About the Private Practice

Brighton Psychological Services, PLLC was founded in 2020 by Dr. Douglas Raynor, a clinical psychologist who has been licensed by the State of New York to practice since 2006. With over 24 years of training and clinical practice, his specialties include the delivery of psychotherapy, psychological assessment, performance/life coaching, and consultation to individuals throughout the lifespan, including children, adolescents, and adults. Over the course of his graduate education and professional career, he has provided psychological services in private practice, as well as hospitals, clinics, rehabilitative health care facilities, universities, and businesses.

As a doctoral level practitioner, Dr. Raynor has advanced training and experience in both Clinical Psychology and Health Psychology. He offers services for a wide spectrum of mind-body challenges that adolescents and adults often face, including mental disorders, physical illnesses, and barriers to peak performance and self-actualization.

The rapport and alliance between you and your psychologist is the strongest predictor of symptom improvement and personal growth. Trust, empathy, and insight are key ingredients for maximizing this collaboration. When you feel this way, you will be more optimistic about the psychotherapy or coaching process and each session will be more likely to help you to achieve your goals.

Dr. Raynor’s approach to assessment, psychotherapy, and coaching emphasizes developing a strong, collaborative relationship while integrating specific evidence-based psychological skills that will help you achieve your goals relating to mental health, physical health, and overall functioning. He is highly open, accepting, and supportive of the wide range of individual differences among humans, such as ethnicity, age, disability, gender, sex, religiosity, political beliefs, and the myriad of other differences that exists in our diverse culture.

Dr. Raynor is a strong proponent of the biopsychosocial model of physical and mental health.  As such, he recognizes the inherent connections between the mind and body, working with clients on all aspects of their emotional, cognitive, social, and physiological well-being.

In short, Dr. Raynor and you will collaborate to gain insight into your life and help you to develop skills pursuant to achieving your individual mental and physical goals and maintaining optimal functioning.

Initiating psychotherapy is a potentially profound step in your personal growth and transformation. It takes courage to acknowledge that you have acute or chronic psychological challenges that are highly distressing or significantly interfering with your relationships, work, or daily life. It takes even more motivation to embark on the process of change, which often involves becoming more self-aware, developing new ways of thinking or coping with negative emotions, or establishing new or better relationships. 

At Brighton Psychological Services, PLLC, Dr. Raynor provides psychological assessment and psychotherapy to adolescents and adults.  He integrates a practical and evidenced-based approach to therapy, balancing insight, solution-focus, and skill-based techniques to facilitate a highly personalized collaboration. 

His theoretical approach is based primarily on two evidence-based models of psychotherapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and acceptance-and-commitment therapy (ACT). 

CBT emphasizes understanding negative thinking patterns and behavioral habits, and then developing more effective cognitive, emotional, and behavioral solutions. 

ACT emphasizes present-moment awareness (mindfulness) and letting go of negative self-talk and painful emotions, as well as flexibly engaging in values-guided action. 

Given each client’s unique history, personality, and concerns, psychotherapy is customized to maximize fit and effectiveness. This means that you and Dr. Raynor will collaborate in setting goals and may utilize techniques from numerous approaches, including those derived from motivational interviewing, solution-focused therapy, interpersonal therapy, dialectical-behavior therapy, psychodynamic psychotherapy, and family systems therapy. 

The objective of life, health, educational, executive/business, and performance-focused coaching and consulting is to promote behaviors and mental skills that help individuals, groups, and organizations to achieve their performance goals and reach their potential. Dr. Raynor’s coaching-based approach incorporates several different evidence-based “positive psychology” techniques to develop efficacious mental skills and critical psychological processes, such as mental toughness and resilience. Individual coaching involves engagement in deliberate practice and mental skills training exercises designed to promote adaptive thinking, motivation, problem-solving, emotion regulation, coping, goal-setting, concentration, confidence, and routines. Dr. Raynor also provides consulting to educators, business executives & managers, coaches, parents, and other leaders to promote enhanced communication, small-and large- group dynamics, and psychological trust.