Dr. Bill Northey

Biography

William F. Northey, Jr., Ph.D., (Dr. Bill) is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Delaware with over 30 years of clinical experience working with children and families. As the Director of the Bellefonte Center for Children and Families, he is a leading provider of services for couples and family therapy in Delaware.

Approach to Couple/Marriage and Family Therapy

Dr. Bill has extensive experience working with all kinds of couples and families in addressing challenges of life that emerge, including dealing with separation, divorce, and co-parenting; substance use disorders from a family perspective; and helping families navigate adolescence. The type of therapy that Dr. Bill practices are systemic (focuses on all the different parts of families and the contexts they live in) and strategic, which means he is very planful and intentional in helping families. Dr. Bill is a very results-oriented marriage and family therapist who is always looking to work his way out of a job—which means his clients improve so that they no longer need him.

Separation and divorce impact the entire family and sometimes families get “stuck” trying to make the transition from a family living under one roof to one with multiple households and possibly additional family members. Dr. Bill is known internationally for his effective approaches to helping families during the transition to co-parenting by providing co-parenting counseling, reunification therapy, parenting coordination, and a new service, the Effective Co-Parenting Appraisal System. All of these services assist families to be in a better place and minimize the impact of divorce on children.

Having spent the last 15 years working with individuals and families dealing with substance use disorders (SUD) Dr. Bill has developed a compassionate and systemic approach to helping families when a loved one has been diagnosed with a SUD, even if the loved one is not ready to seek therapy. All too often traditional SUD treatment approaches fail to include, or worse exclude, family members who can provide both support and encouragement when battling the demons of addiction and drug dependence.

Dr. Bill is competent in helping couples after an affair or some other kind of betrayal. Being in a committed relationship takes a lot and there are times when a spouse may engage in behaviors that endanger that love and commitment. Not all couples can overcome the betrayal of an affair, but many can and Dr. Bill can help.

Education & Experience

After growing up in Claymont, Delaware, and attending the University of Delaware, Dr. Bill received in Master’s Degree and Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy from the University of Maryland and Kansas State University, respectively. After his doctoral program in Kansas, he slowly made his way back to Delaware, first through Ohio where he was a professor at Bowling Green State University, and then to the Washington DC area where he served a Director of Research for the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT). In 2006, Dr. Bill moved back to Delaware where he has held a number of academic, clinical, and consulting positions, including at Drexel, NorthCentral, and Wilmington Universities, the Philadelphia Child and Family Therapy Training Center, and Connections Community Support Programs, Inc.

Dr. Bill is known nationally and internationally for his expertise in co-parenting and training, clinical supervision, and the use of technology in family therapy. He has presented worldwide, including Canada, Argentina, Panama, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Iceland, England, Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Slovenia. Dr. Bill has over 50 publications to his name and serves on editorial boards of the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy and the Journal of Family Therapy. Dr. Bill is very active in the AAMFT and has presented at the Annual Conference every year and conducted a two-day institute on effective co-parenting in Dublin in 2017. He has served on the AAMFT’s Ethics Committee, including as Chair in 2019.

Click here for Dr. Bill’s Curriculum Vitae