Radiant Psychological Services is the solo practice of Jared A. Ramos, Psy.D. Trauma therapy, depth therapy, and independent forensic evaluation, in Richmond, Virginia.
I keep the caseload deliberately small so the work can go deep. There is no intake team, no algorithm matching you to somebody, and no being passed along. The psychologist you meet is the psychologist you keep.
Sessions run in person in Richmond or by secure video anywhere in Virginia. The right format is the one you will still be showing up to in three months.
No intake team, no handoffs, and no repeating your history to a new face every few months. The person who takes your first message is the person who does the work.
It is the most common reason people give for not starting trauma treatment. It has also been studied directly, more than once.
Prolonged Exposure has a reputation for being brutal. What the research describes is something more deliberate, and more collaborative, than the reputation suggests.
Avoidance feels like the thing keeping you safe. In post-traumatic stress it is usually the thing keeping the problem alive.
CPT is one of the most studied treatments for PTSD. Here is what the twelve sessions actually consist of, and what the trials found.
Trauma exposure is common. PTSD is not. Understanding the gap between those two facts changes what you conclude about yourself.
Harm that happened once is treated differently from harm that happened for years, inside the relationships that were supposed to keep you safe.
The traditional advice was to get sober first and deal with the trauma later. The trial evidence does not support the sequence.
A treatment that works for as long as you are in it is not much of a treatment. Here is what the follow-up data show.
People do sometimes report that something valuable came out of the worst thing that happened to them. That is not the same as the thing having …
Me. This is a solo practice. The person who answers your first message is the person you work with in every session after that. You will not be assigned to somebody else, and you will not have to tell your story twice.
Two broad kinds. Structured, evidence based trauma treatment, principally Cognitive Processing Therapy and Prolonged Exposure. And insight-oriented psychodynamic therapy for longer standing patterns that have not shifted with anything else. Which one we use depends on what you want to be different, and we decide that together rather than my applying one method to everybody.
A psychiatrist is a medical doctor and can prescribe medication. I am a clinical psychologist, so I do not prescribe. I work through psychotherapy and psychological assessment, and where medication is part of the picture I will coordinate with whoever is prescribing it.
Read the page on what therapy is actually like before you book. It is written so you can rule yourself in or out on your own terms, rather than discover four sessions in that this is not what you wanted.
Yes, and the two are kept strictly separate. A forensic evaluation is not treatment and the person being evaluated is not my patient. I will not act as both your therapist and your evaluator, because doing so compromises both roles.
