The Therapy Process
“Dearly beloved, we have gathered here today to get through this thing called life” – Prince Rogers Nelson
“It’s the dark horse we give legs to no one else can ride. In the wake of strange beginnings, we can still stand high.” – Emma Ruth Rundle
Many people, simply seeking relief and change, enter into therapy without a clear understanding of what the process is. This decision often comes at crisis or low point in one’s life, and may feel like a defeat of sorts. But, in truth, turning towards yourself and seeking something better is actually an act of great strength and love and is the first major step towards achieving the healing you seek.
That said, I do not practice therapy as a stodgy, diagnosing clinician but as a collaborator in your growth. People often arrive desiring to know what the “normal” baseline is that they need to get themselves to. I seek for us to abandon comparisons to others and to understand what your personal narrative and needs are. To me, this means validating the how-and-why you are how you are and then creating the space to define and evolve into your best vision for your life. Great therapy is not advice giving – it compassionately supports you in learning to listen to and express and empower your own truths.
Whatever the factors or feelings that have brought you to therapy, our work will utilize these transitions and crises as opportunities to deepen the insight and life skills you need to better navigate them. The end purpose is to empower you to not only meet and manage those presenting symptoms and stories, but to help you to lead a healthier, more productive and balanced life as a result of having engaged them.
Beyond help with the immediate issues at hand, engaging in the therapeutic process can help one find more positively-balanced, empowered roles within one’s family and other close relationships. The compassionate and boundaried relationship with your therapist provides a direct framework for building healthier relationships in your life – sometimes simply by modeling something vital that we often have lacked up until this point. Moreover, finding greater compassion for ourselves has the wonderful effect of extending beyond our inner experience to the greater world, ultimately helping us to each ‘do our part’ in being the change we’d like to see in the world. In this regard, engaging in the therapeutic process, can ultimately be a quiet practice of social justice.
Individual Counseling
“Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in” – Leonard Cohen
As the proverbial ‘they’ say, ‘the way is through, not around’ when it comes to dealing with difficult feelings and situations. I am here to walk with you and gently support and guide you as you unpack your experiences, and co-create with you the tools and methods of managing and making healthy sense of them.
Every story I encounter is unique, so my methodology is expressly sensitive to all of the personal and historical narratives that you may bring and is oriented towards uncovering the way forward that best suits your individuality. I operate from a curiously-compassionate, humanistic stance that blends classic psychodynamic work with mindfulness-based cognitive behavioral strategies to help you forge new ways of thinking, behaving and experiencing your life.
I specialize in working with adults in a variety of capacities, including relationship issues, anxiety, depression, trauma, anger management, self-esteem, family of origin issues, life transitions, grief and spiritual struggles/concerns. And I do so in an open, collaborative and understanding therapeutic environment that is sensitive to all of the varieties along the cultural, gender and spiritual/belief spectrums.
Couples / Family Therapy
“An open heart is both the lock and key” – Zara McFarlane
Relationships are an active practice. My licensure in relational therapy supports a journey in which we collectively learn to understand your entire relationship system – not just the biased singular perspectives within it. I am in the service of your relationship / family, and seek the healthiest outcome for the system as a whole – and the subsequent happiness of all involved.
It is an oft-held belief that happy relationships simply consist of finding “the one”, our “soulmate” etc. In reality, once we make it beyond the initial honeymoon phase, healthy and loving relationships require us to choose to show up for our partners and yet the skill set of cultivating and nurturing a solid, fulfilling relationship culture is one that we are, most often, not taught.
I help couples with communications problems, developing better conflict resolution strategies, healing from physical/emotional and online infidelities, addiction/codependency issues and other sexual issues. Together we will examine your familial and relational histories and learn a variety of guideposts towards helping you be your best selves, both together and individually.
Specific skills include becoming present/attuned to yourself and your partner’s experiences, uncovering problematic communication cycles, reflective listening, de-escalation of angry/volatile interactions, the cultivation of trust intimacy/partner validation and empathy, learning one another’s love languages and the skill of consciously choosing one another.
Our work may include elements of mindful sex therapy – focused conversation on the functionality, feelings and communication about sexual interactions. This can also include addressing impulse control issues like excessive pornography use or unwanted extra-relationship sexual contact.
I also provide Pre-Marital Counseling for couples that are in the process of deepening their commitment. This “check-up” supports the multitude of feelings that inevitably arise, and guides important conversations around finances, children, lifestyle choices, and communication styles.
Anger Management
“Anger is an energy” – John Lydon
Like all of our ‘shadow’ emotions, anger is a normal, powerful and wise reaction. I seek not to rid you of your anger, but to understand it and mindfully manage it better. Through learning to pay a different, aware quality of attention to your inner processes, you can leave rage-ful, frustrated knee-jerk responses behind and replace them with the ability of making healthier choices about how you react to the inevitable stresses and trauma of life and relationships.
This course of work includes learning what happens in your body when you become angry, the skills and techniques necessary to gain control of your anger, how to change the situations/relationships in your life that may cause your anger, set boundaries. communicating your anger in more effective ways.
We will also explore the hurt, fear and sadness that is often the core/original foundation for your anger. Ultimately, you’ll learn to take responsibility for your anger and healthily and effectively talk ABOUT it instead of expressing yourself through it to damaging and shame-inducing outcomes.
Mindfulness and Therapy
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional” – Haruki Murakami
While there are a great many experiences and feelings that may bring you to your therapy journey, one of the few commonalities that serves all healing is developing greater compassionate presence. Mindfulness practices play a crucial role in becoming aware of your own internal patterns and are research-proven to be fundamental healing adjuncts in anxiety, depression and anger-driven suffering. Mindfulness is of equal importance in becoming more skillful and conscientious in romantic and familial relationships, as well.
Learning to develop mindfulness helps to develop a place of inner understanding from which a greater compassion for yourself and others can be born. While we cannot change many of the external circumstances and pains of this life, we can learn more masterful ways to react to them through mindful awareness.
Developing this consciousness also provides greater self-empowerment needed to make the new, conscious choices that break old, undesirable habits and patterns. Together, we will develop your ability to focus on your awareness of self so you may better understand just which parts of yourself are engaged in the negative cycles that plague you and find the place within yourself to change them.
Whether you see me for couples work, anger, depression or anxiety, learning mindfulness will often play a part in your healing work and will remain a skill that you can continue to develop and call upon in challenging times beyond our work.
About Ben
I am much like you. I came to this profession through my own healing process, begun as a teenager. My desire to seek better began through the vehicle of New York City’s famed punk rock scene of the 1980s, when my dissatisfaction with the ills of the world led me through social justice activism to deeper pursuits in self-healing. I explored a great many spiritual and psychological philosophies and modalities in efforts to address my own experiences with anxiety, anger, depression and a traumatic past, leading me through an eclectic life full of apprenticeships and mentoring by esteemed luminaries in academic, shamanic and mindfulness communities alike.
I am a firm believer in a mind-body-spirit approach to psychological health, and I incorporate my own multi-disciplinary spiritual practice and investigation with my graduate training in relational therapy into a holistic-minded perspective. I utilize transitions and crises as opportunities to deepen insight and life skills that better navigate and manage them, with the end purpose being client-based empowerment in leading the healthiest, most productive and balanced life possible.
As a multi-racial person raised in an LGBTQ family setting, I honor and welcome all into the therapy process and always seek to create an understanding space that is respectful and safe to all of the spectrums of racial, cultural, sexual, and spiritual diversity. Additionally, I am versed in and respectful to the fluid gamut of relationship styles – from strict monogamy to the many permutations of ethical polyamory.
I am a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a Masters of Science in Psychology from Mercy College and have been further trained in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and other post-modern techniques. I hold a dual BA in Comparative Religious Studies and Africana Studies from Vassar College. I am currently an active member of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (AAMFT) as well as the Psi-Chi Psychology Honors Society. In addition to my academic work, I am a devoted Ashtanga yoga and mindfulness practitioner and have extensive experience in esoteric and indigenous healing modalities and continue to embrace my own work and journey as key to my ability to provide positive direction and support for my clients.
Fees and Insurance
I offer local, in-person service in my Brooklyn and Manhattan-based offices (in the Greenpoint and NOMAD/Flatiron neighborhoods, respectively), as well as online via HIPAA-compliant conferencing services through which I work with individuals and couples from all around the world. Sessions are 45 minutes long and are by appointment only.
This process begins with a free phone consultation in which I learn about you and what you are seeking help with. If, for any reason, it seems that we may not be suited to work well together, I am glad to provide professional referrals to help you find the best fit for treatment.
I discuss my set fees as part of our initial consultation and I do offer accommodating sliding-scale fees wherever applicable. I believe that therapy should not be a cost-prohibitive service and do my best to provide leeway in pricing to help people from all walks of life, accordingly.
As with most marriage and family therapists, I am an out-of-network provider and do not participate in insurance panels. I am happy to provide an itemized bill for you to submit to your insurance provider for reimbursement. In order to assess what kind of coverage you have prior to making an appointment, ask your insurance provider what your out-of-network mental health benefit is and if what, if any, your deductible is for mental health coverage.
Mentorship & Supervision
I am also available for clinical supervision/consultation for practicing therapists. Feel free to contact me directly to discuss working together in this capacity.
