About Us

Jenafir House, LCSW is a therapist and skills trainer in DBT, ACT and other forms of evidence-based treatments. Jenafir is intensively trained in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), designed for the treatment of emotion dysregulation and related disorders including anxiety, depression and impulsive behaviors.

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Jenafir offers individual therapy, leads weekly group skills classes and advanced skill classes and participates on the East West weekly consultation team. She brings mindfulness, cultural humility, empathy and humor to all aspects of her work and is passionate about DBT and mindfulness and their ability to impact her life and the life of her clients.

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Working to bring a strong socio-cultural perspective to her therapy, Jenafir is informed by a previous career designing and implementing mental health programs in East Africa, India and Haiti, where she lived and worked for many years. Mindfulness and zen practice are also a significant part of her work, where she draws from many years of meditation and mindfulness practice with the San Francisco Zen Center community.

Joe is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) working with adults both individually and in groups as a co-facilitator of DBT skills classes. Joe is intensively trained in Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and prior to co-founding East-West DBT, he spent five years at the Oakland DBT & Mindfulness Center. Joe also works through the therapeutic lenses of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) with clients to treat anxiety, impulsive behaviors,  depression and other mood disorders.

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Joe was introduced to Dialectical Behavioral Therapy as a graduate student at the University of San Francisco (MA, 2015) where he researched and presented on the application of DBT. Having been a student of Eastern philosophy and a yoga enthusiast, the draw of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy was a natural one, but it was seeing the practical benefit of DBT in improving the quality of peoples’ lives, that sparked his immersion into the modality.

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Having also worked in the high-stress world of finance and banking (MBA, George Washington University, 1994), Joe is able to also draw on his twenty years of experience in order to help clients relate DBT skills to working life. A regular practitioner of mindfulness, Joe completed an eight-week mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program at UCSF’s Osher Center in San Francisco, and in 2014, finished his 200-hour Yoga Alliance Teacher Training program. Joe lives in San Francisco with his wife and three daughters.