Nicole Manning, AMFT

Nicole Manning is a retired Police Sergeant where she worked for a major metropolitan police department in Northern California for over 26 years. Nicole has worked a variety of assignments throughout her police career which included but were not limited to Patrol, Investigations, Administration, and stints in plainclothes operations which included Narcotics, Robbery, and Vice. She is very proud of her police career and all that it gave her throughout her over 26 years of service, however, as retirement neared she longed to find a way to give back to the profession that had added an extensive amount of value to her own life. Her decision to attend graduate school to become a clinician was not a difficult one. Her sole purpose became to serve the first responder community that she loved and cared for deeply. This new purpose provided her with a new passion to serve others in the cherished first responder community that were struggling with their mental health due to their own personal and/or professional traumas.

Nicole is serving as a clinician with the Public Safety Family Counseling Group, Inc., whose operation focuses and specializes exclusively in working with first responders. Nicole completed a Master’s of Sciences in Psychology from California Coast University (2022) and a Master’s of Arts in Marriage and Family Therapy from Touro University Worldwide (2024). Both of her Master’s degrees were obtained with Honors.

Nicole uses a variety of psychotherapy methods which include Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) but relies most on Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) when working with first responder clients. In this method, therapy is deemed short term, the client must want to change, the client outlines their own goals, and the client utilizes their own strengths to overcome barriers and issues in their lives. She is also Brainspotting and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) certified and implements the use of these techniques when it is deemed appropriate to process and treat traumas and PTSD.

Nicole has chosen to solely work with first responders in her clinical career as she feels that is the population that she can help the most based on both her personal and professional experiences. In addition, due to her first responder background combined with her passion for the first responder community it is the population that drove her to do the clinical work in the first place and she has no intention of working with any other populations.