Specialties

it starts from a simple premise...

Somatic Therapy

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Your nervous system has been doing its best to keep you safe, and sometimes it hasn't gotten the message that the danger has passed. That can look like tension you can't talk your way out of, a body that stays braced long after the moment ended, or a numbness that arrives before you've decided to feel anything.

I draw on Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, and Internal Family Systems, guided by a polyvagal understanding of how safety and threat register in the body. We move at a pace you set — noticing sensation, letting the body finish what it didn't get to finish, and building enough steadiness that you can stay present with what comes up rather than bracing against it.

  • As we talk about your concerns and your history,  I'll ask what you notice in your body while you're talking — where the breath goes, what tightens, what wants to move. We slow down around those moments instead of pushing through them.

    Sometimes that means tracking a sensation until it shifts on its own. Other times it means utilizing EMDR to process a specific memory. It can also mean turning toward a part of you that's been carrying something for a long time and asking what it needs. You stay in charge of the pace. If something feels like too much, we stop and come back to ground — that's not a failure of the work, it is the work.

    • People who understand their patterns intellectually, and found the body didn't get the memo

    • Complex or developmental trauma, where the difficulty isn't one event but a long pattern

    • Chronic anxiety, panic, or a persistent sense of being on alert

    • Dissociation, numbness, or feeling disconnected from your own body

    • Chronic pain and illness

  • I see clients in Midtown Manhattan and online throughout New York State. Sessions are 45 minutes, weekly to start.

Therapy for Chronic Pain and Chronic Illness

Pain is real whether or not it shows up on a scan.
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Some people arrive with a clear diagnosis and visible pathology. Some have pain that is disabling and has no identified structural cause. Many have both. I don't sort people into real and not-real, and if you have a diagnosed condition, I'm not going to reinterpret it as emotional — your specialists treat the disease, and this work sits alongside that.

Chronic pain runs on the same circuitry as chronic threat, which is why it so rarely arrives alone. Alongside the physical pain comes the emotional weight of it: anxiety about the next flare, dread about what this means for your future, the depression that settles in when the world keeps getting smaller. Medical trauma is common — years of appointments, dismissals, invasive procedures, and having to argue for your own credibility. And most people carry it in isolation, because pain is invisible and explaining it is exhausting. Over time it reshapes how you experience yourself and everyone around you: a body you monitor instead of live from, relationships organized around what you can't do, a sense of being unreliable or difficult or too much. That's not a side effect. It's the thing itself, and it deserves a room of its own.

  • Autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, endometriosis and pelvic pain, migraines, musculoskeletal pain, persistent post-surgical and post-injury pain, long COVID, IBS and functional GI conditions, and chronic pain that hasn't yet been named.

  • I see clients in Midtown Manhattan and online throughout New York State. Sessions can be shortened or held remotely on high-symptom days — the frame should accommodate your body, not the other way around.

EMDR Therapy

Some memories don't feel like memories. They feel like they're still happening. A tone of voice, a smell, a certain kind of silence, and suddenly your body is back there before your mind has caught up. You can know it's over and still feel it as though it isn't.

  • EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is a structured, evidence-based trauma therapy that helps the brain finish processing experiences that got stuck. While you briefly hold a memory in mind, we use bilateral stimulation: eye movements, tapping, or alternating tones. This helps the memory get filed as something that happened rather than something that's still happening. The memory stays, but the charge around it softens.

    As a trauma-informed psychologist offering EMDR therapy in Manhattan, I integrate it with Somatic Experiencing and Internal Family Systems. That keeps the work anchored in your body and paced to what your nervous system can actually take in.

  •  We don't jump into a memory on day one. First we get to know your history and what you want to be different. We also build resources: ways of grounding and finding steadiness that you can return to whenever you need them.

    When we begin processing, you'll bring a specific memory to mind and notice what shows up in your body while following eye movements, tapping, or tones. Between short sets we pause and check in. You don't have to describe the memory in detail or relive it out loud. Often what surfaces is surprising: a new thought, a shift in sensation, a sense of distance that wasn't there before. You stay in charge of the pace. If something feels like too much, we slow down and come back to ground.

    • A specific event that still replays, such as an accident, assault, medical trauma, sudden loss, or something frightening you can't shake

    • PTSD and complex trauma, including patterns that began in childhood

    • Anxiety, panic, and phobias linked to particular triggers

    • Beliefs like "I'm not safe" or "I'm not enough" that logic hasn't been able to touch

    • Grief that feels frozen in place

    • First responders, healthcare workers, and others whose work exposes them to trauma. I spent years at the World Trade Center mental health program helping first responders process both acute and long-term trauma.

    • People who've done talk therapy, understand their patterns, and still feel stuck

  • I offer in-person EMDR therapy in NYC in Midtown Manhattan, and virtual EMDR throughout New York State. I integrate EMDR with Somatic Experiencing and Internal Family Systems, so the work stays anchored in your body and paced to what your nervous system can take in.

FAQs about

EMDR

Is EMDR effective?

EMDR is one of the most researched trauma treatments. It's recommended for PTSD by the World Health Organization and the VA/Department of Defense clinical guidelines

Does EMDR work online?

Yes. Virtual EMDR uses on-screen eye movements or self-tapping, and research suggests it can be as effective as in-person sessions.

How many sessions will I need?

It varies. A single distressing event may need relatively few processing sessions. Complex or developmental trauma usually calls for a longer, more gradual course.

Do I have to talk about what happened?

Not in detail. EMDR relies less on retelling a memory than most talk therapies.

Therapy for Women of Color

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A lot of women arrive in therapy having already been the competent one for a very long time. The one who handles it, who translates for the family, who doesn't get to fall apart because there's no obvious place to put the falling apart. Often they arrive because the body has started insisting — insomnia, a clenched jaw, exhaustion that sleep doesn't touch.

This work is for women of color who want a therapist who isn't going to need the context explained. Race, immigration, class, family obligation, and the specific tax of being the only one in the room — these can be part of the conversation without becoming the whole conversation, and without you having to do the teaching.

  • Intergenerational and family dynamics. Obligation, filial duty, silence around what happened before you, cultural norms and pressure around emotional repression, and the guilt that comes with wanting something different from what was sacrificed for.

    Racial stress and its physiology. Code-switching, hypervigilance, and the accumulated cost of being surveilled or misread. This lives in the nervous system, and it responds to nervous-system work.

    The competence trap. Being reliable to the point of erasure. Learning to have needs out loud, often for the first time.

    Identity across cultures. Being second-generation, bicultural, or in between in a way that doesn't resolve neatly.

    And everything else. Anxiety, relationships, grief, career, chronic illness, parenthood — the ordinary and difficult stuff of a life.

  • I work somatically and psychodynamically. That means we make real sense of your story and your patterns, and we also pay attention to what your body has been doing while you've been holding it all together.

    For people who've spent years managing from the neck up, the body is often where the actual information is.

  • I see clients in Midtown Manhattan and online throughout New York State.

LGBTQIA+ Affirming Therapy

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Affirming means you won't spend your sessions explaining yourself. Not your pronouns, not your relationship structure, not why the thing that happened at work landed the way it did. We start from there and go on to whatever you actually came in for — which may have nothing to do with being queer, and that's fine too.

I'm a licensed clinical psychologist working with queer, trans, nonbinary, and questioning adults. Much of my work is with people whose nervous systems learned early to monitor a room before relaxing in it. That vigilance is intelligent. It also gets expensive over a lifetime, and the body is usually where the bill comes due.

    • Identity and its unfolding, at any age and at any stage of certainty

    • Gender exploration and transition — social, medical, or still in question

    • Family relationships: estrangement, partial acceptance, the particular ache of being tolerated rather than welcomed

    • Minority stress, hypervigilance, and the fatigue of chronic self-monitoring

    • Relationships, including non-monogamous and polyamorous structures

    • Everything else — anxiety, grief, work, dating, meaning — held by someone who isn't going to route it all back through your identity

  • Somatic work with queer and trans clients asks for particular care. For some people the body is a source of ease; for others it's contested ground, or the site of things done to it. I don't assume which is true for you, and body-based work is always by consent and always adjustable. We can work with sensation at whatever distance is tolerable, including from quite far away.

  • I see clients in Midtown Manhattan and online throughout New York State.