Our Stories
Our clinic was founded in 2013 by Dr. Douglas Carpenter and his wife Shawnmarie Carpenter. Since then we have grown from a single therapist in a shared office to one of Anchorage’s largest outpatient psychotherapy clinics. Along the way our clinic has been able help over 4,000 clients and provide over 45,000 hours of therapy to Alaskan couples, individuals, and families.
AKMFTA, LLC, began as a dream of transformation for marriages, relationships, and individual people in Alaska. On this page we have collected stories from our clinical team about how they came to join our clinic’s mission of keeping relationships together by transforming lives.
Our Stories
Dr. Douglas Carpenter, PhD
My journey started 15 years ago by using Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), created by Dr. Sue Johnson, to save me and my wife’s marriage. We had been married 12 years when I asked my wife for a divorce. It was not a request I made lightly. I had only come to this point as a means of desperation from seeing the pain she was in and how I really felt my pain was because of who I was.
This was when my wife, out of desperation, searched to find a way for us to get help to save our marriage. At the time we were living on a very small island in Alaska where there were no local support for marriages. She was pointed to a program in Michigan. We attended the program for 7 days and returned to our small Alaska Island. What we found is that we still needed further support and there was nothing on our island that could help. We began researching in the journals and periodicals about what form of therapy we had experienced. It seemed to be a modified version of this thing called “EFT”. My wife and I began to learn all we could from the journals and periodicals and tried to implement them into our marriage.
Those around us began seeing our change and asked us to help them. At this point I and my wife were both working full time and then volunteering another 20 plus hours a week to help our friends with what we had learned. We realized we could go back to school and get degrees that would allow us to become trained in EFT and bring it back to our community. A passion to share EFT with our Alaska people was ignited. We both went back to school with one purpose, to bring EFT to Alaska. With more master’s degrees and now a doctorate we knew that all of our going outside of Alaska was worth what we could offer our couples and families back home. My desire is to help marriages where both partners are desperate for change and willing to grow and heal.
Shawnmarie Carpenter, LMFT
In 1999 my husband and I saved our own marriage by using Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). I did not start my career as a therapist. I was a high school medical science and health teacher for 20 years. One day my husband came to me and said, “Shawnmarie, we aren’t doing good.” Being a scientist I went into the journals and periodicals and found the only evidence treatment for couples with a 73% success rate was this thing called, “Emotionally Focused Therapy.” The next highest treatment was 56% and as a teacher a C is much better than an F.
During this time there were no EFT therapists in Alaska. I found an EFT therapist in the area close to where we have family in the lower 48. The journals said it took an average of 20 sessions so I booked us 20 sessions in 1 week. That was not the way I suggest others do the process. By the third day I thought I needed medication. However, when we returned to our home in Ketchikan, we were “better.” At that point we only had the journal articles and a few suggestions from our EFT experience in the lower 48. This was before Dr. Sue Johnson had wrote Hold Me Tight or Love Sense.
Together my husband and I, because we wanted to save our marriage, figured out the process. It changed our relationship so much that our friends started asking us, “What did you guys do?” We started to share our process with others and found we were spending about 20 hours a week sharing with our friends and still working full time. We made the decision to go back to school, get yet more degrees, so we could bring Emotionally Focused Therapy to Alaska. We knew that if we could do it as a couple, anyone can.
K'hala Hamilton, LMFT
When I was seven years old, without knowing it, Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) saved my childhood. When I was a child I didn't understand the bad things that were happening around me, but I knew that I was unhappy. I always felt like the odd one out, someone who did not fit in. I acted out in school and I had trouble making friends. I didn't know how to interact with people; I just knew something was wrong.
My mom had just returned from her trip to Michigan where she experienced EFT, and for the first time I can remember my mother smiled at ME. It wasn't a fake smile, and it wasn't her usual angry face. It was a real smile, and it was directed right at me. I felt love from her, and she actually wanted to hug me. She had hugged me in the past, but this felt like a completely new experience. I didn't know what this was, but I wanted more of it; I wanted to know where it came from.
Life wasn't perfect after that, but things got a lot better. Eventually I was inspired to pursue the field of psychology. I wanted to understand the mind, relationships, and what it means to know yourself so that I could know others. I studied hard and I learned about EFT, the Enneagram, and Somatic Experiencing. I did it so I could help others, particularly adolescents. People who were just like me, back when I was so lost and confused. I went through a lot of pain and struggle in my teenage years, but I had my mother and father to help me through it. I want to help parents help their kids the way my parents were able to help me. I desire to build relationships between parents and their children so that parents have a real connection to their kids and the kids know that they are safe, loved, and innocent. I am happy to put my knowledge to use to help families, individuals, and adolescents across Alaska.
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