Christen J. Yassin, LCSW-C

I’ve spent eighteen years as a licensed clinical social worker — nearly two decades sitting across from people working through the exact kind of relationships my up coming book is about. That experience wasn’t built in a comfortable private practice from day one. It was built inside some of the oldest and most tested behavioral health institutions in the country.

 

That work is the foundation for my upcoming book, The Contact Continuum: A Guide to No Contact, Low Contact, and Everything In Between — the reason I keep referencing “this book” throughout the story below.

 

I worked at Northeast Treatment Centers, housed on the campus of Friends Hospital — founded in 1813 as the first private psychiatric hospital in the United States, and a National Historic Landmark. Friends Hospital is where the “moral treatment” movement took root: the radical-for-its-time idea that people in crisis deserved dignity and care, not restraint.

 

I worked at the Joseph J. Peters Institute, founded in 1955 and still one of the country’s leading treatment centers for survivors of sexual abuse and for people with histories of sexual offending — work that sits at the most extreme end of what “safety” and “access” can mean inside a relationship.  

 

That work brought me into some of the most complex questions a clinician can encounter around safety, boundaries, relationships, responsibility, and access.  It was during this period of my clinical work, alongside a forensic psychologist, that the concept I later came to call the “Julie Face” was born.  I won’t give away the story here—you’ll have to read The Contact Continuum.

 

My clinical work has taken me into some of the most complex and challenging areas of mental health.

 

It was also during this work, alongside a forensic psychologist, that the concept I later came to call the “Julie Face” was born.

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I won’t give away the story here — you’ll have to read The Contact Continuum.

 

But that experience became part of the foundation for the work I do today: helping people understand contact, evaluate access, and create healthier — and safer — ways of relating.

 

I worked at Dr. Warren E. Smith Health Centers, founded by one of Philadelphia’s first Black psychiatrists specifically to bring quality behavioral health care to communities carrying the weight of poverty and systemic neglect.

 

I worked at COMHAR, on Allegheny Avenue in Kensington — a neighborhood that’s been documented as one of the largest open-air drug markets on the East Coast, and among the highest-crime corridors in the country.

 

And I worked at Northwestern Human Services, another cornerstone of Philadelphia’s behavioral health safety net.

 

As far as my clinical work, The Contact Continuum wasn’t developed from a single population of clients who could afford to opt into therapy on their own terms. It was built and tested across some of the most complicated family and relational territory a clinician can walk into — abuse, addiction, poverty, foster care, generational trauma — which is exactly the range this book needs to hold up for.

 

Today, Centered (centeredonline.com) is a growing practice. Alongside running it, I work full-time at Thrive Behavioral Health, a Maryland-based practice founded in 2012 that provides therapy, psychiatric care, and school-based mental health services to historically underserved communities across the state — including LGBTQIA+, elderly, disabled, and indigenous clients. Between Thrive and Centered, I’m still doing the work the Contact Continuum was built from: helping people figure out what to do with the relationships in their lives that aren’t simple. That growth is ongoing — I’m actively working toward licensure in D.C. and Virginia before the end of summer 2027, likely sooner depending on each licensing board’s timeline, which will extend Centered’s reach, and my ability to practice and speak, across the full region this book’s framework was built from.