Today we’d like to introduce you to Jimi McJunkin.
Hi Jimi, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My path into this work wasn’t a straight line. Before becoming a therapist, I worked in restaurants and in group homes for disadvantaged youth, and I was actually in a graduate program pursuing a teaching credential. Along the way, I’d been a client myself with two different therapists — one after my mom passed away, and another a bit later when I was feeling unsatisfied with my work and unsure of my direction. Both of them, independently, told me they thought I’d make a good therapist.
That planted a seed. In the teaching program, I realized what I actually loved wasn’t teaching a particular subject — it was helping people feel better. So I left that program, applied to two graduate psychology programs, and chose San Diego State University’s multicultural therapy program. It turned out to be exactly the right call.
Since then, I’ve spent twelve years building a practice in Escondido/North County San Diego — working with individual adults on complex, often deeply personal issues, and over time expanding beyond the traditional therapy chair into men’s groups, spiritual community work, and retreats. What started as ‘I think you’d be good at this’ has become a career I genuinely experience as a spiritual practice — helping people find direction the same way those two therapists once helped me find mine.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It hasn’t been a straight line. Early on, a lot of the challenge was just the practical grind of building a caseload — working across insurance platforms, taking on clients with genuinely complex presentations, and learning as I went, since therapy school teaches you the clinical work but not necessarily how to run a business.
One of the bigger, ongoing struggles has been learning the importance of my own self-care — specifically, how not to carry home the weight, trauma, and energy of other people’s pain. Early in my career, I didn’t fully understand how much that could build up. Over the years I’ve had to learn how to actually clear that energy, rather than let it accumulate, so I can keep showing up fully present for my clients without it weighing me down in my own life. I think this is something a lot of therapists — and honestly, anyone in a caregiving or emotionally demanding profession — can relate to. It’s not something anyone teaches you in grad school; you learn it the hard way, through experience.
The other struggle has been figuring out how to build a practice around the work I actually love, which tends to live on the fringier side of the field — men’s work, spiritual practices, and psychedelic preparation and integration work with clients. To be clear, I don’t facilitate those experiences myself; my role is helping people prepare beforehand and then do the work afterward of turning whatever insights came up into real, lasting change in their life and behavior. That kind of work isn’t always the easiest to build a sustainable, insurance-friendly practice around, so a lot of my journey has been learning how to create space for it alongside the more traditional clinical work that pays the bills.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
My practice, McJunkin Inc., is based in Escondido, right in the North County San Diego area. On the clinical side, I work with individual adults navigating complex, often deeply personal issues — I take insurance through Headway, Alma, and Rula, and also see cash-pay clients directly. My approach blends more traditional modalities like CBT and nervous system regulation with less conventional ones — IFS, somatic experiencing, psychodrama, family constellations, breathwork — because I’ve found that real, lasting change usually requires working with the whole person: mind, body, and nervous system together, not just talk therapy alone.
What I’m probably most known for, though, is the work I do outside the traditional therapy hour. I co-facilitated a men’s group for two and a half years, and I still run multi-day men’s retreats — including father-son retreats — that draw on ceremony, ritual, psychodrama, and nervous system work to help men process grief, masculinity, and generational wounds in ways a weekly session often can’t reach. More recently, I actually stepped back from facilitating and rejoined a men’s group as a participant myself — I realized I needed to be doing my own work and getting the support that comes from being in a group, not just leading one. I plan to facilitate other groups again in the future, but that experience has been a good reminder that this work only stays sustainable if I keep doing it on myself too, not just for my clients.
I also specialize in something a little more unusual: psychedelic preparation and integration work. I don’t facilitate the experiences themselves, but I help clients prepare intentionally beforehand and then do the real work afterward — turning powerful insights into lasting behavioral change, rather than letting them fade.
What sets me apart, I think, is that willingness to work in the ‘fringier’ parts of this field — spiritual practices, men’s work, and psychedelic integration — while still being clinically grounded. A lot of therapists stay firmly in one lane; I’ve built a practice that can hold both the traditional and the unconventional, for clients who are genuinely in transition and looking for something deeper than symptom management.
What I’m most proud of is that this practice reflects years of learning what actually helps people, not just what’s easiest to bill for. I want readers to know that if they’re searching for a therapist who treats this work as more than a job — who sees it as its own kind of spiritual practice — that’s what they’ll find here.
Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
Honestly, what makes me happiest is fairly simple: time with my family — my wife and my ten-year-old son. Being out in nature, camping, traveling, live music — anything that gets me out of routine and into something more alive.
I also find a lot of happiness in feeling like I’m part of something larger than myself, and in the work itself — helping people feel better, and helping them remember who they are underneath all the societal norms and expectations that get layered on top of us over a lifetime.
And maybe most of all, happiness for me comes from continuing to unfold — letting go of old wounds and beliefs that no longer serve me. That’s an ongoing practice, not a destination, and honestly it’s one of the things that makes this work and my own life feel connected rather than separate.
Pricing:
- Individual sessions: $200
- Retreats: $450-$1200
Contact Info:
- Website: https://mcjunkininc.com
