Bob Holmes, Assistant Professor at South Dakota State University, is a counselor, life coach, mediator, clinical supervisor, and trainer with Behavior Management Systems in Rapid City, SD. He has taught Brief Therapy, Couples Counseling, Counseling the Survivor, and Counseling Practicum at the West River Graduate Center. He is currently teaching the Counseling Pre-Practicum.

Bob received an MSW in 1977 from the University at Albany in New York. He has been trained in multigenerational family therapy, structural family therapy, brief and solution-focused therapy, Ericksonian hypnosis, mediation, critical incident stress debriefing, disaster mental health, and life coaching.

He has been a counselor for people with drug and alcohol problems; counselor, supervisor, and family therapy trainer in a school-based day treatment program; clinical director of a family service agency's counseling, adolescent pregnancy prevention, and school-based family therapy programs; instructor of graduate social work courses in family therapy and treatment of children; social worker for terminally ill and other homebound patients in a hospice and home health program; and psychotherapist in private practice. He has presented more than 150 workshops and training programs.

His specialties and current projects include:

1. Collaborative and competency-based counseling that utilizes family, marital, individual, and group therapies as well as educational and biophysiologial interventions.


2. Children’s and teens’ emotional and behavior problems.


3. Youth with oppositional and criminal behavior.


4. Marital therapy and marital enrichment workshops using John Gottman’s ideas within a collaborative and competency-based approach. Bob and his wife, Bonnie Riggenbach, a social worker in the private practice, present a nine-hour Couples Workshop three times a year.


5. Helping people with the after-effects of disruptive life events, including post-traumatic stress disorder.


6. Anger/aggression reduction programs for children, teens, and adults.


7. Domestic violence intervention groups for men.


8. Counseling with clients who seek help only because courts, spouses, or parents say they must.


9. Consulting with other human services professional on their “stuck” or “impossible” cases.


10. Continuously seeking ways to help clients make deeper and longer- lasting change as quickly as possible, using as many types of interventions as he can teach himself to do. Most recently he has been studying and applying in his work object relations ideas and ideas on the origins of and freedom from shame.


11. Developing his use of humor in counseling, teaching, organizations, and other relationships.

Bob’s most recent project is in conjunction with the ExCEL and Quest, programs for girls at the Custer Youth Correctional Center in Custer State Park. He developed and presents a workshop in Emotional Intelligence, which is delivered in four weekly three-hour sessions.

Phone: (605) 343-7262

E-mail: rholmes@behaviormanagement.org