About me

Jay Reid, M.S., LPCC

I work with adult scapegoat survivors of narcissistic parents to recover the quality of life they've always deserved.

Jay headshot

My own story

At first, I didn't know I was the scapegoat.

Recovery couldn't be done alone. It took a relationship where my voice was welcome, and I found that relationship in therapy.

Growing up, I had no idea that I was the scapegoat in my family. I knew that I was yelled at and made to feel incompetent regularly. But, I always concluded that it was only because I was so bad, inconsiderate, or thoughtless. If I wasn't these things, so I thought, then my parent would not be so critical of me.

It wasn't until I was in graduate school for clinical psychology that I realized most kids aren't treated this way by their parents. I only learned this because a therapist I was working with made this clear to me. It was liberating to know that a lot of the reason why life felt so hard was due to how I was treated rather than who I was at my core.

But it wasn't enough to change the internal beliefs I'd had to adopt just to get by, which told me, "In order to live safely, I needed to diminish myself and always put others first."

At the time, success meant living dangerously, so succeeding in graduate school felt too dangerous. I left graduate school and worked as a data scientist for 10 years.

In the meantime I got into a long-term form of psychotherapy called psychoanalysis that provided me the new, real relational experience I needed to know that it was now safe to live from different assumptions.

In 2014, I decided to come back to the field I had always loved the most - clinical psychology. Since then, I've had the privilege of working with hundreds of other scapegoat survivors and have been able to use my own experience in recovering from this type of abusive childhood to help my clients feel understood, validated, and accompanied as they work to reclaim the strength in themselves that they have had to deny so often.

Background

Education, publications, and teaching

Education

Current San Francisco Center for PsychoanalysisAnalyst in training
2004 Pennsylvania State UniversityM.S. Clinical Psychology
1999 University of PennsylvaniaB.A. Psychology, Magna Cum Laude

Books on Amazon

Journal articles

2023 Features of Pathogenic Beliefs in the Context of Childhood Maltreatment: Implications for Therapeutic Empathy Reid, J., & Kealy, D. Smith College Studies in Social Work. Read the full text (PDF) →
2023 Identifying patient verbal coaching in psychotherapy Bugas, J., McCollum, J., Kealy, D., Silberschatz, G., Curtis, J. T., & Reid, J. Counselling and Psychotherapy Research, 23(1), 247–257.
2022 Understanding and Working with the Effects of Parental Pathological Projective Identification Reid, J., & Kealy, D. Smith College Studies in Social Work, 1–18. Read the full text (PDF) →

Teaching and presentations

March 2020 Corrective emotional experiences in therapy for survivors of childhood narcissistic abuse San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group Annual Conference.
October – December 2019 Control-Mastery Theory for Beginning Clinicians: From Conceptualization to Intervention Course was taught to Doctoral Students in Adult Psychotherapy Training Psychology Internship Program in the Department of Psychiatry at California Pacific Medical Center.
June 2017 Differentiating Protection vs Autonomy tests in Control Mastery Theory Taught to Doctoral Students in the San Francisco Psychotherapy Research Group Internship Program.

Want to see if we're a good fit?

Book a free 15-minute phone consultation.

Jay is a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC).