About Me
I am a licensed psychologist with 25+ years of experience in assessment, treatment, training, and supervision. I have always enjoyed being helpful to others and using my rather sunny personality to brighten other people’s lives. Reflecting upon my training and main factors that have shaped my work I believe that my constant striving for self-improvement and hard psychological work on myself have been most influential in who I am today as a person and psychologist. I have always put great emphasis on rigorous formal training when it comes to health care and mental health. However, the true art of therapy reveals itself in the integration of all academic knowledge and skills in a compassionate personality.
After receiving my first advanced degree in psychology from Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg, Germany in 1994, I helped building an outpatient clinic for heroin users and their families. Additional training included Rogerian person-centered psychotherapy and family systems therapy.
After relocating to NYC in the late ‘90s, I received my Master’s of Science and Doctor of Psychology from Long Island University, C.W. Post. My training in the US was broad and thorough at the same time and included psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, and family systems approaches as well as organizational change management and coaching in various corporate environments. I have trained and worked in the city’s hospital system for over ten years and became the Director of Psychology Internship Training at Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital in 2006. I redesigned the training curriculum and achieved national accreditation for my program by the American Psychological Association. For the next six years, I enjoyed training and supervising aspiring psychologists in their final pre-doctoral year of training. In 2008, I was promoted to Director of Psychology for the department and thus expanded my professional horizon even further into managing mental health services, training and supervising psychologists and other mental health professionals as well as educating and coaching administrators and health care workers of all disciplines.
I am now focusing my work on individual and couples therapy in private practice. I have great passion for my work and believe that the 25 years of varied experience in assessment, treatment, training, and supervision in the field have helped me to integrate a broad range of techniques into a unique psychotherapeutic approach. I blend aspects from various experiential dynamic therapies (i.e., Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems). As a gay therapist in NYC, I specialize in helping the LGBTQ+ community with issues around dating and sexuality (e.g.; sexual identity, coming out, sexual performance etc.).