Culver City Senior Center Welcomes New Marriage and Family Therapist

CULVER CITY, CA — Culver City Parks, Recreation & Community Services Department is pleased to welcome Valerie “Billie” Klayman, M.A., Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist as an additional team member available for community support.

Residents are invited to come in and say hello to Billie. She is available Wednesday and Friday afternoons at the Senior Center located at 4095 Overland Avenue. Nonmembers should park across the street at the Veterans Memorial Building. Ms. Klayman may also be reached by phone and receives messages at (310) 253-6717.

For over seven years, Billie served as a volunteer where she was instrumental in creating a partnership with Antioch University Counseling Center to make mental health support available at the Senior Center. She began while interning as a support group leader for groups focusing on the difficulties incurred as we age and how to create meaning during this process.

Ms. Klayman also volunteered as a drop-in counselor, and this program is still offered on the first and third Saturdays of each month from noon to 2:00 pm. Billie is also well-versed in working with diverse populations including youth, veterans, LGBT and people of color.

In practice of therapy for eleven years, Billie has been fully licensed since July 18, 2012. She identifies herself as a Meaning Centered Therapist and believes that all of us can create happiness in our lives. She quotes Aristotle who said, "Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence."

How to achieve happiness, contentment, and meaning in our lives is the existential question. She believes in a collaborative and humanistic approach with those she works with in her practice.

Billie has been involved at the Antioch University Counseling Center since March 2006 and has been a supervisor to trainees and interns at the Antioch University Counseling Center since 2014.

She has spoken at Sovereign Health Group, where she talked to clinicians and others about how to use Meaning Centered Therapy in 12-step programs, and other substance and addiction treatment programs.

— News release from Culver City. Photo credit: Richard Hawkins/Flickr