Clinical Consultation

For decades, Ms. Mencher has worked with clinicians spanning first-year graduate students to seasoned therapists in individual, group, and agency consultation. She establishes a relational climate of safety and trust, where clinicians and trainees can challenge themselves to go to their learning edge. As in therapy, as in teaching, as in life, Ms. Mencher brings her emphasis on relationships to her work.

Psychodynamic work requires the therapist to balance skills and knowledge with keen self-awareness and thoughtful use of self.  Ms. Mencher both models those qualities and elicits them in her clinical consultation clients.

She leverages her skills as a teacher and therapist, cultivating an ongoing commitment to learning throughout a clinician’s career.  Ms. Mencher helps therapists to place actual client experience and the specific therapist/client relationship in the foreground of clinical understandings, with theory providing some all-important backlighting.

Individual Consultation

Ms. Mencher meets individually with psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and other mental health clinicians, on both an ongoing and as-needed basis, to address general case consultation, as well as more specialized areas such as LGBT issues; race, ethnicity, and class; therapist use of self; eating disorders; girls and women’s development; and trauma.  Responding to the needs of clinicians across the country who lack expert consultation on LGBT issues, she also provides clinical supervision and consulting via video-conferencing and phone.

Group Consultation

Ms. Mencher leads clinical consultation groups, where colleagues learn from each other under the tutelage of a seasoned clinician. She provides case consultation and customized trainings for agencies and professional organizations, in both virtual and on-site settings.

Training Topics Include

• Incorporating Mutuality into the Therapeutic Relationship

• Relational Approaches to Clinical Supervision

• “GLBTQQFFPA”???? Working with Sexual Minority Clients in a Changing World

• Working with LGBTQ College Students

• Close Encounters of the Third (and Other) Gender Kind: Gender Diversity Issues for the General Psychotherapy Practitioner

• Working with Same-Sex Couples

• The Lesbian Family Lifecycle

• What Does Gender and Sexuality Mean for 21st Century Youth?

• Promoting Resilience in Gender-Nonconforming Youth and their Families

• Countertransference Discomfort in Working with Gender-Diverse Clients

• Working with the Lesbian/Transgender Couple

• Brief Intermittent Therapy with Survivors of Childhood Sexual Trauma

Courses Taught – Smith College School for Social Work

• Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Identities: Developmental and Treatment Considerations

• Advanced Treatment with Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer, and Transgender Clients

• Dynamic Processes and the Supervisory Relationship

Related Publications

Eldridge, N.S., Mencher, J., & Slater, S. (1997).  The conundrum of mutuality: A lesbian dialogue.  In Judith V. Jordan (Ed.), Women’s Growth in Diversity: More Writings from the Stone Center.  New York: Guilford, 107-137.

Mencher, J. (2015).  What I’ve Learned from Transgender Clients: Psychotherapy on the Gender Frontier.
http://www.salon.com/2015/05/03/what_ive_learned_from_my_trans_clients_psychotherapy_on_the_gender_frontier/

Mencher, J. (1997).  Intimacy in lesbian relationships: A critical reexamination of fusion.  In Judith V. Jordan (Ed.), Women’s Growth in Diversity: More Writings from the Stone Center.  New York, Guilford, 311-330.

Slater, S. & Mencher, J. (1991).  The lesbian family lifecycle: A contextual approach.  American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 61(3), 372-382.

Fleishman, J. and Mencher, J. (2019). Two middle-aged, white, Jewish, cisgender lesbians sitting around talking about trans sex. In G.J. Jacobson, J.C. Niemira, & K.J. Violeta (Eds.), Sex, Sexuality and Trans Identities. New York: Jessica Kingsley.