* Note: Video is unavailable for this interview.
An Interview with Psychotherapist Jerome Veith
Jerome Veith, Ph.D. is a Senior Adjunct Professor of Philosophy and Psychology at Seattle University. He specializes in the process and healing from traumatic experiences and helping those struggling with issues of purpose, meaning, and personal identity.
Jennifer Smith: Thanks for joining us today for this installment of The Seattle Psychiatrist Interview Series! I'm Jennifer Smith, Research Director at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. We're a Seattle-based psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy practice specializing in anxiety disorders. I'd like to welcome with us today, psychotherapist Jerome Veith. In addition to his work as a therapist at our practice, Jerome also teaches at Seattle University. He designs interdisciplinary courses for students in Psychology, exploring the significance of trauma and what it means for us to process and heal from traumatic experiences. Jerome has also published numerous articles, a number of literary and philosophical translations, and a recent book focused on understanding our relationship to our past. Prior to his graduate studies in Psychology, Jerome earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy, making him an exceptionally good fit for clients struggling with issues of purpose, meaning, and personal identity.
To get started, can you tell us a little more about yourself?
Jerome Veith: I divide my work fairly evenly between teaching philosophy and psychology at Seattle University (where I’ve been working since 2012), and practicing therapy at Seattle Anxiety Specialists (where I’ve been since SAS’s inception in 2018). I really enjoy both of these lines of work - they complement each other superbly! Beyond work I read, cook, spend time with friends, listen to music, and occasionally try my hand at playing it. Since moving here over 20 years ago and falling in love with the Northwest, I’ve made a point to get to know the area more and more.
Jennifer Smith: What are your favorite parts of the Seattle area, or Washington as a whole?
Jerome Veith: In Seattle it depends on the weather, and if I’m wanting bustle or seclusion (or a mix of both). I gravitate toward places with character, atmosphere, trees, or a view: parks, pubs, lookouts, and bookstores. Further afield, the Peninsula exerts a particular pull on me (I look for the mountains every morning), and I try to make it to a little island in the San Juans at least once a year.
Jennifer Smith: What is it that got you interested in becoming a therapist?
Jerome Veith: A half-joking answer would be: drugs! Perhaps like many a teenager who dabbled in psychedelics, I fancied myself an oh-so-wise shaman-apprentice, ready to guide others through their ego-death. Luckily that hubris wore off fast. Psychedelics did spark an abiding interest in the depth and breadth of the mind, though, and that’s been a thread of my studies ever since.
A more serious response is that, while majoring in philosophy and psychology at Seattle University, I learned not only that entire therapeutic movements had been influenced by existentialism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics - which by then I considered my intellectual homes - but also that SU has a graduate program dedicated entirely to training those kinds of therapists. The folks in and around that program seemed to have a distinct way of listening to experience: a way of being inquisitive together, of allowing more to be questionable and meaningful than we commonly permit ourselves, and of noticing the interpretive moves we’re always making. That attitude (or mode, practice - whatever you wish to call it) resonated powerfully with me, and pointed toward my eventual therapeutic path. First, I went off to get a PhD in philosophy, though.
When that (seven-year!) process atrophied something in me and I desperately needed therapy myself, I experienced firsthand how illuminating and revitalizing it is to be heard in therapeutic relation. That’s when I knew this was work I wanted to do, and I enrolled in SU’s therapy program.
Jennifer Smith: You were born in the US but raised in Germany, and you lived there until you came to the US for undergrad. Your schooling before the US was entirely German, while your home life was American. Has this informed your thinking or your practice at all?
Jerome Veith: It has influenced so much! My upbringing shaped my identity profoundly - along with my eventual interest in identity itself, and certainly my way of holding identity in therapy.
Growing up in Germany at the end of the Cold War, adjacent to a US military supercomplex and near the French border, surrounded by facets of history both buried and bare, greatly shaped my attunement to all sorts of cultural edges. I became aware very early on how much is at stake in having and expressing an identity, yet for all sorts of reasons I couldn’t easily inhabit just one - but laying claim to many was also challenging. That suspension between cultures eventually became a quite generative space: one where identity is resonant but never fixed, and one that invites free exploration.
That isn’t to say that finding this space was easy or comfortable. It takes an ongoing effort to maintain. For this reason, I resonate in my work with folks who experience cultural othering or inhabit several cultural positions. They might struggle with all sorts of outsider-ness, as this can be a blessing and a curse. One sees differently from the margins, but this isn’t always a welcome or comfortable perspective. One might not be seen at all or as one intends. There is also an immense pain in exclusion that can open onto deep uncertainty about one’s permission to be, and about one’s and aspirations and possibilities of experiencing home, community, or belonging.
Jennifer Smith: What areas or disorders do you specialize in?
Jerome Veith: This is difficult to label on a diagnostic level, because the DSM’s taxonomy is so problematic and fails to capture so many of the nuances of human experience. I tend to be a good fit for clients whose anxiety, trauma, stuckness, or lostness resonates with questions of identity, self-worth, or wider meaning. Another way to put this is that I work with clients who struggle to integrate with some aspect of themselves, of the world, or even with the world as such.
Jennifer Smith: Can you talk a little about your treatment approach?
Jerome Veith: I mentioned before that I tend to work well with clients who experience deep questions underneath their presenting symptoms. However, it’s not always clear from the outset whether or how these questions are present. Discovering that, and allowing one’s questions to find articulation, is part of the work of therapy. Without talking through what’s happening, it might seem like one simply can’t manage the stresses of daily life; one might simply feel lost, stuck, or out of balance. Sometimes it only becomes clear belatedly that one needs new language or a different framing of the issue. Sometimes that reframing is the entire work of therapy; sometimes that’s just where the exciting work begins.
That said, much of my approach is a shared noticing of what’s going on - on affective, embodied, cognitive, and relational levels - both from within the client’s experience, but also from the stance of someone alongside that. Being accompanied in this noticing can be immensely helpful. It’s not that I necessarily have a better perspective, but I do sometimes have a different one; and often that’s sufficient space for new interpretation.
Jennifer Smith: As a professor of philosophy, do you find that being a therapist helps you in the classroom - and conversely, does being a professor help you in any way as a therapist?
Jerome Veith: Yes and yes! I have a sense that years of university teaching - and doing so in a spontaneously responsive sort of way - prepared me both for the unpredictable conversations one has in therapy, and for the mode of listening that these require. Sitting with confusing texts and ideas, often for immense spans of time, turned out to be great preparation for the attentive mode in which I accompany my clients.
My therapy work has, in turn, deeply informed my teaching. In working through real and deep issues with people, I’ve come to recognize layers of human experience that are rarely captured in academic writing. I try to point my pedagogy toward these lived textures, either by way of more experiential media (film, literature, poetry, music) or by bringing in direct case material.
Jennifer Smith: Do you have any words of advice or anything else that you would like to share?
Jerome Veith: Nothing has been more impactful for my sanity than receiving, internalizing, and continuing to give myself “permission” - whatever this might mean in a given context. For me, it’s often permission to pause, play, or ponder without needing an outcome. In a culture that seems to demand perfection from us at all turns, this can be a liberating practice.
* For those interested in working with Jerome, click on our appointment page to see his current availability.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.