Therapy for entertainment & media professionals in NYC
For people who make culture | Depth-oriented therapy for individuals & couples
Brooklyn Heights & virtual across New York State
If you work in or around the creative and entertainment industries, you already know the particular weight that comes with it — one that’s hard to explain to people on the outside. Your work and your sense of self can be difficult to separate. The money may be good, and then suddenly it isn't. You're often evaluated, ranked, and compared as a condition of your job. And the thing that makes you good at what you do may also keep you up at night.
I work with people across this whole world — the ones on the page, screen, and stage; the people who develop, sell, produce, market, represent, and greenlight the work; and the content creators who are the work. You may occupy different seats, but you face a similar set of pressures and often a shared pull between who you are and what you make.
“So much of your sense of self is fused with your work — any piece of feedback, or not getting credit for something, can feel like a verdict on how well you’re living up to being yourself.”
As featured in
— Laura Rothkopf, LCSW in La Fronde
It's one world with a psychology of its own, and I believe it deserves a therapist who understands the whole of it. The questions a life in these industries raises — ones about worth, identity, desire, and drive — aren't just anxiety to be managed, but information worth taking seriously. That’s the kind of work I aim to do.
Where our work will go
Some of this may sound familiar: the anxiety, the comparison spiral, the feeling of being an imposter despite the evidence, the dread before you put work into the world and the comedown that follows. It impacts your mind, your body, your sleep, and your relationships. In therapy, we can work with all of that.
And while relief from these symptoms is real and important work, along the way we'll likely uncover themes with roots that run further back than your current job or latest setback. For a lot of people in creative and public-facing work, being valued for what you produce started early — you were the talented one, the promising one, or the one that made things happen — and that recognition arrived before you even really knew who you were underneath it. That can be part of what fuels the work you do, and it can also distort how you measure your worth. Part of what we'll do is become acquainted with these patterns and their origins so that they no longer shape your choices from the shadows.
Some of what we may encounter:
How you experience yourself
When your sense of worth is fused to your output. A bad review, a killed project, or losing out on a job to someone else can register as a verdict on your whole self. That fusion isn’t necessarily a flaw — it may be part of what drives you — and the work is holding onto it in a way that doesn’t take you out.
When you're constantly being perceived. Being watched, reviewed, and ranked is a daily condition of your work, and, beneath the exposure, there’s often a subtler split: a public version of you that starts to feel separate from who you are when no one’s paying attention. We’ll work on keeping the public self from crowding out the self that’s actually yours to live in. More on the split between your public and private self — what it looks like and what the work involves.
When comparison turns to shame. Watching a peer get the thing you'd hoped for can stir up envy, and then shame about the envy. Those feelings are worth looking at honestly, because they usually point to something about what you want, not just what they have.
Your relationship to the work
When success wasn't the fix you'd hoped it would be. You got what you thought you wanted and the relief didn’t last, or never came. There’s often guilt attached to this experience, and it usually has something to tell you about what you were really after.
When the work stops feeling like yours. What used to excite you feels flat. Sometimes that’s burnout; sometimes it’s grief for a version of the work, or yourself, that felt more alive. Either way, it’s usually a signal that something needs to change.
When a chapter of the work ends. The show wraps, the tour is over — and instead of pride there’s an eerie numbness or an unexpected grief. Different from burnout: it’s the disorientation of coming down from something that organized your whole sense of yourself.
The people around you and decisions you make
When a creative partnership curdles. So much creative work happens inside close relationships — a band, a co-founder, a longstanding collaboration — that carry all the intensity of family. When a working relationship like that starts to fray, it’s rarely just about the work. We can sort out what’s yours and what’s theirs, and what it would take to protect both the relationship and yourself.
When the right move is to say no. Not every opportunity is good for you, and in a field built on scarcity, turning something down can feel impossible — even when your gut or your body is telling you it's the wrong move. Part of the work is learning to tell fear from wisdom, and trusting yourself enough to protect your wellbeing.
When you're facing a hard decision. Whether to stay in a role, walk away from a career that "works," or make any high-stakes choice — I can stay in that uncertainty with you, without pushing you toward a particular answer, so you're not left to wade through it alone.
If you recognize yourself in any of this, you can request a free consultation here.
When you’re questioning your path
You chose this career, and that's part of what makes it so complicated.
When you build your life around something you care about, questioning it can be deeply uncomfortable, not to mention inconvenient. The commitments are already made, the identity is already built, and the people around you have come to know you as the person who does this. Perhaps you find yourself wondering whether the drive that got you here is still yours or whether you've just performed it for so long that you can't tell anymore. Maybe the goal still looks right on paper but no longer lands the way it used to, and you're not sure whether that's a signal or just fatigue. At some point, many people find themselves asking: Is this the life I actually want today or just the one I pictured myself wanting?
That's real information, and it's not something to resolve in six sessions with a worksheet. Sitting with that question is often the first step toward figuring out what still fits with who you are today and what you've outgrown. It deserves a place where you can look at it honestly, without rushing to an answer.
Couples therapy: when work enters your relationship
Relationships in this world carry specific pressures. Two careers moving at different speeds. One partner's big break arriving as the other hits a dry spell. The difficulty of being a steady partner when your own identity feels unsettled. Income that's high one year and uncertain the next, and the strain that puts on a shared life. Long stretches apart — a shoot, tour, residency, or run out of town — and the work of staying connected across distance. The loneliness that comes with feeling your partner doesn’t quite get the world you disappear into, or the tension of being with someone who's in it too and finding yourself competing.
I'm trained in Gottman Method Couples Therapy and also work psychodynamically and relationally. In practice, that means we do two things at once: build the concrete skills that keep a relationship steady under pressure, and understand the deeper patterns that shape how you move through connection, conflict, and repair.
Often the same person I see individually is navigating a relationship question, and the same couple I see is really two people each wrestling with who they are. Because of the nature of my work, I’m comfortable holding both. You can read more about my approach to couple work here.
What changes over time
Most people come to therapy because they’re hurting, and easing that matters. But the deeper work is often more about changing your relationship to the thing that's been running you, and ultimately living a life that feels like yours.
Over time, that can look like several things. Being able to take a hard review, a lost job, or a slow stretch without it becoming a ruling on your worth. Knowing which opportunities are yours to take and being able to turn down the ones that aren't. Feeling less driven by comparison and clearer about what you actually want. Being steadier with a partner and in your own life. And underneath all of it, coming to know the version of you that's there whether the work is going well or badly, and finding that it's enough.
This isn't about caring less about your work. Usually it's the opposite: when your sense of self isn't riding on every outcome, you can work more freely, and often better. That's what most people are really after — to keep caring about the work while feeling steadier in yourself and more grounded in what you can actually control.
My background
I trained seriously as a performer through school and into college, so I come to this work knowing the particular exposure of life in creative fields, and why it doesn't feel like “just a job.”
That background is what drew me to the industry side of things. Early in my career, I spent close to a decade in and around entertainment and media. I started out working in music at VICE and subsequently spent much of my time there and at WarnerMedia building work with film and television studios, networks, and the fashion and design worlds. I know this ecosystem from several seats: the artist's, the label's, the studio's, and the brand's. Because of this, you won't have to spend our first month teaching me what your work is, how the industry actually operates, or why it gets under your skin.
I retrained deliberately as a psychotherapist, pursuing clinical training at NYU and a two-year psychodynamic psychotherapy program at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. I also bring a background in philosophy to questions of meaning and identity — the kinds of questions much of therapy treats as anxiety to be managed rather than as information worth taking seriously.
What this means for you: there’s no need to translate your world before we can start and no use in staying on the surface once we do. I understand the industry you're in, and we’ll work at the depth the real questions require. You can read more about my background and training here.
Practical details
I work with creative and entertainment professionals across New York — writers, actors, musicians, directors, artists, content creators, and designers, alongside the executives, agents, producers, publicists, and other industry professionals who develop, sell, and represent the work. I see individuals and couples, in person in Brooklyn Heights and virtually across New York State.
My practice is private pay, which keeps the work unhurried and fully confidential. Individual sessions are $250 and couples sessions are $300. I hold a limited number of sliding-scale spots, so if fee is a barrier, please feel free to ask. I'm also happy to provide documentation for possible out-of-network reimbursement if your plan offers it.
More on fees, policies, and getting started on the FAQ page.
On privacy:
Some of the people I work with have public-facing lives, or are close to someone who does, and discretion matters to them. Here's how it's built into my practice.
No insurance paper trail. Because I don't bill insurance, there's no third party involved in your care and no insurance claim generated by it.
Confidential from first contact. You can reach me through a private inquiry rather than a public booking system. Your first message comes directly to me.
Details are handled with care. Scheduling, communication, and record-keeping remain private. If your situation involves particular exposure (a recognizable name, a role in the public eye) I'm glad to discuss what would help you feel secure.
The aim is that when we meet, the work itself is the only thing you have to think about.
You’re welcome to share as much or as little as you’d like in your message. I typically respond within two business days.