relational therapy in New York
for the person who understands their patterns everywhere except in the room where they're happening.
you're here because
You can see it afterward.
In the clarity of the drive home, in the three-day retrospective, in the conversation you have with yourself at midnight about what you should have said or done or been. The pattern is visible in hindsight. What’s harder is catching it in real time in the conversation, in the moment, before it’s already produced the familiar outcome.
Relational therapy works differently than most approaches. Rather than only talking about the patterns in your life, it uses what happens between us in the room, in real time as the place where the patterns become visible, workable, and changeable. The relationship isn’t just the container for the therapy. It’s part of the work itself.
WHAT IT IS
relational therapy in new york city
Relational therapy is built on a core observation: the patterns that cause the most suffering in people’s lives are fundamentally patterns of relating to other people, to intimacy, to conflict, to being known. And those patterns are most visible, and most workable, not when you’re talking about them abstractly but when they’re actually happening.
In relational therapy, the therapeutic relationship itself becomes a place to notice and work with how you show up. How you present yourself in our first session. What you assume about me. Whether you manage my reactions or let me have them. Whether you perform being a good client or let yourself be uncertain and unpolished. How you handle disagreement, feedback, rupture, and repair.
None of this is incidental. It’s information about how you move through relationships more broadly. And because it’s happening in real time rather than being reconstructed from memory, we can work with it directly.
This doesn’t mean therapy becomes the focus at the expense of your actual life. It means that what happens between us becomes a window into what happens everywhere else and a place to practice doing it differently.
WHO IT HELPS
what relational therapy in nyc works well for
Relational therapy is particularly useful when the patterns that are causing problems are relational at their core when the issue isn’t just what you think or feel but how you show up with other people.
- For relationship anxiety, relational therapy is often the most direct path through. The anxious attachment patterns such as the hypervigilance, the shape-shifting, the way you manage closeness and distance, will show up in our relationship too. When they do, we can look at them together in real time rather than reconstructing them from memory. That immediacy changes what’s possible.
- For people-pleasing and boundaries, the therapeutic relationship becomes a practice ground. If you’re someone who manages how you’re perceived, who performs being a good client, who can’t let me be disappointed in you, that will happen in our sessions. Noticing it there, together, is often more useful than talking about it abstractly for months.
- For family estrangement, relational therapy provides something that estrangement often takes away, the experience of being genuinely known and accepted without conditions. For people whose primary relational experience has been managing other people’s needs or performing for their approval, the experience of a relationship that doesn’t require that is both unfamiliar and orienting.
- For identity and life transitions, relational therapy is useful because transitions are fundamentally relational. They change how you relate to the people around you, to the roles you’ve held, to the version of yourself that others have known. Using our relationship as a mirror for those changes gives you real-time information about who you’re becoming.
For perfectionism and self-worth, what happens between us is often where perfectionism is most visible in the performing, the managing, the anxiety about being evaluated. Working with it directly in the relationship tends to be more effective than examining it abstractly.
HOW I USE IT
relational therapy through an intersectional lens
I practice relational therapy from an intersectional and identity-affirming framework which means I don’t treat the patterns that show up in our relationship as simply personal or psychological. I’m interested in the cultural, familial, and social context that shaped how you learned to relate.
For most people, the relational patterns we work with weren’t arbitrary. They developed in specific contexts in the families, communities, cultural systems, that shaped what was safe, what was required, and what the cost of relating differently might have been. Understanding that context is part of understanding the pattern.
- For first-generation and immigrant clients, the way you show up in relationships often reflects the particular complexity of navigating between worlds such as the code-switching, the careful management of how much of yourself is visible, the attunement to power dynamics that comes from years of learning to read rooms. In our relationship, that shows up too and we can work with it there.
- For Asian American clients, relational therapy often surfaces the specific ways that emotional expression and relational directness were or weren’t modeled, and how that shapes the way you show up in close relationships now. The experience of being in a relationship where your full emotional experience is welcomed rather than managed can be genuinely novel. That novelty is part of what makes it useful.
- For queer clients, relational therapy provides a specific kind of safety that isn’t always available such as the experience of being known across multiple dimensions of identity without having to manage how that’s received. For people who learned early that being fully seen was risky, a relationship where that’s genuinely not the case is both healing and disorienting in the best way.
Relational therapy works best when it’s integrated with approaches that address the cognitive and skill-based dimensions of change. I typically pair it with attachment-based therapy to understand the origins of the relational patterns, cognitive behavioral therapy to work with the beliefs that maintain them, dialectical behavior therapy for the skill-building that relational work alone sometimes lacks, and mindfulness-based approaches to build the awareness that makes working with real-time relational experience possible.
meet your mindfulness therapist in nyc
hi, i'm kristie
a licensed therapist, supervisor, and consultant based in New York.
I take the relationship in the room seriously, both as a place where patterns become visible and as a place where something different becomes possible. I’m direct, I notice what’s happening between us, and I bring my own presence into the work rather than staying behind glass.
WHAT CHANGES
what shifts when relational therapy is working
The shifts in relational therapy tend to feel like gaining access to yourself in the moments that used to be automatic.
You start to notice what you’re doing in relationships while you’re doing it such as the managing, the performing, the adjusting, rather than only in retrospect. That noticing, even when it doesn’t immediately change the behavior, is the beginning of having a choice.
The experience of being known (genuinely known, not just understood) starts to feel more available. In our work first, and then, often, in the relationships outside it. What becomes possible in a relationship where you’re not performing tends to generalize over time.
Repair becomes something you can do. The experience of navigating rupture in our relationship, of something going sideways and then being addressed and worked through, provides a template for doing that in other relationships. That template, for many people, is something they’ve never had.
The relationships in your life start to feel more real. Less managed, less curated, less like performances of connection. More like actual contact. That’s what this work is for.
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.
