David Leong - Therapy and Counseling

The Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist is the most common license for psychotherapists in California.

There is often some confusion about the acronyms MFT/LMFT/MFCC. The legal name of the license is Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT). This often gets shortened to just Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT). The Marriage, Family and Child Counselor (MFCC) was the original name of the license before it was changed to LMFT quite a few years ago.

In addition to graduate school, the LMFT license requires 3000 hours of supervised internship. Once the internship hours have been earned, it an applicant must then pass two exams in order to receive their license.

David Leong, M.A.
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist

Psychotherapy is a regulated profession. Only people who hold certain licenses can practice psychotherapy. Each license has a different focus. Some examples are:

• Psychiatrists are medical doctors. They are the only people who can prescribe psychoactive medications such as anti-depressants. Most modern Psychiatrists focus on assessing, prescribing and managing those medications.
• Psychologists have a doctoral degree in psychology. Their focus is often on research or clinical testing. All those TV crime dramas where the court is trying to determine if someone is legally insane? A Psychologist would do the tests to make that determination, for example.
• Licensed Clinical Social Workers (LCSW) requires a Masters Degree and they have a primary emphasis on connecting people to social services. Often found in community health organizations and hospitals.
• Marriage and Family Therapists (MFT) also require a Masters Degree. MFTs provide the vast majority of therapy in California. MFTs are required by law to complete classes in counseling and psychotherapy, where the other licenses above are not. The focus of MFTs is psychotherapy.

Each of the licenses listed can practice psychotherapy – provided that they have had the necessary training. MFTs graduate with that training. People holding other licenses often have to add psychotherapy training separately. Most psychotherapists are MFTs.

I chose the MFT license because psychotherapy is what I am passionate about – helping people change on a deep level – and the MFT license is tightly focused on that. It is where I feel I can make the biggest contribution to the world. I am also committed to continuing my training, and I enjoy learning about the newest breakthroughs in the field.

David Leong
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist