Willard Harley Jr

Dr. Willard Harley Jr, Ph.D earned a Ph.D. degree in psychology from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1967 and has been a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in Minnesota since 1975. For the first ten years after earning his degree, he taught psychology at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. During those years, he was also a frustrated part-time marriage counselor with little success in helping couples.

In 1973 he discovered that he was not alone in his failure to save marriages — almost everyone in the marital therapy profession were also failing. So he spent the next two years designing an entirely new approach (see How Dr. Harley Learned to Save Marriages). When his success rate skyrocketed in 1977, he resigned from his teaching position to counsel full-time. Over the next ten years his solo practice developed into the largest network of mental health clinics in Minnesota (thirty-two locations) with over one hundred psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and chemical dependency counselors working with him to provide a full range of mental health services. He became the exclusive provider of mental health and chemical dependency services in ten counties, and had offices in other counties as well.