Aikin Associates

Why I am a Therapist

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in other people’s lives.

Biographies were my choice at the library always, and in whatever fiction was read to us my main interest was what happen to the people, imagining what they were going through and trying to understand their motivations.

I naturally became the friend that people came to when they wanted to talk. Growing up in LA. near Hollywood, many of my friends had bigger then life stories to tell but when I deliberately chose a rural town to go to college in I realized every one’s story was fascinating to me, not just the really dramatic or glamorous ones.

It was then that I knew psychology would be my chosen profession.

To make a living listening and trying to understand others was, for me, the most natural way to be in the world. And I have to say, over 40 years later, it still is. People ask, “don’t you get burned out listening so much to others? ”  I have to say, not yet, and I don’t see it coming.

Professional Bio

Nancy Tischler Aikin, PhD is a co-founder of Aikin Associates Seminars, and as such has been a trainer/practitioner for the last 3 decades.

Being an educator, community developer as well as a clinician has been her focus throughout her career. She is a practicing clinical psychologist in private practice seeing families, couples and individuals.

She provides EFT supervision to several individuals and is currently co-leading three on-going EFT consultation groups with her husband Paul. She has also been a consultant to the Davis Unified Schools and is currently hired by Sutter Medical Foundation as an outside expert to facilitate the hospitals’ physician wellness program.

Dr. Aikin earned her PhD in clinical psychology from the University of California, Davis in 1980 with a specialty in child treatment and worked with adolescents for many years as the clinical director of the teen services for Planned Parenthood of Sacramento. She has achieved the designations of Certified EFT Trainer, Supervisor and Therapist and has worked most closely with EFT trainers Rebecca Jorgensen, Alison Lee, Jim Furrow, Lisa Palmer-Olsen and Gail Palmer. Along with her husband, Paul, She is Co-Director of the Greater Sacramento-Davis Center for EFT. Her most recent project in collaboration with Sue Johnson, Gail Palmer, Jim Furrow and Paul Aikin is to expand the HMT program for couples to families.