Jared Elwart is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with experience in schools, residential programs, hospitals, emergency rooms, and private practice. Jared has worked with children, adolescents, young adults, and older adults, to learn about themselves and how they relate to their problems, their loved ones, and their world. He specializes in treating sexual dysfunctions, eating disorders, men’s issues, emerging adulthood, OCD, and psychosis, and has experience working with addiction, trauma, parenting challenges, depression, anxiety, and grief.
Oriented by psychoanalysis, Jared focuses on the impact of the past on the present by exploring patients’ unconscious through free association – speaking openly about whatever comes to mind, including dreams, recurring patterns, and memories. His technique creates a therapeutic space where patients can probe what is happening beneath the surface of their words, producing an effect where they begin to listen to themselves in a new way. Jared’s patients have found this approach particularly effective if short-term therapeutic methods have been insufficient for their needs. With children, he takes a similar approach that integrates play and creativity, providing other methods of expression for their problems or successes. With couples, he uses the Gottman method to frame his counseling, which emphasizes couples’ communication, history, and shared meaning to reestablish the fundamentals of relationships.
Jared holds a Bachelor of Psychology from Northern Illinois University, and a Master of Social Work from Aurora University. He is a member of the Lacanian Compass and the New Lacanian School. Jared is married and has two daughters. All three ladies are very active horseback riders, which he enjoys doing as well. At his house there are three dogs, a cat, a snake, and a horse! He loves reading, weightlifting, golfing, and playing guitar.
What people are saying about Jared:
“I saw Jared for therapy for almost six years, which was longer than I saw any other therapist, and I saw a lot. He helped me feel comfortable opening up about things I had never said before and turn them from something unbearable into something I could live with.”
Jared’s Recommended Readings:
A Practical Way to Feel Better – Gerardo Arenas
“Guiding Principles for Any Psychoanalytic Act” – Éric Laurent
What May I Expect from Psychoanalysis? – Vicente Palomera
The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy – J.M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves – Stephen Grosz
The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living – Mari Ruti
“Remembering and Forgetting” – Russell Grigg
The Psychoanalysis of Children – Melanie Klein
Listening With the Third Ear – Theodor Reik
What is Madness? – Darian Leader
The Left Hand of Darkness – Ursula K Le Guin
