Dr. Whitmer resides in Yakima, Washington, and offers services in all counties in Washington. Forensic services are offered nationally. He chose a career in mental health counseling and forensic evaluations and assessments based on his own family of origin’s adversity to overcome through resiliency and commitment to help others.

As an adolescent, he grew up farming in the Columbia Basin in Washington State. His agricultural background helped create a tenacious work ethic. It also led him to work and travel overseas to manage, build farms and irrigation systems in the Middle East with a widely diverse population of peoples. His Middle Eastern experience taught many important lessons, one of which formed his approach to working with a broad diversity of people and one he still lives by to this day.

Many people and cultures are vastly different from the middle class Caucasian Americans experience, not necessarily better or worse, but different, with varying strengths and weaknesses. And while popular culture likes to distinguish between cultures and draw lines in the sand to express stereotypical differences, all people and cultures strongly desire the same things in life. All people and cultures want security with and for their loved ones, stability, safety, community, order, and a sense of purpose and meaning.

Communicating with and observing people from very different cultures brought awareness about differences, but more predominantly, about similarities within the individual context.  People want to understand those who are different than themselves if their families and community are safe to pursue happiness through purpose and meaning.

Based on this view, we can celebrate great differences nationally, culturally, familial, and individually, knowing we share the same human experience of purpose seeking and meaning making.

Secondly, it truly is up to us, individually, to make meaning out of even the most difficult of situations and environments so we can seek our higher purpose. At the end of each day, we each make an individual choice to experience and celebrate differences among individuals and cultures and is a profound, wonderful, and generative expression that will result in a legacy of hope.

The alternative is to villainize people based on their differences, leaving a legacy of discrimination, hatred, and war.

Guess which one is better for your mental health and the health of those you strive to leave a legacy to?