Relationship & Attachment Therapy in NYC and across New York & Florida

When relationships feel confusing or painful

You may find yourself repeating patterns you don’t fully understand. You want closeness yet feel overwhelmed when you get it. You crave reassurance but struggle to trust it. You withdraw when hurt, or alternatively pursue when anxious.

Relationships may feel disproportionately activating. You might ask yourself:

  • Why does this keep happening?

  • Why do I react this way?

  • Why do I feel so much, or sometimes so little?

For many people, these patterns are rooted in early attachment experiences, relational trauma, or environments where emotional needs were unmet, unpredictable, or unsafe.

Relationship struggles can also intensify during periods of grief, loss, or major life transition, moments when old attachment wounds are often reactivated.

What this can look like

These patterns show up differently for different people. You might find yourself:

  • Pulling away from people you care about when things feel too close, sometimes showing up as chronic social isolation that's hard to explain or reverse on your own

  • Staying in relationships that don’t feel good because leaving feels worse

  • Feeling a persistent anxiety in dating or partnership that you can’t quite explain

  • Struggling to ask for what you need or feeling ashamed that you need it at all

  • Being drawn to people who are emotionally unavailable, and not fully understanding why

  • Moving through conflict in ways that leave both you and the other person feeling worse

  • Finding sexual intimacy complicated, distant, or fraught

These patterns are not flaws. They reflect how you’ve had to adapt to your early attachment figures, relational environments, and life experiences.

For some, burnout or chronic stress can further erode relational capacity, making it harder to stay emotionally present, connected, or open in partnership.

When one partner reaches and the other retreats

Many of the relationship patterns people bring into this work follow a recognizable shape: one partner moves toward connection when things feel uncertain, while the other moves away. This isn't a compatibility problem or a sign the relationship is doomed. It's two nervous systems that learned different strategies for staying safe in closeness.

If you find yourself needing frequent reassurance, reading into silence, or feeling calm only once you've confirmed the relationship is secure, that's often described as an anxious attachment pattern. If you find yourself needing space when things intensify, feeling crowded by a partner's need for closeness, or noticing discomfort when someone depends on you, that's often described as an avoidant attachment pattern. Many relationships that feel stuck in a push-pull cycle involve exactly this combination — sometimes called an anxious-avoidant dynamic.

These patterns don't just coexist by accident. They tend to find and intensify each other. The more one partner pursues, the more the other retreats; the more one retreats, the more urgently the other pursues. Neither person is doing something wrong. Both are responding to old, learned associations between closeness and danger.

A question I sometimes ask clients working through this: if your partner never changed, not one thing, how would you actually feel about the relationship? The answer often reveals whether the relationship is stable or whether milestones and reassurance-seeking have been substituting for real security.

Therapy for anxious, avoidant and disorganized attachment

Many people who come to me already have a sense of their attachment style, often from something they’ve read. The label can be a useful starting point, though what we work with is how the pattern actually shows up in your relationships, in your body, and in the room between us.

Anxious attachment

If you find yourself reaching for reassurance, reading into silence, or only feeling calm once you’ve heard back, therapy can help you understand what that alarm is responding to, so it doesn’t have to run the relationship.

Avoidant and dismissive-avoidant attachment

Many people looking for a therapist for avoidant attachment learned early to rely on themselves, because needing others didn’t feel safe. In therapy we can look at what that self-reliance protects, at a pace that doesn’t feel like being pushed into closeness. I’ve written more about it in Therapy for Avoidant Attachment: When Needing People Didn’t Feel Safe.

Disorganized (fearful avoidant) attachment

Wanting closeness and fearing it at the same time can be especially confusing, for you and for the people close to you. I’ve written more about it in Disorganized Attachment Style: Wanting Closeness and Fearing It at the Same Time.

Over time, many people move toward what researchers call “earned security,” where closeness feels less like a risk and more like something you can rest in.

A relational, psychodynamic and somatic approach

Because therapy is itself a relationship, we pay attention to how familiar dynamics show up in the room between us - not just as something to talk about but as something to actually work with in real time.

We explore how early experiences shaped your sense of what’s safe in relationships, what you learned to expect from others, and what you learned to hide or suppress in order to stay connected. We look at the beliefs you hold about your own worth and lovability, often ones you’ve never put into words. And we pay attention to how all of this gets expressed through your body using somatic therapy - the tightness, tension, numbness, disconnection - because these patterns are physiological just as much as they are psychological.

This work often includes understanding the impact of trauma on how safe closeness feels today.

For couples, I integrate attachment-based and Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) to help partners understand each other beneath the defensiveness that may currently be getting in the way of real closeness.

Change happens not just through insight, but through experiencing a different kind of relational dynamic: one that prioritizes authenticity, emotional safety, and transparency.

Therapy for people pleasing

For many people, people pleasing is an important part of the puzzle when it comes to relationships and attachment. It often started as a way to stay safe, where you’ve learned to read the room, smooth things over, become whoever the moment required. It can look like kindness or flexibility from the outside, and feel like exhaustion and resentment on the inside. In therapy we look at where that pattern came from and what it protects, so that saying no, or simply having a preference, can start to feel less dangerous.

Identity & Belonging

My work is LGBTQ+ affirming, and I support individuals and couples exploring how identity, sexuality, and belonging intersect with relational patterns and attachment experiences. This includes people navigating non-monogamy and polyamory, where questions of attachment, jealousy, boundaries, and self-definition often come to the foreground. If you're looking for a polyamory therapist who understands attachment dynamics specifically, this is a core part of my practice.

Whether navigating dating, partnership, family relationships, or questions of self-definition, therapy offers a space where these experiences can be explored without judgment.

If you’re ready to explore your relationship patterns at their roots, I’d welcome the chance to connect.

Let's Connect

Common questions about relationships and attachment

  • It can, but not by one partner "fixing" the other. It requires both people understanding their own pattern well enough to respond differently in the moments that usually trigger it — the anxious partner tolerating uncertainty without demanding immediate reassurance, the avoidant partner staying present with closeness instead of creating distance. That's slower and harder than it sounds, but it's very possible with real awareness on both sides.

  • Yes. Fearful-avoidant attachment, also called “disorganized” attachment, usually means wanting closeness and fearing it at the same time. You might pull someone in and then push them away, or feel unsafe both alone and in a relationship. This pattern often develops when the people a child depended on were also a source of fear or unpredictability.

    In my work, I combine relational psychodynamic therapy with Emotionally Focused Therapy, IFS, somatic therapy, and EMDR when it fits. We look at where the pattern came from, notice how it shows up in your body and your relationships, and use the therapy relationship itself as a steady place to experience something different. Over time, many people develop what’s called “earned secure” attachment: a sense of safety in closeness that wasn’t there to begin with. I’ve written more about this in Disorganized Attachment Style

  • Avoidant attachment is a way of handling closeness by keeping some distance from it. It can look like independence, but it's often protecting a fear of closeness that once wasn't safe to feel. Therapy can help, though it tends to happen slowly and through the relationship with the therapist: letting some vulnerability be seen and finding that the relationship holds is what makes it possible to rely on people outside the room. You can read more in my post on therapy for avoidant attachment.

  • Attachment patterns tend to show up as recurring dynamics rather than one-time problems — the pull to withdraw when someone gets too close, the reassurance that lands but doesn't stick, the difficulty trusting a relationship even when there's no clear threat. When the same thing keeps happening across different relationships, that's usually a signal worth following.

  • Often yes, and sometimes being outside a relationship creates more room to understand these patterns without the pressure of managing them in real time. A lot of people do this work between relationships and find it fundamentally changes how they show up when they enter the next one.

  • Individual therapy focuses inward: your history, your patterns, your internal experience of relationships. Couples therapy works with the dynamic between two people in the room together. Both are valuable and address different things. Some people do both at the same time; others start with one and add the other later.

  • Yes. I work with couples and individuals navigating open relationships, ethical non-monogamy, and polyamory. The attachment questions around jealousy, security, boundaries, and self-definition come up in non-monogamous structures — those are as welcome here as anything else.

  • These patterns are among the most ingrained things about us. They’re formed early, reinforced over years and often show up across multiple relationships. Change is possible, but it takes time. Most people notice something shifting within a few months. Deeper change tends to emerge over time.