Meet Dennard McInnis, LCSW-S.

My style is active, curious, and direct. I don't think therapy should be an hour of explaining your life while I occasionally nod and ask how something made you feel.

We'll pay attention to what's actually happening in your life and what you do when it happens. I'll ask questions, tell you what I'm noticing, and challenge you when I think something doesn't add up.

People rarely change because someone explains their problem more clearly. They change when they do something different and reality gives them new evidence.

Sometimes that means understanding something differently. Sometimes it means doing something differently and seeing what happens.

I have 20+ years in human services and behavioral health, including 16+ years of clinical practice. My work has taken me through juvenile justice, substance use treatment, psychiatric and emergency mental health, hospital social work, clinical supervision, behavioral health quality assurance and utilization management, and private practice.

Working across those settings gave me experience not only providing treatment, but evaluating clinical care and helping other professionals develop their work. It also taught me to stay calm when things aren't calm, distinguish observation from interpretation, and recognize that understanding a problem isn't the same thing as being able to change it.

I earned a Master of Arts in Criminal Justice from the University of Louisiana at Monroe in 2006 and a Master of Science in Social Work from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010. I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker Supervisor and Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor. My additional clinical training includes EMDR and Dialectical Behavior Therapy.

I started working in juvenile corrections before I became a therapist. That work forced me to question how quickly we decide that we understand another person, and how easily an explanation can feel complete before it actually is. I became interested in what changes when you look more closely at what happened, the circumstances around it, and what the person was responding to. Just as important, I learned to change my own explanation when the facts no longer supported it.

That way of thinking followed me into clinical work. Over the years, I kept seeing people who could understand themselves remarkably well and still find themselves doing the same things. I became increasingly interested in what sits between insight and actual change: what a person expects, what feels dangerous, how they learned to protect themselves, what that protection is doing for them, and what would have to happen for those expectations to genuinely update. The McInnis Method grew out of years of trying to understand that gap.