therapy for identity & life transitions in New York
for the people who got there and felt nothing
you're here because
Something that was supposed to feel like arrival felt like loss instead
A relationship ended. A career dissolved. They moved to New York or away from it. They came out. A parent got sick.
Others come in with something harder to name. Nothing dramatic happened. Everything is technically fine. But there’s a growing gap between who they are and who they’ve been performing and it’s getting harder to close.
Both of those people end up in the same place.
THE CHALLENGE
what they're navigating
New York has a way of accelerating everything. The pace of it, the scale of it, the sheer density of people all performing competence at the same time. This makes it easy to keep moving without ever stopping to ask whether you’re moving toward something or just away from stillness.
Most people who come to me for identity and transition work aren’t in crisis. They’re functioning. They’re often succeeding by every external measure. But something has quietly shifted, or loudly crashed, and the strategies that carried them here aren’t carrying them anymore.
Maybe it looks like this:
- You’ve hit a milestone you worked toward for years and felt nothing when you got there. The promotion, the relationship, the apartment in the right neighborhood and underneath it, an unsettling quiet.
- Or something ended and you realize you don’t know who you are without it. The relationship, the job, the version of yourself you’d been building since you were twenty-two.
- Or you moved to New York as one person and you’re slowly becoming someone else and the people back home don’t recognize you, and you’re not sure you recognize yourself either.
- Or you came out, or you’re still coming out, and you’re realizing that the identity work doesn’t end with the announcement. It’s just beginning.
- Or you’ve spent so long adapting to this city, to your family, to what’s expected of a person who looks like you and came from where you came from that you’ve lost the thread back to what was actually yours.
The common thread isn’t the event. It’s the feeling underneath it: who am I now, and what do I actually want?
MEET YOUR NYC THERAPIST
hi, I'm Kristie!
I’m a licensed therapist, supervisor, and consultant based in New York.
I specialize in identity, transitions, and the patterns that keep people stuck between who they were and who they’re trying to become. I work from an intersectional, culturally responsive lens which means I don’t separate your identity from your history, or your patterns from the world that shaped them.
I’m a first-generation, queer Asian American woman who has navigated every version of this work personally. The questions I bring into the room with clients are the same questions I’ve had to sit with myself.
WHO I WORK WITH
New Yorkers who are in the middle of becoming
You came to New York to build something whether it’s a career, a life, a version of yourself that felt more true. You're building it. And somewhere in the building, you've lost track of whether it's actually yours or just the next version of what you thought you were supposed to want. New York makes this particular kind of lostness hard to see. The exhaustion looks like ambition. The disconnection looks like focus. And because everyone around you is running on the same fuel, there's no one to notice the gap including you. This work is for people at that gap. People who are functioning, capable, often successful, and quietly wondering if this is actually what they wanted, or just what they were very good at becoming. I have special interest in the following population:
Asian Americans & people of color
You've spent years learning to navigate spaces that required you to leave parts of yourself at the door. You got good at it. The cost of being good at it is what brings you here. It’s the slow accumulation of a self that was built for other people's comfort, and the growing sense that it no longer fits.
queer & LGBTQ+ adults
Coming out is a beginning, not an ending. What comes after such as building a life that reflects who you actually are, renegotiating relationships, figuring out what you want now that you've stopped performing what everyone else needed, that's the longer work. And it doesn't come with a map.
first-generation Americans & immigrants
identity and transition work often sits at the intersection of two worlds between the one your family built their hopes around and the one you're actually living in. New York gave you space to become more fully yourself. It also made the distance from home more complicated, and the grief of that distance harder to name.
WHAT WE WORK ON
the patterns that surface in transitions
Identity transitions don’t usually arrive alone. They tend to surface other things and patterns that have been running quietly in the background, suddenly visible because the context that made them invisible has changed.
- For many people, a transition is the first time they notice how tightly their sense of self is wrapped around what they do. When the doing changes, when the career shifts, the relationship ends, the role dissolves, the question of who you actually are becomes urgent. This is often where perfectionism and self-worth work begins: not as a problem of standards, but as a question of identity. Who are you when you’re not achieving?
- For others, the transition surfaces the relational patterns that have always been there. The way you adjust yourself in relationships to avoid conflict, to keep people close, or to manage how you’re perceived. Relationship anxiety often shows up here. You may feel the fear that if you change, the people who love you won’t follow. Sometimes they don’t. And that grief is so real.
- Underneath many identity transitions is a longer history of people-pleasing and over-functioning where you’ve learned early that belonging required becoming whoever the room needed you to be. Transitions make that visible because the room has changed and the old performance no longer works.
- For first-generation, immigrant, and LGBTQ+ clients especially, transitions often surface family estrangement which is the complicated grief of distance from family, chosen or unchosen, and the identity work of figuring out who you are when you’re no longer performing for the people who first defined you.
And underneath all of it, for many people, is a version of existential dread and meaning-making. The quiet question that transitions make loud: what is all of this actually for, and am I living in a way that reflects what I actually believe?
We work with what comes up. The transition is usually the door. What’s behind it is where the real work lives.
HOW I WORK
the therapeutic approaches I draw from
My foundational lens is intersectional and identity-affirming therapy which means I look at the full context of who you are, including your race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and immigration history. Identity transitions cannot be understood in isolation from the world that shaped the identity in the first place.
Within that framework I draw from several approaches depending on what you’re working on and where you are in the process.
intersectional & identity-affirming therapy
My foundational lens. I look at the full context of who you are — your race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and immigration history. You cannot fully understand why someone developed the patterns they did without understanding the world that shaped them.
Cognitive behavioral therapy
helps identify the specific thought patterns and beliefs that are keeping you stuck whether it’s the stories about yourself that feel like facts or the predictions about what will happen if you change. Once those are visible, we can work with them directly rather than around them.
dialectical behavior therapy
provides concrete skills for managing emotional intensity, tolerating distress, and navigating relationships with more clarity and less reactivity — especially useful in moments where insight alone isn't enough.
Attachment-based therapy
examines how your earliest relationships shaped the way you connect, trust, and protect yourself, and how those patterns show up in the transitions you’re navigating now. For people in the middle of relational transitions especially, this is often where the most important work happens.
Relational therapy
uses our relationship itself as part of the work. How you show up in sessions, what you avoid, what you reach for, how you handle being seen, tends to reflect how you show up everywhere else. That information is useful.
Mindfulness-based therapy
WHAT SESSIONS LOOK LIKE
what working together looks like
The first session is mostly orientation. I want to understand what brought you here, what you’ve already tried, and what you’re hoping changes. I ask a lot of questions. You don’t need to have it figured out before we start.
After that, the work is different for everyone but there’s usually a pattern to how it unfolds. We find the thread. We trace it back. We figure out where the pattern came from and what it’s been protecting you from. And then we start to work with it differently not just in conversation, but in the moments in your life where it actually shows up.
I’m quite direct so if I see something, I’ll name it. I’m not interested in circling a thing forever. I’d rather say it plainly and figure out together what to do with it.
WHAT CHANGES
what's different after this work
The shifts that happen in identity and transition work tend to be quieter than people expect and more durable.
You stop waking up with the low-level sense that something is wrong without being able to name what it is. The decisions that used to feel loaded start to feel clearer. This is not because the options are simpler, but because you know more about what you actually want. You stop performing continuity in relationships that no longer fit and start having the conversations that actually need to happen.
The version of you that arrives on the other side of this isn’t unrecognizable. It’s more recognizable and closer to the thing that was always there underneath the adaptations.
New York stops feeling like a place you have to keep proving yourself in. It starts feeling like somewhere you actually live.
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 Minutes): Ongoing therapy designed to help you navigate challenges, understand patterns, strengthen relationships, and create meaningful change over time.
Therapy Intensive (90 Minutes): 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 Hours): 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.
FAQs
is this therapy right for me if I'm not sure what I'm transitioning from or to?
Yes, that uncertainty is often exactly where the work begins. You don’t need to have it figured out. Most people who come in for identity work don’t have a clear before and after. They have a feeling that something has shifted and they’re not sure yet what it means.