New York City · Westchester · Long Island · New York State
100% Telehealth
The goal is to become aware. Of the patterns, the resistance, the stories running beneath the surface. That awareness — not the fixing — is what creates space for something to genuinely change.
"Most of what runs your life is running beneath the surface. Therapy is the practice of bringing it into the light."— New York State of Mind
They just know something isn't sitting right. A feeling they can't name, a pattern they keep returning to, a version of their life that isn't quite matching the one they imagined. That's a reasonable place to start. We've worked with people who arrived knowing exactly what they needed and people who had no idea. Both are fine.
When you work with someone at NYSOM, you're working with a real therapist — someone who listens without agenda, notices what you don't say, and shows up consistently. The relationship is not incidental to the work. It is the work.
Our therapists live and practice in New York. They understand this city — not as observers, but as people who ride the same trains, navigate the same pressures, and carry the same complicated affection for this place that you do.
Let's be honest — New Yorkers are a special breed. Some of the most brilliant, creative, hardworking, and resilient people on the planet call this city home. Extraordinarily diverse, relentlessly driven, and endlessly complex — New York doesn't just attract extraordinary people, it creates them.
And we know it. (We're not exactly known for our humility.)
But that same intensity comes at a cost. Because here's the other thing about New Yorkers — we are also, and there's really no delicate way to put this, a lot. Neurotic, self-critical, overstimulated, and carrying approximately seventeen things we probably should have talked to someone about years ago.
And honestly? We've earned it. New Yorkers have weathered things most people only read about — September 11th, the height of a global pandemic that hit our streets harder than almost anywhere else on earth, and the daily weight of living in one of the most stimulating, demanding environments in the world. The noise, the pace, the pressure, the beauty, the chaos — it accumulates in ways that are easy to dismiss and hard to put down.
But here's what we also believe — and this is important: the very thing that makes this city hard is the same thing that makes its people extraordinary. Pressure, over time, doesn't just wear people down. It also sharpens them. Steel sharpens steel. New York has always known this. The city doesn't ask whether you're ready. It just shows up — relentless, indifferent, magnificent — and you rise to meet it, or you don't. Most New Yorkers rise. Again and again.
That grit is real. The resilience New Yorkers carry isn't a cliché — it's forged. Earned through difficulty, through loss, through showing up when the city didn't make it easy. What therapy offers isn't a softening of that toughness. It's the chance to understand where it came from, what it's protecting, and how to carry it with more ease — so the strength you've built doesn't cost you more than it gives.
That's why New Yorkers don't just need therapy. They need therapy that gets it. That understands the nuance, the complexity, and the specific texture of what it means to live this life.
The greatest challenges create the most extraordinary people. New York has always known that. So do we.
Most people who reach out aren't in crisis. They're tired. Stuck. Carrying something they can't quite name. Living at a pace that doesn't leave much room for any of it. Sometimes you just need a space to:
None of that requires a diagnosis. It just requires showing up.
And to our friends and family across the rest of New York State — we see you. Buffalo, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, the Hudson Valley — we know that sometimes we get a little caught up down here and forget that we're all one state. We haven't forgotten about you.
Because at the end of the day, this is about New Yorkers treating New Yorkers. We live this. We breathe this. We ride the same subway, complain about the same weather, and carry the same complicated love for this state that you do.
New Yorkers, for New Yorkers.
There's a difference between a therapist who has read about New York and one who has lived it — who knows what it costs, what the subway does to your nervous system, and what it means to carry the weight of this city every single day.
There Is Someone Here For You
New York is the most diverse place on earth. It always has been. That diversity isn't a feature of the city — it is the city. And a therapy practice that serves New York has a responsibility to reflect that.
We've built a team that spans backgrounds, languages, cultures, orientations, and lived experiences — deliberately, and because it matters. Our clinicians include therapists of color, LGBTQ+ clinicians, first- and second-generation immigrants, and practitioners with deep roots in communities across the five boroughs, the suburbs, and upstate New York.
The therapeutic relationship works best when you feel genuinely seen — not just heard. That means working with someone who understands not only your diagnosis but your context: your family structure, your cultural background, your community, the specific pressures that come with being who you are in the place you live.
Whoever you are, wherever you're from — there is someone on this team who has been trained to meet you there. That's not a promise we make lightly. It's one we hired for.
Our Therapists Are Trained In
We are actively onboarding a consulting staff psychiatrist to support medication evaluation alongside your therapist.
"The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change."
— Carl Rogers
On Peace — Not Happiness
We want to be honest with you about something — because most therapy practices won't say it this plainly.
This is not a happiness practice. We are not here to help you feel better as quickly as possible, reframe your way out of difficulty, or arrive at some curated version of wellness where everything hurts less and the future looks clean. That's not what we do, because that's not what we believe therapy is for.
What we're actually working toward — and this is the part that tends to surprise people — is coming to terms with how you already feel. Not transcending your experience. Not replacing the difficult parts with better ones. But learning to sit with what's real, to see it clearly, and to stop spending your energy at war with it.
Here is the paradox: the people who stop chasing happiness are often the ones who find something close to it.
Not because they found the right circumstances, or resolved every hard thing, or finally became the person they thought they were supposed to be. But because somewhere in the process of accepting what's actually true — about themselves, about their lives, about the people they love — something releases. Space opens. Emotions that had been locked behind the push and the striving become, slowly, more available.
That is the access we're talking about. Not manufactured joy. Not the forced optimism that therapy sometimes gets accused of selling. Real emotional access — the kind that allows you to feel the full range of what's available to a human being, including, sometimes, genuine happiness. But more than that: equanimity. The capacity to meet what life brings without being undone by it.
The word we keep returning to is not happiness. It is resilience. The ability to absorb difficulty without losing yourself. To grieve without disappearing. To be hurt without closing. To remain — through the hard seasons and the long stretches of ordinary — fundamentally intact.
And beneath resilience — if you go far enough — is something quieter still. Not the absence of pain. Not the resolution of everything unresolved. Just a kind of steadiness. A relationship with yourself that can hold what's hard without falling apart.
That is what we mean when we say peace. It is not a destination. It is not a feeling that arrives and stays. It is a practice — of seeing clearly, accepting honestly, and returning, again and again, to what is actually true. This is the work. It is slower than fixing. It is harder than feeling better. And in our experience, it is the only thing that lasts.
That sentence points to something most of us learn the hard way: the harder we push for change, the more it eludes us. What follows is the framework that guides our work — five ideas that form a map for how real, lasting change actually happens.
On Resistance & What Lies Beneath It
The part of you that doesn't want to change — that's not the enemy. It's actually trying to tell you something.
Most of us carry some version of this: we know something needs to shift, we genuinely want it to, and yet — we don't. We circle back. We find reasons to postpone. We say we're not ready, not enough time, not quite the right moment. This isn't weakness or lack of will. It's resistance. And resistance, almost always, is unconscious.
The instinct is to push through it — to treat it as an obstacle between you and the version of yourself you're trying to reach. But force applied to resistance tends to harden it. The wall gets thicker. The counterweight gets heavier. You end up exhausted, having gone nowhere, wondering what's wrong with you.
What works — quietly, reliably, in a way that still surprises people — is attention.
Not analysis. Not explanation. Not trying to trace the resistance back to a childhood memory and feel clever about it. Just full, unhurried, non-judgmental attention — the kind that says: I see you. I'm not going to argue with you or pretend you're not here. What are you actually protecting?
This is one of the stranger, quieter truths in this work. Things that have been hidden — defended, deflected, dressed up as something more acceptable — begin to soften when they're finally seen. The resistance that felt like a wall turns out to have been, all along, a door. And what's behind it is rarely as catastrophic as the energy spent keeping it closed.
This is why so much of what we do in therapy isn't about pushing forward. It's about learning to stay — to sit with what's actually here, long enough for it to show you what it needs. The movement comes after. Almost on its own.
A Note on Technology & Connection
You don't have to live in New York City to feel the weight of a world that never slows down.
Whether you're in Manhattan or Monticello, most of us are living inside the same relentless stream — news, notifications, comparison, noise. Technology has given us extraordinary things. But it seems worth pausing to ask: what might it be costing us, too?
There's a particular irony in all of this. Technology — designed to connect us — has an uncanny ability to leave us feeling more fragmented than before. Disconnected from ourselves, from the people around us. The paradox of being more reachable than ever, and somehow more alone.
We're aware of the irony — this practice runs entirely on technology. What we keep coming back to is that the tool matters less than the intention behind it. We'd like to think we're using it for one of its highest purposes — to bring people a little closer to themselves, and to someone who can actually help.
On Telehealth & What We're Trying to Preserve
There's something genuinely valuable about doing therapy from the place where your life actually happens.
Telehealth has opened doors that needed opening — making therapy accessible to people who couldn't get there before, whether because of geography, disability, schedule, or simply the exhaustion of adding one more commute to an already overwhelming week.
This is why our therapists are New Yorkers. They know the neighborhoods. They understand the particular weight of this place. So even if you and your therapist are sitting in different rooms, you're sharing the same world. And that shared world creates a layer of intimacy no algorithm can replicate.
On Forcing Change
You can't force change. But you can focus on it. There's a difference — and it matters more than most people realize.
Forcing change is effortful in the wrong direction. It's white-knuckling, willpower, pushing against yourself — and it tends to produce exactly the kind of resistance that keeps things stuck. Force, applied to something as nuanced as human behavior and emotion, tends to harden rather than soften it.
Focusing on change is different. It's bringing your attention — carefully, honestly, without judgment — toward the thing you want to understand. Turning toward rather than pushing against.
Intention matters here too. An intention to understand is different from an intention to fix. An intention to be honest with yourself is different from an intention to be hard on yourself. Therapy helps you get clear on what you're actually trying to do — and whether the way you're going about it is helping or quietly making things harder.
This is what therapy looks like at New York State of Mind. We don't hand you a checklist. We sit with you in the hard parts, help you see what's been invisible, and trust you to know — once you have the space to hear it — what actually needs to change. In a city that never stops moving, we believe the most powerful thing you can do is pause.
Therapy takes different shapes depending on what you're bringing and who you're bringing it with. Each format has its own dynamics, its own rhythm, and its own kind of work.
These are the clinical frameworks and approaches our therapists are trained in. No single modality fits everyone — we draw from several and let the work, and the person, guide which ones take hold.
The presenting concerns and clinical territory our therapists work in most. If you don't see what you're carrying listed here, reach out anyway — this list isn't exhaustive.
How we deliver care — and what's available when the work calls for more than therapy alone.
The mind and body are one system, in constant conversation. Chronic stress lives in the nervous system. Grief lives in the chest. Anxiety speaks through the stomach. Trauma is stored in the body long after the mind has tried to move on.
Therapy is often the center of the work. But it is rarely the whole of it. When the moment calls for more, we have built relationships — carefully, over time — with an outstanding network of external practitioners we trust completely. These are not generic referrals. They are people we know, whose work we consider a genuine extension of our own.
When a referral is the right step, your therapist stays involved. We make the introduction, provide context, and keep the thread of your care connected. Not a folder of business cards. A team that functions as one.
"The part can never be well unless the whole is well."
— Plato
How it works
Your therapist identifies that additional support would benefit your progress.
Together, you choose the right practitioner from our network.
We make the introduction — with context, with your consent. You don't start from zero.
Your therapy continues. Practitioners stay in communication. You stay at the center.
Wherever you've built your life in this state, you deserve a therapist who understands it — and can reach you there.
If you have Aetna or Cigna, you're likely covered — and your out-of-pocket cost may be significantly lower than you expect. We're in-network with both, which means we bill them directly and you pay only your co-pay or deductible portion.
We bill Aetna directly for individual, couples, and family sessions. Most Aetna plans cover telehealth therapy at standard co-pay rates.
Cigna coverage includes behavioral health services under most plan types. Telehealth sessions are typically covered at the same rate as in-person care.
In addition to Aetna and Cigna, we're in-network with the following. If your insurer isn't listed, reach out — out-of-network superbills are available for most plans.
Once a month — no more — we send a short, thoughtful piece on mental health, city life, and the quiet work of change. No sales, no noise.
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Great therapy starts with great therapists — and great therapists deserve a practice that supports them as much as they support their clients. No quota pressure, no corporate oversight. Just meaningful clinical work, done well.
We are actively hiring across all five boroughs and throughout New York State. All positions are fully remote via telehealth.
Beyond licensure and training, we look for therapists who believe the therapeutic relationship is the vehicle for change — and that every client deserves to feel genuinely understood, not just treated.
We Welcome Clinicians Trained In
We welcome inquiries from practitioners across disciplines. Reach out at hello@nystateofmindpsychotherapy.com.
NYSOM is a telehealth practice serving clients across New York State. There's no waiting room, no commute, and no intake coordinator standing between you and a clinician. We respond personally, and we're straightforward about fit — including when we're not the right match.
hello@nystateofmindpsychotherapy.com
(917) 624-9984
Monday – Friday: 8am – 8pm
Saturday: 9am – 2pm
New York City · Westchester · Long Island · All of New York State
Local care, everywhere. Specifically New York.
"The first conversation is simply a conversation — no commitment, no pressure, no clinical jargon. Just an honest exchange about what you're looking for."
Writing on therapy, psychology, and the texture of being human. Not clinical summaries — the ideas that guide how we work, written out honestly.
On the paradox at the heart of change — and why effort is sometimes the thing standing in the way.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes not from doing too much, but from trying too hard at the wrong thing. You've probably felt it. The night you absolutely needed to sleep and lay there, wide awake, watching the ceiling. The moment you needed to calm down and felt your heart rate climb. The conversation where you tried so hard to say the right thing that nothing came out right at all.
This is not a personal failing. It is a structural feature of how the mind works — one that therapy has been bumping into for over a century, and one that we think is worth naming plainly.
The harder you reach for certain things, the further they move. Not because you're doing it wrong. Because reaching is the wrong instrument.Sleep is the most familiar example. Every insomniac knows the drill: you need to sleep, so you try to sleep, and the trying — the monitoring, the calculating, the willing — is precisely what keeps you awake. The moment you stop trying, stop checking, stop making sleep the object of effort, it arrives almost immediately. What changed? Not the circumstances. Just the stance.
Relaxation works the same way. Tell someone who is anxious to relax and watch what happens — the instruction itself becomes a source of pressure. Now they are anxious about not being relaxed, which compounds the original anxiety into something more elaborate and harder to escape. The effort to feel calm produces its opposite.
Happiness is the grandest version of this. The people who seem most genuinely at ease in their lives are rarely the ones who have made happiness their primary pursuit. They've made meaning their pursuit, or connection, or craft — and happiness has arrived as a byproduct. The ones who chase it directly tend to find it receding.
This is the paradox. And it is not just philosophical. It shows up in the therapy room, reliably, every week.Someone comes in wanting to stop feeling anxious. They've been trying to stop feeling anxious — monitoring their thoughts, avoiding triggers, white-knuckling their way through situations — and the anxiety has, if anything, gotten worse. What they haven't tried is simply letting the anxiety be there. Turning toward it, instead of away. Giving it their full, unhurried attention without immediately trying to make it leave.
This is uncomfortable advice. It sounds counterintuitive to the point of cruelty. You want me to stop trying to feel better? But that's not quite what we're saying. We're saying that the effort to suppress, override, or escape a feeling tends to amplify it — and that something different happens when you stop fighting and start paying attention.
The feeling doesn't disappear immediately. But it changes. It becomes less dangerous. You realize you can be in it without being destroyed by it. And that realization — that you can tolerate what you thought was intolerable — is the beginning of something real.
You can't force change. But you can focus on it. There is a difference — and it matters more than most people realize.Forcing is effortful in the wrong direction. It's the insomnia strategy: the harder you push, the more you stay stuck. Focusing is different. It's bringing your attention — gently, honestly, without judgment — toward the thing you want to understand. Not to fix it. Not to make it go away. To see it clearly.
Carl Rogers put it this way: the curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change. That sentence has outlasted most of the therapy trends of the last century because it keeps being true. Acceptance isn't resignation. It's what makes movement possible.
The next time you can't sleep, notice what happens when you stop trying to sleep. The next time you need to relax, stop instructing yourself to relax. The next time you want to feel differently than you do — instead of reaching for the feeling you want, try simply staying with the one you have.
See what happens.
The case for resilience over happiness — and why peace is a more honest thing to work toward.
We want to be honest with you about something — because most therapy practices won't say it this plainly.
This is not a happiness practice. We are not here to help you feel better as quickly as possible, reframe your way out of difficulty, or arrive at some curated version of wellness where everything hurts less and the future looks clean. That's not what we do, because that's not what we believe therapy is for.
What we're actually working toward — and this is the part that tends to surprise people — is coming to terms with how you already feel.Not transcending your experience. Not replacing the difficult parts with better ones. But learning to sit with what's real, to see it clearly, and to stop spending your energy at war with it.
Here is the paradox: the people who stop chasing happiness are often the ones who find something close to it. Not because they found the right circumstances, or resolved every hard thing, or finally became the person they thought they were supposed to be. But because somewhere in the process of accepting what's actually true — about themselves, about their lives, about the people they love — something releases. Space opens. Emotions that had been locked behind the push and the striving become, slowly, more available.
That is the access we're talking about. Not manufactured joy. Not the forced optimism that therapy sometimes gets accused of selling. Real emotional access — the kind that allows you to feel the full range of what's available to a human being, including, sometimes, genuine happiness. But more than that: equanimity. The capacity to meet what life brings without being undone by it.
The word we keep returning to is not happiness. It is resilience.The ability to absorb difficulty without losing yourself. To grieve without disappearing. To be hurt without closing. To remain — through the hard seasons and the long stretches of ordinary — fundamentally intact.
And beneath resilience — if you go far enough — is something quieter still. Not the absence of pain. Not the resolution of everything unresolved. Just a kind of steadiness. A relationship with yourself that can hold what's hard without falling apart.
That is what we mean when we say peace. It is not a destination. It is not a feeling that arrives and stays. It is a practice — of seeing clearly, accepting honestly, and returning, again and again, to what is actually true. This is the work. It is slower than fixing. It is harder than feeling better. And in our experience, it is the only thing that lasts.
The part of you that doesn't want to change isn't the enemy. It's actually carrying something important.
Most of us carry some version of this: we know something needs to shift, we genuinely want it to, and yet — we don't. We circle back. We find reasons to postpone. We say we're not ready, not enough time, not quite the right moment. This isn't weakness or lack of will. It's resistance. And resistance, almost always, is unconscious.
The part of you that doesn't want to change — that's not the enemy. It's actually trying to tell you something.The instinct is to push through it — to treat it as an obstacle between you and the version of yourself you're trying to reach. But force applied to resistance tends to harden it. The wall gets thicker. The counterweight gets heavier. You end up exhausted, having gone nowhere, wondering what's wrong with you.
What works — quietly, reliably, in a way that still surprises people — is attention. Not analysis. Not explanation. Not trying to trace the resistance back to a childhood memory and feel clever about it. Just full, unhurried, non-judgmental attention — the kind that says: I see you. I'm not going to argue with you or pretend you're not here. What are you actually protecting?
This is one of the stranger, quieter truths in this work. Things that have been hidden — defended, deflected, dressed up as something more acceptable — begin to soften when they're finally seen. The resistance that felt like a wall turns out to have been, all along, a door. And what's behind it is rarely as catastrophic as the energy spent keeping it closed.
This is why so much of what we do in therapy isn't about pushing forward. It's about learning to stay.To sit with what's actually here, long enough for it to show you what it needs. The movement comes after. Almost on its own.
On emotional regulation — and the counterintuitive truth that attention is the beginning of relief.
This essay is being written. Check back soon.
Why the most important moments in a relationship aren't the good ones.
This essay is being written. Check back soon.
On the drives that govern human behavior — and why we do what we do even when we know better.
This essay is being written. Check back soon.
On the Japanese philosophy of finding wholeness in the incomplete, the impermanent, and the imperfect — and what it has to do with therapy.
This essay is being written. Check back soon.
On intrinsic and extrinsic motivation — and why the source of your drive matters as much as the drive itself.
This essay is being written. Check back soon.