing chaos into something navigable, finding the structural pattern under what looks like noise, holding both granular detail and systemic context.

I didn't know it then, but a lot of that work transferred more directly than I'd have predicted. Tracking multiple layers of complexity at once, recognizing the structural pattern under what looks like noise, helping someone find the navigable path through a body of material that doesn't, at first, look like it has one — these aren't separable skills from what I do clinically. My thesis on identity-under-pressure has stayed close, too; the questions I was asking about Wilde and Brian Slade are not, at their root, different from the questions I'm asking with a client about how their sense of self formed under conditions that didn't have room for them.

Before I went back to school in psychology, I completed a BS in Psychology at Washington State University, graduating summa cum laude. The formal grounding in psychological science — research methods, neuroscience, developmental and abnormal psychology — sits underneath the phenomenological orientation that came later. I returned to graduate school for an MA in Existential-Phenomenological Psychology at Seattle University; that was where the philosophical and clinical registers I'd been working in separately finally converged.

During and after graduate school, I worked in community mental health — Valley Cities Behavioral Health, Crisis Connections — with adults navigating severe mental illness, complex trauma, addiction, housing instability, and the systemic conditions those things happen inside. That stretch of work keeps the private practice honest. It's harder to overinflate what therapy can do once you've sat with someone whose suffering has a structural cause that no amount of weekly sessions is going to resolve. I now also teach at Seattle University in the Psychology department — counseling theory, crisis intervention, and research writing.

Clients tend to describe my work, when they describe it, in terms more about pace and attention than about technique. Slow enough to actually feel what's happening, but not stalled. Substantive without being intense for the sake of intensity. The most common reaction I get from someone several months in is that they feel met — meaning, more specifically, that they feel like I'm actually tracking what's happening for them rather than running them through a treatment plan.

“An obstacle was there that changed the pattern of my actions and the manner of my life”— Constantine Cavafy, “Hidden Things”

Why "epoché"

In phenomenological philosophy, epoché (eh-poh-KAY) is the practice of suspending assumptions — setting aside what you think you know so you can see what's actually there. Husserl's term. The discipline at the root of the phenomenological tradition, and the discipline at the root of how I try to work.

What that looks like in the room is on the approach page.

Training & credentials

Core Credentials:

• Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC), Washington State
• EMDRIA Certified EMDR Therapist
• EMDRIA Consultant in Training (CIT)
• Fluence Certified Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy Therapist
• MA, Existential-Phenomenological Psychology, Seattle University
• BS, Psychology, Washington State University, summa cum laude
• MLIS, University of Washington
• BA, English, Reed College
• Teaching Faculty, Seattle University Psychology Department

Trauma Modalities:

• Ketamine Assisted EMDR Therapy: Enhancing Trauma Treatment with Low Dose Ketamine
• Brainspotting Phase 1 & 2
• Flash Technique 1 & 2
• Four Blinks

Psychedelic & Consciousness Work:

• Essentials of Psychedelic Therapy (Fluence)
• Journey Clinical Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy Training (didactic, therapeutic protocols, medical foundations, and experiential)
• EMBARK Psychedelic-assisted Therapy for Major Depression

Relational, Somatic & Contextual Approaches:

• Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Intensive (PESI, with Steven C. Hayes)
• EFCT Externship (ICEEFT)

Crisis Intervention:

• ASIST (Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training)

For more about my underlying orientation, see approach. For the same thing in a different register, apologia.