Insight is not enough psychodynamic
You can understand a pattern completely and still be inside it. Getting free of it is a different piece of work.
A life that feels more like your own.
Therapy for high-achieving adults and couples navigating burnout, anxiety, relationship challenges, and life transitions in New York.
In person in the Financial District and Williamsburg, and virtually across New York.
MSW, New York University · BA in Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
From the outside, things work. Inside, something feels off.
You are capable and people rely on you. And something is off anyway, in a way that is hard to point at and does not go away on the weekend.
Maybe the pace stopped being sustainable. Maybe a relationship, a role, or a version of yourself no longer fits. Therapy is a place to slow down enough to understand what is actually happening, and why it keeps happening.
Where this work usually begins
Burnout and high-pressure careers
You are still delivering, but the recovery is not happening. We look beneath productivity and time management to the questions of worth, expectation, and identity that keep the pace in place.
Life transitions, identity, and self-esteem
A move, a role, a relationship, or a loss can raise the question of whose expectations you have been living by—and what your own answer might be.
Anxiety, stress, and emotional overwhelm
When your nervous system stays braced long after the reason has passed, we work with both the thinking and the body that learned to stay ready.
Relationships, intimacy, and connection
Distance, recurring conflict, grief, or difficulty being known. We look at the cycle you are caught in and what it protects, individually or together as a couple.
How I work
How I work
Most of the people I work with can already describe their pattern accurately. Knowing it has not changed it. So we go after the threads between your past and your present—not to explain you, but to loosen what is still holding on. It is patient work, and it is grounded.
More on my approachWarmth, not neutrality trauma-informed · AEDP
We go toward what hurts without judgment, at the pace you set. I will not sit behind a blank face while you do it.
Out of survival mode somatic
Years of coping leave you at a distance from what you want. The body tends to register that first, so I ask about it.
A note from me
I spent seven years inside the kind of pressure you are describing.
Before becoming a therapist, I worked at Boston Consulting Group for seven years, from summer intern to project leader. I know the standards, the pace, and the quiet cost of meeting them well.
It means you will spend less time explaining your world to me, and that I am not thrown by people who analyze everything, including their own therapy. It also means I am not offering you coaching. This is therapy—the aim is understanding yourself, not optimizing yourself.
— Vanessa
I see adults, older adults, and couples—in person in the Financial District and Williamsburg, and virtually across New York. Sessions are available in English and Spanish, and the first conversation is a free fifteen minutes.
Training and credentials
New York University
Master of Social Work
University of Pennsylvania
BA in Psychology
A first step
A short conversation can help us see if it feels like a fit.
Fifteen minutes, no cost, no obligation. We talk about what brings you here and whether working together makes sense—and if someone else would be the better fit, I will say so.
Schedule a free consultation (opens in a new tab)