Relational Therapy for Individuals in NYC | Attachment, Patterns & Healing from the Past
How have the people around you shaped you?
At some point in your life, you’ve probably heard some version of “you are the five people you spend your time with,” or “the people you surround yourself with are a direct reflection on who you are.” That can feel either reassuring or anxiety-inducing, depending on how authentic your relationships with others feel, and how mutually nourishing they are.
To expand on these sayings, you are the combination of every person you have met: the romantic relationship where you finally felt safe, the best friend that’s grown so close you’ve forgotten what life was without them, the teacher or a mentor who believed in your talent and supported your growth. And on the other side, the break up that ended in a despair and a complete loss of your identity, the friendship that quietly grew distant, the boss or authority figure who singled you out and made you feel small.
Those experiences don’t always stay in the past even when you have moved far away from them. They can show up in how you respond to affection and closeness, in how you navigate expressing your needs and desires, and the inner stories you carry about whether you are lovable, capable, or “good enough”.
People come to relational therapy for individuals in New York for many reasons. You might have a full, rich life, and you want to make sure that old patterns don’t keep repeating. You might be coming out of a painful transition: a breakup, a divorce, a falling out with family, and looking for a space to make sense of what happened. You might have noticed, over time, that intimacy, conflict, and letting people in have always felt harder for you than they seem to be for others. Or on the opposite: that you attach quickly and deeply, and that has sometimes been used against you.
No matter what brings you here, this is a space to understand your patterns and learn where they came from, how they show up, and what to do when they may arise again.
What is relational trauma/rupture?
Relational trauma includes any rupture that happened in the context of a relationship with another person. That can be divorce, even when it's amicable. That can be a break up, even when the relationship feels like it was "not long enough to matter", or happened a long time ago. The loss of a friendship, or separation from family of origin, whether you were the one to choose the ending, or whether it happened to you and was out of your control.
It can also be subtler than a clear rupture. That can be a slow realization that a relationship has never quite given you what you needed, or the exhaustion of always being the one who holds everything together. The accumulation of there being consistently too much of something, or not enough of something: too much criticism, too much codependency, not enough support, not enough privacy. These experiences of “too much” and “not enough,” when repeated over time, shape your beliefs about yourself and narratives about what relationships are supposed to feel like.
Relational therapy for individuals means exploring the family of origin you grew up in, the relationships you've chosen, the friendships that shaped you, the chosen family you've built, and the ways those experiences continue to influence how you relate to yourself and to the people around you now.
Some of the relational subjects I have experience in helping you with:
A pattern you keep noticing but can't seem to break: pulling away when things get serious, choosing partners who aren't fully available, shutting down in conflict, or staying in relationships long past when they stopped working
Recovering from a specific relational rupture: a breakup, a divorce, an estrangement, a friendship that ended in ways that still don't make sense
Difficulty separating what you want and value from what the people around you need from you (losing yourself in other people's expectations)
Relationship anxiety that shows up as hypervigilance, people-pleasing, or an ongoing effort to manage how others feel about you
Loneliness as the driving force behind self-sufficiency: staying fiercely independent as a way of never having to need anyone, and never risking disappointment
Being an immigrant, AAPI adult, or part of the LGBTQ+ community, and carrying relational complexity that most therapy spaces don't fully account for
Navigating expectations about loyalty, family obligation, identity, and belonging
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That depends on what your previous experiences with therapy were like. If it was mostly talk therapy (processing events, gaining insight, identifying patterns,) what I do is similar in some ways and different in others. I am trained in EMDR and IFS (parts work), which means we also work with the body and with the deeper emotional structures that hold these patterns in place, in addition to the narrative process.
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That's okay! It’s more common than you might think. A lot of people arrive knowing that something in their relationships isn't working or doesn't feel right, without being able to name it precisely. We can start there. The first few sessions are often about gaining some history of what has worked and what hasn’t in your relationships up to now, understanding what you're bringing in and what you're hoping for, and that usually helps us develop a more concrete compass of what you want to work on.
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I pay close attention to your nervous system and your pace. A significant part of my work, especially early on as we are building rapport, is helping you build inner resources: think of it as different tools that increase your capacity to sit with difficult emotions without being overwhelmed by them. The goal is to expand your window of capacity with your consent, not blow it open when you least expect it. Of course, sometimes a memory can feel overwhelming out of nowhere and the window gets blown open anyway. If this is your concern, let’s talk about it right away, and establish some safe guards so you feel more prepared.
How I work with relational patterns
I work best with people who are looking for something deeper than communication strategies or tools for getting along better in their relationships. We can absolutely work on those things too, but we’ll also aim to understand the roots of your patterns, make space for the parts of you that learned to protect themselves in ways that may no longer serve you, and build new ways of relating from the inside out.
For many of my clients, relational patterns are deeply shaped by cultural contexts, immigration history, and identity. Some of what we explore may include expectations you were raised with about how family works, what you owe the people you love, and what relationships are supposed to feel like. We might also then identify where you would like to unlearn some of those expectations, and what areas need change.
You don’t have to be in the middle of a crisis to benefit from this work. In fact, if that is the case, and you are going through an active break up or a rupture, I would likely suggest we start with grounding and stabilization work to help you through what’s going on immediately, to give your nervous system enough room to eventually do the deeper relational exploration (we don’t teach you how to swim when you are drowning, same principle here).
The therapeutic relationship itself is part of the work. Little details about what you share, what you hold back, when you go quiet, what you notice about safety and trust between us, is information about you. I won’t analyze everything you do or make everything about you and me in session, but I will pay attention to the details (i.e. when a pattern you’re trying to work on shows up in the therapy room) and bring them to your attention when it seems useful.
My work with relational patterns draws on several modalities that I've found to be genuinely effective for this kind of exploration:
IFS (Internal Family Systems / parts work) helps us understand the different parts of you that developed different relational strategies: the part that shuts down to stay safe, the part that doesn’t trust “safety”, the part that gives endlessly to avoid being left behind.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) can be helpful for processing the specific experiences that are still being held in your body as active threat, and old events that your nervous system hasn't yet registered as over.
Narrative therapy can help you examine the stories you've inherited about what relationships are supposed to look like, where those stories came from, and whether those stories are yours or someone else’s.
In our work together, you can expect to:
Develop a clearer understanding of your relational patterns, where they came from, how they show up, and which parts you want to unburden
Build more capacity to stay present in difficult conversations without shutting down, escalating, or saying things you don't mean
Understand how your cultural background, family of origin, and identity have shaped the way you give and receive care, and make more conscious choices in your relationships in the future
Heal from relational losses that have been sitting unprocessed, including ones that happened a long time ago or ones you've been told "oh you still care about that?" about
Soften relational defenses that once protected you: not by getting rid of them, but by having more choice about when to use them
Build a sense of your identity and self-worth that isn't dependent on how any one person sees you
Experience more ease, honesty, and genuine connection in the relationships that matter most
Set and hold boundaries with family members, partners, and friends in ways that honor your values while still maintaining compassion and care
Who I work with
I offer individual attachment therapy to adults via telehealth to adults across New York state. My practice has a particular focus on queer adults, BIPOC and AAPI clients, immigrants and first and second generation folks, and helping professionals: people whose relational lives are shaped by layers of context that mainstream therapy often misses.
If you’re navigating questions of family loyalty alongside questions of identity, if you’ve been the person in your family or community who holds things together, if you’ve learned to be self sufficient in ways that have started to cost you, I hear you, and I’d love to talk further to see if we could be a good fit.