Faculty Spotlight: Professor Jennifer Dorsey

Professor Jennifer Dorsey, a Part-Time Core Faculty member in the Wright Institute’s Counseling Psychology program, was born and raised in a small town in Oregon, where she lived with her parents and younger brother. “My brother and I were very tight,” she recalled. “We grew up camping in the woods and playing outside.” Professor Dorsey was also a voracious reader and remembers spending a lot of her free time with a book.

For her undergraduate studies, Professor Dorsey attended Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California. “As a first generation college graduate, I’m very proud of the effort and sacrifice it took for my family to send me to college,” she explained. Professor Dorsey graduated in 1994 with a BS in commerce and began a career in advertising at a legendary SF agency.

While working in advertising, Professor Dorsey learned about the intricacies of capitalism, consumerism, and navigating power dynamics. “I met a lot of friends - it was very social,” she recalled, “but it was also extremely gendered, sexist, urgent, and misaligned with my personal values.” Despite the mismatch, Professor Dorsey acquired valuable skills from her time in advertising - such as how to think proactively, problem solve, and manage and inspire a team. “I learned how to envision, plan, execute, improve, set goals, and receive feedback,” she shared. “These lessons are all very transferable skills for engaging in assessment, treatment planning, and the arc of therapy.”

Increasingly drawn to the field of community mental health, Professor Dorsey began volunteering with a sexual assault prevention center and crisis hotline in Santa Clara, assisted with eating disorder support groups at UCSF, and was a counselor at The TALK Line in San Francisco. At The TALK Line, she built ongoing counseling relationships with caregivers in need of parenting support. “The goal of the program was child abuse prevention, starting with supporting vulnerable and under-resourced caregivers,” she explained. “It was strengths based, systemically integrative, and a great strategy. I loved working there.” During her four years of weekly volunteering at The TALK Line, it was clear to Professor Dorsey that advertising wasn’t going to be a lifelong career for her.

In 2001, Professor Dorsey moved to New York City, fulfilling a childhood dream of hers. While there, Professor Dorsey started a family and for a short time she chose to focus on the career and privilege of being a stay-at-home caregiver. She became an active member of her communities as the family moved from New York to Philadelphia, then back to the Bay Area.

After returning to the Bay Area, Professor Dorsey became deeply involved in a local school district. “I was a member of the district planning committee tasked with curating the social-emotional learning for a brand new elementary school,” she explained. “Over three years we explored visionary approaches to education, innovative learning environments, community building, and facilities design - everything was examined. Then we built this amazing school from the ground up.” The experience was inspirational and gave Professor Dorsey a perspective that would become foundational to her future clinical work with children and families, as well as her approach to teaching.

In the fall of 2015, Professor Dorsey enrolled in the Wright Institute’s Counseling Psychology program. “The time was right to build this career in psychology that I had always wanted to have,” she reflected. “I knew that a master’s degree and a license in counseling psychotherapy was exactly what I needed.” Professor Dorsey was drawn to the Wright Institute because of their vision statement of educating clinicians to society. “I had an amazing interview and the faculty member who interviewed me became my mentor,” she shared. “I have benefitted greatly from the power of mentorship and strive to pass it on.”

Professor Dorsey completed her practicum at Bay Area Community Resources and continued to work there for four years after graduating from the Wright Institute in 2017. “I loved working with children and families and was invested in the community, often seeing my clients in their home environments,” she reflected. “I endeavored to be close to the systems that impacted my clients, exploring the cultural and relational dynamics of the school community, and the much greater socio-political impact.”

In 2019, Professor Dorsey returned to the Wright Institute's Counseling Psychology program as an adjunct professor, and in 2021, she became a part-time member of the core faculty. “I joined a wonderful and gracious teaching team and learning to teach became a fun and rewarding experience,” she recalled. “I became passionate about how to grow in our offering of systems thinking and in seeking opportunities for the continuous improvement and reach of the Multicultural Awareness and Sensitivity curriculum beyond that course.” One of the reasons she chose to become a part of the core faculty was to further that work.

During her time as an instructor, Professor Dorsey has taught Child and Adolescent Counseling, Clinical Assessment and Measures, Common Therapeutic Factors, Diagnosis and Empirically Supported Treatments, Family Therapy I, Multicultural Awareness and Sensitivity, and Professional Development Seminar. She finds that Multicultural Awareness and Sensitivity and Family Therapy I are rewarding courses to teach because they invite students to learn through a deepening self awareness of the systems around them. “I never know what might come up in these courses and I learn a new way to teach them every year because the content is truly reliant on evoking my students’ own self-reflection,” she explained. “I find that to be really exciting and a big responsibility.” She also really enjoys teaching Child and Adolescent Counseling because of the primary roles of neurobiology and somatic expression in play therapy, and she enjoys offering play to her students.

In her private practice, Professor Dorsey supervises two AMFTs and works with children, teenagers, families, intimate partners, and individuals across the life span often experiencing anxiety, depression, relationship and family systems issues, eating disorders, identity, meaning making, and histories of trauma. In recent years, she opened a play therapy office and has increased the number of children she sees as clients. In her work, Professor Dorsey is systemic thinking, psychodynamic and attachment oriented, and incorporates her training in IFS, EFT, DBT, play therapy, restorative justice practices, and working with shame.

In her spare time, one new hobby she’s particularly enthusiastic about is learning to play the mandolin. “My paternal grandmother was a mandolin player in a band in the area where I grew up,” she shared, “and I have her mandolin.” Professor Dorsey loves spending time in nature, hiking, going to the beach, and spending time with her friends and two nearly adult children.