Michele Southworth, JD, LMFT

Michele Southworth, JD, LMFT
Director, Post Graduate Certificate Program

Michele Southworth is the Director of the Post-Graduate Certificate Program in Marriage and Family Therapy and is a senior clinical staff member. She has practiced as a marital and family therapist and an attorney for over 30 years. She attended the University of Pennsylvania College for Women for her undergraduate work and began her professional education at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, after which she practiced family law in Philadelphia for eight years.

Working with families in the legal system led to an interest in the then-emerging field of divorce mediation and then to the study of marriage and family therapy at Council for Relationships. She was certified as a marriage, family, and sex therapist by Council for Relationships in 1989. Since then, she has practiced in the dual fields of divorce mediation and marriage and family therapy. Ms. Southworth has been a senior clinical staff member at Council for Relationships since 1989. Her clinical practice includes working with issues of personal growth, gender-role conflicts, bereavement, depression/anxiety, and divorcing families in a variety of divorce-related modalities, including divorce mediation. She has also worked in several interdisciplinary settings with legal and/or financial professionals and has pioneered new, cooperative approaches to the dilemmas of divorce. This work involves the development of innovative models to support the successful adaptation of all family members as they move through the divorce transition and has contributed to such new modalities as Collaborative Family Law and Parent Coordination for high-conflict parents.