Silvio Machado, Ph.D.

Associate Professor - ON SABBATICAL FALL 2024 and SPRING 2025

Silvio Machado, Ph.D.

Contact

silvio.machado@sonoma.edu
Faculty Website

Dr. Sil Machado (he/his/him) joined the faculty in 2017 with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from
Saybrook University, where he specialized in LGBTQ+ mental health, depth, experiential, and
psychodynamic psychotherapies, and qualitative research methods. He holds three separate M.A.
degrees in counseling, general psychology, and Jungian Archetypal psychology. He is a licensed
psychologist with experience providing individual, couples, and group psychotherapy, trainee
supervision, neurofeedback, and biofeedback in primary care, non-profit, public health, juvenile
justice, and private practice settings. He is board certified neurofeedback.

As a depth psychologist, Dr. Machado is committed to a holistic understanding of the psyche,
including its conscious, unconscious, developmental, contextual, somatic, cultural, symbolic,
creative, and spiritual dimensions. His current clinical work integrates neurofeedback,
biofeedback, hands-on somatics, and depth psychotherapy modalities to address the unresolved
emotional pain and nervous system dysregulation that drive his clients’ symptoms. He has
advanced training in psychodynamic, Jungian, Existential-Humanistic, Focusing, experiential-
dynamic, somatic, expressive arts, psychophysiology, sandplay therapy, craniosacral therapy, and
Transforming Touch®, as well as evidence-based approaches including CBT, DBT, and EMDR.

Dr. Machado’s teaching interests include psychotherapy theory, critical perspectives on diagnosis
and psychopathology, counselor supervision and identity development, trauma therapy, and
theories of depth and psychodynamic psychotherapies, and he has taught in undergraduate,
master’s, and doctoral level programs. His primary areas of scholarship interest include Jungian
and archetypal dynamics in psychotherapy, trauma therapy, queer experience (e.g.,
homonegativity, HIV, queer spirituality, identity development), dreams and dreamwork, hands-on
therapies for trauma, and the transformation of shame in psychotherapy. In his research Dr.
Machado utilizes qualitative approaches rooted in an emancipatory framework, such as poetic
inquiry, autoethnography, photo-elicitation, autobiography, and narrative research, all with the
intention to illuminate lived experience. He has presented his work nationally and has published
multiple articles in peer-reviewed journals.

For more information about Dr. Machado, please visit his faculty website.