The Psychodynamic, talk-therapy approach  strives to understand one’s unconscious motivations for behavior. Childhood patterns that play out in adulthood are uncovered. Neurotic personality traits reveal themselves with the therapist thereby permitting exploration of one’s behavior and what drives it.

One can expect to reflect and examine on one’s past and present experience in the world. What is being recreated? How aware are you to what, exactly, you are doing that is producing an undesired result? When you are awakened to what is driving you, different and healthier options are more available to you. The outcome is for you to be able to make other choices.

CBT is a specific treatment that targets one’s persistently negative thoughts. It is highly structured treatment that includes written exercises, log-keeping, and attuned attention to one’s core belief system.

In this treatment, self-distortions are revealed, and replaced with reality-based thoughts, proportionate to each situation at hand. Clients may be instructed to engage in situations that induce fear or worry. With tailored instruction, we work to deflate and manage each situation.

DBT is a highly-specialized form of CBT that targets patients with borderline personality disorder. This is used solely as a supplemental form of treatment as it is a skills-based training curriculum.

The client is required to be in treatment with a primary clinician other than the DBT specialist. This is a tutorial format, with a curriculum, designed to reconfigure thoughts and behaviors, reduce harmful behaviors, improve interpersonal functioning, and gain skills for crisis management and tolerating distressing situations. Expected outcomes include harm reduction, emotional regulation, and improved social interactions.

This therapy is a structured, problem-solving approach to understanding the barriers that exist between the couple. Exercises in listening, mirroring, and reflecting back and forth are practiced until they are incorporated into daily life, as a natural skill. Fluent, clear communication is modeled. The verbalization of all of one’s thoughts and feelings to, and about, the other person is encouraged.

Specific communication tools and behavioral adjustments are deployed so as to increase authentic communication and improve emotional and sexual intimacy.

In this treatment mode, the entire family unit is the client. This therapy approach seeks to delineate each member’s role, and how to work toward open and honest communication. Relational patterns among members are highlighted and role-playing may be used to reconstruct a different narrative, and repair relationships within the system.

Past and present resentments, secrets, and/or destructive behaviors are brought into the room. All family members are prompted to participate and speak up. This is a dynamic approach that allows the negative and positive family legacy to be revealed. Dysfunctional, destructive dynamics are eliminated.

In NYC, children and young adults are overexposed to wealth, and underexposed to the consequences of it. Parents struggle to find balance for their children between personal responsibility and desiring to excessively provide for them. Well-intentioned actions can sometimes impair one's sense of ownership and competence.

Parents are provided with both dynamic insight and concrete tools as to how to proceed with limit-setting, consequences, peer competition, substance use, and coping with oppositional and angry behavior from their children. The outcome of this treatment is for parents to feel balanced and secure in their children’s relationship to finance. The outcome for children is to gain a greater sense of personal ownership over their actions, and a sense of mastery as they navigate adolescence and/or early adulthood.

Group therapy seeks to recreate one’s day to day experience within an intimate, smaller setting. As members get to know and understand each other, defenses, resistances, and specific roles emerge within the group. The group facilitator encourages dynamic interactions among members so as to uncover and understand automatic behaviors, while at the same time fostering intimacy and trust among the members.

As a result, a corrective experience occurs. Clients have a chance to look at their behavior very much in the present moment with peers who can identify, and offer immediate and constructive feedback. Members’ external worlds are recreated within the group.

Groups are constructed according to problem, demographic, topic, and clients’ availability. Examples of past specific topical groups have included ones that target: social anxiety, depression, anger management, gay and lesbian issues, HIV, dating difficulties, as well as groups for artists, entrepreneurs, and and CEOs.

Understanding the cultural ethos, mores, and archetypes of a person is key to successful treatment. Dynamics of immigration, acculturation, generational differences with families, and ethnic biases all subtly influence how a person exists in the world.

Having spent time in Southeast Asia, Europe, and Africa, and having treated numerous clients from the Middle East, my sensitivity and understanding of our global community is an important part of my practice.