My work with individuals, couples, and groups is influenced by my clinical practice as well as sound theoretical and empirical foundational knowledge. I believe that experience is our ultimate teacher, and I use my own as well as my knowledge of the experience of others, as inspiration. I approach psychotherapy with an integrative lens, utilizing psychodynamic theory to help engender healing experiences unique to each person with whom I work. Treatment is also informed by skills-based modalities to focus on presently improving circumstances and relationships.

I studied Philosophy at Columbia University for my undergraduate degree, earned a JD at Brooklyn Law School and was admitted to the NY and NJ Bars. I practiced law for twelve years, after which I pursued this deeper passion, work related to the mind’s relationship with itself and others. I earned my Ph.D. in Psychology at Long Island University - Brooklyn, and I trained at Mount Sinai, Beth Israel, Center for Intensive Treatment of Personality Disorders, Jacobi Hospital, and the New York University Post Doctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy.

My work in sessions is relational and collaborative, starting with creating a safe, non-judgmental space and a supportive therapeutic relationship. Sessions include addressing symptoms that have become unmanageable (e.g., anxiety, depression, panic, obsessions, phobias, paranoia, etc.), processing and working through past traumatic experiences (e.g. violence, sexual, physical and emotional abuse and neglect, abandonment, etc.), understanding and moving on from self-defeating behaviors and relationship patterns (in the family, in your intimate connections, and at work, etc.) as well as reducing compulsions and addictions (gambling/trading, drugs and alcohol, risk-taking). Sessions also aim to ease conflicts around gender norms and roles, group identity marginalization, religious and cultural practices, and other issues of identity. As a person who knows much about transitions, I can help you out of tight spaces that might not fit with who you are at your core.

Working together, we will aim to access and understand deeply the emotional sources of current difficulties, often, but not exclusively, in your history of relationships, to which you had to adapt and accommodate in order to survive. We will seek to appreciate more fully emotional wounds and aspects of yourself that have consequently been left behind and abandoned, leading to instability. Our work is about healing from your wounds, sometimes carried by parts of you that have continued to be silenced and neglected by yourself and those in whom you have trusted. We will likely discover ways that you cope to defend your wounded parts that no longer serve you.

The work will also focus on creating opportunities for reparative experiences and healing so that you can build a present and a future that is more open, flexibly adaptive, and deeply connected to the person you most seek to become, re-engaging aspects of self that may contain powerful energy, but need to be supported, attended to and brought back to life, your life. Sessions can be challenging, fulfilling and delightful, at times painful, but always with the aim of promoting growth.