Kristie.

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attachment-based therapy in New York

for patterns that started before you had words for them and are still running the show.

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you're here because

The way you love, trust, need, withdraw, cling, or shut down didn't start in your current relationship.

It started a long time ago, in relationships you didn’t choose, before you had the language or the perspective to understand what was happening to you.

Those early experiences didn’t just shape your memories. They shaped your nervous system by determining what feels safe, what feels dangerous, what closeness means, what you can expect from the people you let in. And that template, built so early it feels like just who you are, is often still running in your relationships, your work, the way you respond when someone gets close or pulls away.

Attachment-based therapy goes to where the pattern started. Not to relive it, but to finally understand it

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WHAT IT IS

attachment-based therapy in new york city

Attachment theory describes how our earliest relationships, usually with parents or primary caregivers, shape our expectations about closeness, safety, and connection for the rest of our lives. If those early relationships were consistent and responsive, we tend to develop a secure foundation: a basic trust that closeness is safe and that we’re worth showing up for. If those relationships were inconsistent, overwhelming, neglectful, or unpredictable, we tend to develop other strategies such as ways of managing closeness that made sense given what we experienced, even if they cause problems now.

Attachment-based therapy works with these patterns directly. It looks at how your early experiences shaped your “attachment style” which is really just the characteristic way you approach closeness, conflict, need, and distance, and helps you understand both where that style came from and what it would take to develop more flexibility within it.

This isn’t about blaming parents or relitigating childhood. Most attachment patterns developed as the most adaptive response available at the time, given what was happening. The work is about understanding the pattern with enough clarity and compassion that it stops running automatically so you have more choice in how you show up now.

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WHO IT HELPS

what attachment-based therapy works well for

Attachment-based therapy is foundational for anything involving how you connect with, or disconnect from, other people.

  • For relationship anxiety, attachment-based therapy is often the core of the work. Whether your pattern looks anxious (i.e. pursuing, over-checking, needing reassurance) or avoidant (i.e. withdrawing, needing space, struggling with vulnerability), both are attachment strategies that developed for reasons. Understanding those reasons is usually the fastest path to having more choice in how you show up now.

     

  • For people-pleasing and boundaries, attachment-based therapy helps trace the pattern back to its origins often a relationship where your needs were secondary, where love felt conditional, or where being agreeable was the safest available strategy. That history doesn’t excuse the pattern, but it makes it make sense and patterns that make sense are easier to change than patterns that just feel like character flaws.

     

  • For family estrangement, attachment-based therapy holds the reality that family relationships, even harmful ones, are attachment relationships, and that the loss of them activates real attachment grief. This work doesn’t ask you to minimize that grief or rush through it. It makes room for it.

     

  • For identity and life transitions, attachment-based therapy is useful because so much of identity is built in relationship to caregivers, to family systems, to the people who first told you who you were. Transitions often require examining those early messages and figuring out which ones are still true and which ones you’re ready to leave behind.

     

  • For perfectionism and self-worth, attachment-based therapy examines the connection between early experiences of approval and your current relationship to achievement specifically, the possibility that the drive to be excellent developed as a strategy for securing love or safety that felt conditional.
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HOW I USE IT

attachment-based therapy in nyc through an intersectional lens

I work with attachment from an intersectional and identity-affirming framework which means I look at attachment patterns not just as individual or family-level phenomena, but as patterns shaped by culture, immigration history, and systems of power.

Standard attachment theory was developed primarily in Western contexts and doesn’t always account for family structures, cultural values, and relational norms that differ from that frame. A pattern that looks “anxious” or “avoidant” through a narrow lens might actually be a reasonable adaptation to a specific cultural or familial context. I hold that complexity.

  • For first-generation and immigrant clients, attachment patterns are often shaped by family systems under significant stress such as immigration, displacement, intergenerational trauma, parents who were themselves managing more than anyone should have to. Understanding attachment in this context means understanding it within the larger story of what your family was navigating, not just within your individual relationship to your parents.
  • For Asian American clients, attachment-based therapy often involves examining family systems where love was expressed through provision, sacrifice, and high expectation rather than through emotional attunement or physical affection and understanding how that shapes adult attachment without pathologizing the family system that produced it.
  • For queer clients, attachment-based therapy often involves working with the attachment injuries that come from family relationships that couldn’t fully accept who you are and understanding how those injuries shape trust, vulnerability, and closeness in adult relationships, including relationships where the conditions that created the injury no longer apply.

Attachment-based therapy works best in combination with approaches that address the present-day expression of these patterns. I typically pair it with relational therapy, which uses our relationship as a place to experience and practice different attachment dynamics in real time, cognitive behavioral therapy to work with the beliefs attachment patterns generate, dialectical behavior therapy for managing the emotional intensity that attachment work can surface, and mindfulness-based approaches to build the capacity to notice attachment patterns as they’re happening.

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meet your mindfulness therapist in nyc

hi, i'm kristie

a licensed therapist, supervisor, and consultant based in New York.

The patterns that start early are the ones I’m most interested in. Not to relitigate the past, but because understanding where something began is often what makes it possible to finally do something different with it now. I’ve done this work in my own life, and I bring that into the room.

learn more about me →
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private practice consultant smiling on a couch

WHAT CHANGES

what shifts when attachment-based therapy is working

The shifts in attachment work tend to be foundational. They don’t just change one relationship, they change your relationship to relationships.

You start to understand your own patterns with more compassion and less judgment. The anxious checking, the need for space, the difficulty of trusting stop feeling like flaws and start feeling like a logic that makes sense once you understand where it came from.

The patterns become more flexible. You’re not erasing your attachment style, you just develop more range within it. The anxious person develops more capacity to tolerate uncertainty. The avoidant person develops more capacity to stay present when things get close.

Relationships start to feel less like minefields. The hypervigilance, which is the constant scanning for signs of withdrawal or rejection, starts to quiet because you trust yourself more in the moments that used to feel dangerous.

And over time, the relationships you’re in, or the ones you choose going forward, start to reflect more of what you actually want, rather than what your early experiences taught you to expect or accept.

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fees

investment

Different challenges require different levels of support. Whether you’re exploring therapy for the first time, looking for ongoing support, or seeking focused guidance around a specific issue, there are multiple ways we can work together.

Therapy Session (45 Mins): Ongoing therapy designed to help you navigate challenges, understand patterns, strengthen relationships, and create meaningful change over time.

Therapy Intensive (90 Mins): An extended session that allows us to explore a specific issue in greater depth, helping you gain clarity and make progress without feeling rushed.

VIP Sprint (3 Hrs): A highly focused, deep-dive experience designed for people facing a significant challenge, transition, or decision. Together, we’ll identify what’s keeping you stuck, uncover underlying patterns, and create a clear path forward.

Session

$375

45 minutes

Intensive

$750

90 minutes

vip sprint

$1500

180 minutes

New here or not sure what you need?
I offer a free 15 min chat to talk through what you’re looking for and figure out whether this is a good fit.

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FAQs

Some, but not in the way that might sound. We’re not relitigating the past for its own sake. If we were to talk about your childhood, we would be using it to understand patterns that are active now. The focus stays on what’s useful for your present life, even when the material comes from earlier experiences.
Yes. Attachment patterns aren’t only about overtly difficult relationships. Even generally positive family relationships can produce attachment patterns that don’t serve you now — patterns around independence, emotional expression, conflict, or closeness that made sense in that family system and may not fit the relationships you’re building now.
Attachment styles are more flexible than they’re sometimes presented. The research on this is genuinely encouraging. People develop more secure patterns through relationships (including therapeutic ones) that provide what was missing the first time around. You’re not stuck. The pattern can shift.
I am an out-of-network provider, which means I do not have a contract with insurance companies. If you have out-of-network benefits, you may be eligible for partial reimbursement for therapy sessions. Many PPO and POS plans offer out-of-network mental health benefits, though coverage varies by plan. As a courtesy, I am happy to conduct an initial benefits verification. However, because insurance information can change and coverage decisions are ultimately made by the insurance company, I strongly encourage clients to contact their insurance provider directly to confirm their out-of-network mental health benefits before beginning therapy.
After each session, I can provide a superbill that you may submit to your insurance company for reimbursement. Depending on your insurance plan, I may also be able to offer courtesy billing. Please note that reimbursement amounts, deductibles, claim approval, and eligibility are determined entirely by your insurance company.
I choose to remain out of network so that treatment decisions can be guided by your needs rather than insurance requirements. Insurance companies often require a mental health diagnosis, may request access to clinical information, and can place limitations on treatment based on their definition of medical necessity. Remaining out of network allows for greater privacy, flexibility, and autonomy in our work together.
I don’t offer a sliding scale. If cost is a barrier, I’m happy to talk through options during our consultation including whether working with a supervised clinician at Uncover Mental Health Counseling might be a good fit.
All sessions are conducted virtually via a secure HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform. Virtual therapy allows you to access support from the comfort and privacy of your own space without the need to commute. As long as you are physically located in New York at the time of your session, we can meet wherever is most convenient for you.
Because appointment times are reserved specifically for you, I require at least 48 hours’ notice for cancellations or rescheduling requests. Appointments canceled with less than 48 hours’ notice, as well as missed appointments, will be charged the full session fee. This policy helps ensure that appointment times remain available for clients who need them and allows me to maintain a consistent and sustainable practice. If an unexpected situation arises, please reach out as soon as possible.