About
Jim Denning, MA, LPC
What I actually do in the room
My clinical focus is trauma. Trauma is a slippery word, so let me be concrete: I mean the events that your nervous system filed under “still happening” and never let go of. They leave marks on sleep, on temper, on how close you can let people get, on your sense of whether good things are allowed to last.
I am trained in Accelerated Resolution Therapy and in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — two approaches that work with how memory is stored rather than only with how you talk about it. I have used ART with veterans through the Lone Survivor Foundation. I also draw on cognitive approaches and, when a client wants it, on Christian counseling.
What I will not do is run you through a protocol because it is the one I know. The first job is working out what is actually wrong, which is often not the thing you booked the appointment about.
- Licence
- Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC), Texas — #73687
- Education
- MA, Counseling · MA, Ministry
- Trained in
- Accelerated Resolution Therapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Cognitive Behavioural approaches, Christian counseling, on request
- Practising since
- 2013
The long way round
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, then prison ministry, then a diagnosis he refused to accept as a verdict. None of it is decoration on a biography.
The long way round
My route to this chair was not a straight line. I trained engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, served as a prison minister, and spent a stretch of my own life being told the best I could hope for was to manage. None of that is decoration on a biography. It is why I work the way I do.
Before counseling I was an IT engineer and technical trainer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I have also done prison ministry, and I have had a great many useful conversations from the other side of a bar. Those are not equivalent experiences, but they taught the same lesson from different angles: people are rarely what their worst moment says they are.
The engineering habit stuck. When something is not working I want to know the mechanism, not just the symptom. That is a large part of why I went looking for the research on memory and threat response, and why I ended up training in ART rather than staying with talk therapy alone.
My own turn in the chair
In 2009 I was diagnosed with treatment-resistant bipolar II, generalised anxiety and ADHD. I was told to go on disability and settle in for a life of struggle and suicidal feeling. I did not accept that, and I spent years working out why I could not think my way out of it. What I found changed the direction of my life, and it is the subject of my book, Make It to Midnight.
Curiosity, and its limits
I hold master’s degrees in both counseling and ministry, and I am genuinely interested in where psychology meets meaning — Jung on synchronicity, questions about how attention and intention shape a life. I bring that in when a client finds it useful and leave it out when they do not. It sits alongside the evidence-based work; it does not replace it.
Who I work with
- Adults, individually, in person in San Antonio and by telehealth within Texas
- People carrying trauma, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, or grief
- Veterans and service members, and their families
- People who have tried therapy before and found it did not go anywhere
If what you need is outside what I do well, I will say so and help you find somebody better suited. That is a normal outcome of a consultation, not a failed one.
Written and clinically reviewed by Jim Denning, MA, LPC. Last reviewed 1 September 2026.
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A conversation, not a commitment
The first step is working out whether this is a good match. If it isn't, I would rather tell you that early.