About Us
Coldwater Counseling Center is a non-profit community counseling center
serving the Greater Los Angeles area.
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The mission of Coldwater is to provide depth psychotherapy to the community at affordable rates, to provide education and training in depth psychotherapy to the interns and licensed practitioners who provide these services, and to educate the community regarding the psychological and spiritual components of depth psychology.
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Coldwater Counseling Center is a resource to help individuals of all ages, couples, and families explore their inner, wounded and unfulfilled spaces. We are committed to helping individuals toward greater awareness of themselves, their relationships with others, and with the world.
Our History
Coldwater Counseling Center was founded by in the early 1960's by The Rev. Canon Ray Riebs as an outreach program of St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Studio City, California. Riebs recognized the need for providing services for the care of the human soul beyond the skills and training he had as clergyman, and the need for making these services available to the community in an affordable way. Coldwater Counseling was one of many community outreach programs sponsored by St. Michael's for many years.
Reibs' successor, Rev. Weaver Stevens, continued to nurture these outreach programs during his twenty-five year tenure. In 1983 the Counseling Center was at a crossroads and Weaver Stevens asked Steve Galipeau, who he had met at the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, to take over as Director and see if "we can resurrect it or need to bury it." From that point on the Center began to grow, both in terms of the number of people being seen, and the number of staff needed to see them.
In 1994 the parish took a different direction and Coldwater Counseling Center became a non profit organization of its own with help from numerous parishioners (in particular attorney Frank Hobbs) and the Center's staff under the leadership of Steve Galipeau. The Center was able to keep its name and found an office location less than a mile north of the church on Coldwater Canyon Avenue.
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Steve has been able to establish an atmosphere that sustains the view point of depth psychology that the best thing therapists can do for those they serve is to continue to work on themselves. Steve has given several lectures at professional conferences on issues related to this theme. A journal version of a lecture he gave at a National Conference of Jungian Analysts, "Perversions in the Temenos," can be found on the website of The Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, Vol. 3, No. 2 2001. In this article Steve discusses the dangerous situations in which therapists make the therapy more about them rather than the client. Further information about Steven Galipeau can be found on his website.