About
I grew up here. I have worked here for my whole career. That is not a marketing line, it is the reason I do not need a client to explain what a fourteen hour shift does to a person, or why a rent increase can produce a genuine panic response.
I did not come to this work through a tidy route, and I think that is part of why the room feels the way it does.
Before I was licensed I worked in settings where people arrived at their worst hour and left without a follow up appointment, because the funding ran out or the referral line was closed. I learned early that the difference between someone getting better and someone getting worse is very often logistical rather than psychological. Who called back. Whether the fee was survivable. Whether the clinician flinched when they heard what the client did for money.
Since then I have practised in Manhattan private practice, taken referrals from virtual networks and businesses across the city, and built a caseload that is deliberately mixed. On the same Tuesday I might see a director of engineering, a dancer between contracts, and someone who works nights in an industry most people will not name at a dinner party. They have more in common than any of them expects.
My training is humanistic and person centred at the base, with trauma informed practice layered over it and a liberation psychology frame around the whole thing. In plain terms: I believe you already have most of what you need, I will not pretend your history did not happen, and I will not treat your circumstances as background noise.
Outside the practice I am a slow reader of long novels, an unreliable runner along the Hudson, and someone who still gets faintly emotional about the light on Twenty Third Street in October. I say this because clients sometimes ask, and because therapy works better when you know there is an actual human on the other chair.
What I believe
Debt, immigration status, a hostile manager, a landlord, a body that other people feel entitled to comment on. These are not the preamble before the real material. They frequently are the real material, and a therapy that cannot hold them will keep asking you to breathe through something that needs changing rather than tolerating.
Decades of outcome research point at the alliance rather than the acronym. That does not make technique useless, it makes it secondary. If you do not feel met by me within a handful of sessions, that is worth naming out loud, and I would far rather help you find a better fit than keep an unhelpful hour on the calendar.
I have had clients arrive braced for a lecture because a previous clinician made them justify their work, their drug use, their relationships or their body. You will not be doing that here. Curiosity, yes. Assessment where it is clinically needed, yes. Moral audit, no.
Progress in therapy is not a line, it is a scatter plot with a trend. Weeks four to eight are often the worst because the numbing has thinned before the new coping has arrived. I say this in advance so it does not feel like evidence of failure when it happens.
Sometimes a person needs a psychiatrist, a lawyer, a union rep, a doctor, a housing advocate, or a month of sleep more urgently than they need a weekly hour with me. I will say so. I keep a working referral list across all of those and I would rather send you to the right door than keep you in my room out of politeness.
Who I am not the right fit for
I am an individual therapist working with adults. There are things I do not do, and saying so plainly is more useful than a page that implies I do everything.
That is exactly what the free consult is for. Fifteen minutes, no notes, no pressure, and a straight answer either way.