D.W. Darling, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Southern Utah University and Associate Director of Clinical Training for the university's PsyD program.

Her path to psychology was not a straight line. She served six years in the Air Force as a Mandarin cryptologic language analyst, trained through the Defense Language Institute's intensive immersion program and holding a Top Secret clearance. That background, and everything it taught her about how people perform under pressure and what they are told they are worth, informs the questions she asks as a researcher.

Her work sits at the intersection of financial psychology, blended family dynamics, and existential and humanistic psychology. She is best known for the concept of training-based devaluation: the idea that professional training operates as a form of financial socialization, teaching clinicians to undervalue their own work in ways that follow them throughout their careers. Her dissertation examined the financial influences on relationship satisfaction among childfree stepmothers, work that continues in her current research on financial structure and relationship dynamics in blended families.

She is a licensed psychologist in Utah and Arizona and a Certified Financial Therapist. Her research and writing have appeared in the Journal of Financial Therapy, Psychology Today, and The Feminist Psychologist, and she presents regularly at the American Psychological Association and Financial Therapy Association annual conferences.