Therapy for Women of Color in NYC
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.
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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.
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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.
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I see clients in Midtown Manhattan and online throughout New York State.