Therapist for Families and Individuals in Calabasas, CA
I’m Bill Moran, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Calabasas, CA, and I work with individuals, couples, and families from all kinds of backgrounds. But before I explain what I do, I want to tell you a bit about how I got here, because it’s part of why I work the way I do.
I grew up in Queens, New York, in a devout Irish-Italian Catholic family. Like a lot of people, I drifted from my faith as a teenager and spent my twenties living a fairly secular life. I also spent those years dealing with my own struggles, including addiction and a real lack of self-worth, long before I ever sat on the other side of a therapist’s office. I share that not for sympathy, but because it shapes how I work. I’m not just offering you theory I learned in a classroom. I’ve walked through some of this myself.
From the Trades to the Boardroom to the Therapy Room
I started my career as an electrical contractor at 19, and spent a decade in that field before moving into real estate in 1984. Over the next 30 years, I built a career in real estate sales and mortgage banking, running teams, employing hundreds of people, and helping families make some of the biggest financial decisions of their lives. By most measures, it was a success.
But something was still missing. That gap eventually led me into a deeper search, through psychology, theology, and spirituality, and eventually back to the Catholic faith I’d stepped away from. That return led me to found WhyCatholic.com, a free resource created to help people understand the Catholic faith more clearly, and it ultimately reshaped the direction of my career entirely.
Becoming a Therapist
I went back to school, earned a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and a Master’s degree in Psychology with an emphasis on Marriage and Family Therapy. During my internship, I worked as a co-therapist in domestic violence group counseling and helped establish a support group for survivors of abuse. After graduating, I worked as a primary therapist in respected recovery and intensive outpatient programs in Malibu and Woodland Hills.
Why Family and Mentorship Matter to Me
I grew up with an emotionally absent father, and that shaped me more than I realized for a long time. It’s part of why I spent 20 years on the board of the Catholic Big Brother Big Sister program here in Los Angeles, mentoring boys and girls growing up without an involved parent. I also helped raise three stepchildren of my own. Between that and years of working with clients, I’ve spent a lot of my life walking alongside people through real, difficult growth, personally and professionally.
How This Shapes My Work Today
All of this the business background, the faith journey, the personal struggles, the mentorship comes together in how I work with clients now. I combine real-world experience with clinical training and a Catholic understanding of the human person, not because I’m reciting theory, but because I’ve lived enough of life to know theory alone doesn’t get anyone through hard seasons.
If you’re considering therapy and want to know whether we’d be a good fit, I’d encourage you to reach out. A short conversation is usually enough to tell. Schedule a conversation now
If you’d like to get a better sense of who I am before reaching out, I was recently a guest on Personally Speaking with Msgr. Jim Lisante, airing on SiriusXM’s Catholic Channel (129), where we talked about faith, psychology, and real life.