Therapy for Lawyers & Legal Professionals in New York City
When your career becomes your identity
Working in the legal profession can be intellectually rigorous, high-stakes, and emotionally demanding.
You may seem composed, capable, and successful on the outside, while internally feeling pressure that rarely turns off. You may be trying to find a way to make this career sustainable, or you’re wondering whether to make a chance.
Many attorneys and legal professionals I work with find themselves navigating chronic stress and burnout, perfectionism and fear of failure, feeling ashamed of needing help, difficulty disconnecting from work, strain on relationships, and a quiet but persistent question: who am I outside of what I do?
The legal field often rewards endurance, self-sacrifice, and emotional suppression. Over time, this can create distance from your own emotional life.
A therapist who understands legal culture
Before becoming a psychotherapist, I practiced corporate law after earning my JD from Columbia Law School.
This experience gives me firsthand understanding of:
Billable hour pressure
Firm hierarchy and evaluation culture
Performance-based self-worth
Identity fusion with professional success
The normalization of being constantly “on”
You don’t have to translate your work environment or professional language in therapy. We can begin from a place of shared understanding.
Beyond burnout: identity, relationships, and emotional cost
While many legal professionals initially seek therapy for burnout, the work often opens into deeper exploration.
You may find it difficult to access your emotions outside of work, or notice a numbness that doesn't fully lift even when the pressure eases. Anxiety that followed you home from the office starts to feel like just how you are. Relationships suffer in ways that are hard to attribute to any single cause. And beneath all of it, there may be guilt about wanting a different pace, about having needs at all.
For some, professional pressure intersects with earlier relational patterns: perfectionism, conditional approval, or the belief that worth must be earned through performance. The drive that made you successful didn't come from nowhere, and understanding where it came from can change your relationship to it.
A depth-oriented approach
My work is relational, psychodynamic, and trauma-informed.
Rather than focusing solely on stress management, we explore the emotional meaning of your work, how your career has shaped your sense of identity, the internalized expectations and self-criticism that drive you, and how constant pressure lives in the body as well as the mind. We look at relationship patterns inside and outside the workplace, including the ones that predate your legal career.
This isn’t performance-enhancement therapy or a space for optimizing productivity. It’s a place to slow down and understand what’s happening beneath the surface.
When career stress connects to earlier experiences
For some legal professionals, workplace strain resonates with something older: high expectations in family systems, emotional neglect or conditional approval, pressure to succeed as a means of belonging, or trauma histories that have been effectively masked by high functioning.
Therapy offers a place to understand how these layers interact. We won’t be pathologize ambition or suggest that success itself is the problem. Instead, we’ll create room for a more sustainable and honest way of living.
Therapy that holds the whole person
Legal professionals come to therapy for many reasons, including: burnout and chronic stress, relationship challenges, trauma recovery, grief or life transitions, and questions around identity or purpose. Career is often where the conversation begins, but rarely where it ends..
If you’re a legal professional seeking therapy in New York, I’d welcome the chance to connect.
This work typically takes place within individual therapy, though I also work with couples where relevant.