About
About me: My name is Molly, and I am a social work-trained psychotherapist who has worked my entire career as a clinician. I have decades of experience in social service, mental health and addiction recovery settings, and I’m skilled and very comfortable working with stress, mood, trauma and psychiatric disorders. I also have particular expertise assisting adolescents and young adults struggling with transitional life crises, which may involve serious psychiatric or substance abuse issues. As we live in a complex and disorienting world,
I employ a practical style of therapy rooted in a hopeful, first-things-first approach.
About Center Psychotherapy: I chose this name for my practice as it reflects the kind of process I try to cultivate: how to get to balance, from the edges, when in the grip of chronic or traumatic stress. Before opening this space, I worked for many years in a large interdisciplinary mental health practice with people carrying every imaginable "diagnosis". There, I learned quite a bit about the mechanisms underlying stress, and how they can destabilize mood, emotions and physical health. My work responded to this deeper understanding and in 2018, I opened my own shop and joined with Avon Integrative Health, a collective comprised of chiropractic, naturopathic and massage therapies. I hoped that ready access to professionals with alternative strategies to treat chronic stress would complement my methodology and be helpful for my clientele.
What I know: good therapy helps by promoting mental and emotional flexibility, guided by innate strengths and re-discovery of the creative impulse. Good therapy can enable the restoration of healthy connections between mind, body and the outside world, and prevent or ameliorate serious or chronic mental health issues. Good conversation is part of good therapy: awareness in the present is cultivated, and curiosity stimulated. "Symptoms" of psychological, emotional and physical distress can thus be released, and understanding and transformation made possible.
I carry a BFA in Art Therapy, and earned a Master’s Degree in Social Work from Hunter College of the City University of New York. I am credentialed as an addiction specialist and in a form of mind-body therapy known as Somatic ExperiencingⓇ. I practice painting and photography, and welcome the use of the arts in psychotherapy.
