CBC Team

Will Buerger is a licensed clinical psychologist who is the Director of Continuing Education and Trauma Program Coordinator. He works full-time at CBC with children, adolescents, adults, and families. Dr. Buerger has training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), as well as multiple empirically supported trauma treatments, including Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) and Prolonged Exposure (PE). He has extensive experience applying empirically supported treatments (ESTs) within a variety of clinical settings, including private and Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals, specialized outpatient clinics, and community mental health clinics.

Dr. Buerger has particular expertise in the areas of trauma and borderline personality disorder (BPD), and a passion for adapting ESTs to the unique and complex presentation of each individual. He received his BA in psychology from Gettysburg College and earned both his masters and his doctorate in clinical psychology from Rutgers University’s Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP).

Dr. Buerger completed his pre-doctoral internship at the Greater Hartford Consortium, which incorporated intensive training in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and substance use disorders within the Newington VA, and consultation on DBT and other ESTs through Community Mental Health Affiliates (CMHA) of New Britain, CT. Within the Newington VA’s PTSD rotation, Dr. Buerger provided veterans with the most up-to-date empirically supported trauma treatments and became a VA-certified provider of Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT).

Dr. Buerger also applied his CBT and DBT skills within the Newington VA’s substance abuse treatment program, where he implemented abstinence-based and harm-reduction interventions for substance use disorders of varying levels of severity. At CMHA, Dr. Buerger expanded these skills to populations struggling with significant psychosocial stressors, providing consultation to licensed social workers, recovery specialists, and medication providers. Focusing on conceptualization and effective problem solving within a DBT framework, Dr. Buerger started a DBT consultation team, ran a DBT skills group, and provided supervision on how to perform individual and group DBT with high treatment fidelity.

Prior to internship, Dr. Buerger completed externships in a variety of clinical settings, including the Rutgers College Counseling Center, where he counseled students struggling with the stressors that accompany academic settings. At the Rutgers Anxiety Disorders Clinic, he gained intensive training on how to provide ESTs to veterans and civilians struggling with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), panic disorder, and social anxiety disorder.

He also completed an externship at New York Presbyterian Hospital’s Westchester Campus, where he worked on multiple inpatient units to adapt ESTs for complex and chronic difficulties, including schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and borderline personality disorder. At the Dialectical Behavior Therapy Clinic at Rutgers University, Dr. Buerger trained under Dr. Shireen Rizvi, a student of Dr. Marsha Linehan, to implement protocol-based DBT. These experiences were also supplemented by three years conducting assessments and working as an individual and group therapist within the GSAPP Psychological Clinic.

Dr. Buerger’s research interests, driven by his passion for individualized approaches to ESTs, focus on clarifying the components that cause each treatment to have its positive effect. Dr. Buerger has developed this topic in his doctoral dissertation, published articles, presentations at national psychology conferences, and most recently a book chapter that he co-authored with Dr. Alec Miller. He is also an active member of multiple professional organizations, most notably the American Psychological Association (APA), the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT), and the International Society for the Improvement and Teaching of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (ISITDBT).