Discover Relational Therapy in Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Learn to stay fully yourself in relationship with others — so connection becomes a source of nourishment, not just another place you disappear.
I work with queer New Yorkers and New Yorkers of the global majority (BIPOC) who are ready to access the joy, lightness and relief they imagined their achievements would bring.
About Relational Therapy
You know how to intuit someone's needs before they're even aware of them, which has made you indispensable at work and at home. But holding it together for everyone else comes at the expense of your own needs — or even knowing what your needs are. You want to let go of the resentment eating away at your joy, but giving up control feels terrifying. And besides, you don't really trust anyone else to do the job as thoroughly as you do.
Relational therapy uses the dynamic between you and me as data. The beliefs you carry in life, you bring into the therapy room — and your presence + my presence = our dynamic. As a relational therapist, I track what your story, your body language, and how you feel in the room evoke in me. And when it's clinically right, I'll share it — when your pain moves me, when your growth delights me. This gives your system a chance to relearn what it feels like to be truly seen, not just valued for what you can do. Equally important, you'll discover that you have the power to impact another person — not only the other way around.
Being a relational therapist also means checking in on how you're experiencing me — which gives us live, experiential data about your relational patterns and tendencies. When we work with our dynamic together, therapy becomes alive, connected, and deeply affirming.
Who is Relational Therapy for?
I work with queer New Yorkers and New Yorkers of the global majority (BIPOC) who struggle to stay in touch with their inner desires, beliefs and emotional experience in relationship with others.
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You're the child of immigrant or first-generation parents, often caught between the tension of their values and your own.
You crave being seen for who you really are — but when life presents the opportunity, you freeze in fear or pull away.
You're struggling to feel where the code-switching ends and the real you begins.
You're resentful, exhausted, and sick of overfunctioning for others — but don't know how to stop, or are scared to.
A secret, rageful part of you wants to start saying exactly what you mean — but you're terrified your honesty will hurt or disappoint others beyond repair.
You grew up in a chaotic household where you became the administrator, the mediator, the peacekeeper, the confidante — and you're still playing all those roles today.
What does Relational Therapy Help with?
Relational therapy is especially effective for challenges that feel complex, layered and stuck including:
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Overthinking, replaying interactions on a loop, constant second-guessing whether your feelings are "valid".
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Feeling heavy and bogged down, going through the motions without feeling present, feeling like a burden to the people you love.
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Hypervigilance, chronic catastrophizing and future-forecasting, a constant low-grade dread with no specific source.
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Conflict keeps getting stuck in frustrating patterns, difficulty staying honest, curious and compassionate with both yourself and your partner at the same time.
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Chronic resentment when others don't clear the same bar you consistently do; constantly packaging what you say to make it as palatable as possible.
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Exhaustion, hypervigilance and resentment from navigating white, cis-het spaces not built with you in mind; difficulty sensing the real you versus the code-switching you.
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Achieving more than you thought possible, but feeling disillusioned with your industry or role; the accumulated, painful weight of microaggressions or outright discrimination.
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Struggling to stay close to your family without losing yourself; constantly navigating how to honor both their values and your own.
What you can Expect from Relational Therapy
Relational therapy uses the dynamic between you and me as both data and material. As we discuss what's happening in your life, I'll be open and transparent about the impact you have on me — whether you move me, surprise me, or delight me. I'll also check in on how you're experiencing me, not to fish for compliments, but as clinical information about your relational patterns for us to explore together.
What makes relational therapy different from traditional talk therapy is the attention and intentional care given to the dynamic we create — as opposed to spilling your guts to a cold, blank slate. Relational therapy feels alive because we name the implicit out loud: not just what you're sharing, but how you're sharing it, what you're leaving out, the intention behind it, and the impact all of that has on another person — me.
As trust deepens and our work together grows, you'll get better at spotting and naming your relational strengths and challenges. You'll develop a clearer sense of what's your stuff, what's the other person's stuff, and what belongs to the relationship itself. And over time, you'll build a more genuine capacity for honesty, compassion, and integrity — with yourself and with others — especially in the relationships that matter most.
About my Approach
I'm Anna, a licensed clinical social worker and former professional dancer who has spent my life in deep relationship with the body — and in the honest, messy, fulfilling, often frustrating work of creativity and collaboration. Dance taught me that genuine connection lives beyond words; it lives on a nervous system level, in the nonverbal maps of others our bodies feel and sense before our minds catch up. As a bisexual, Latiné woman and eldest daughter, I've also done my own hard work of learning to stay honest and present in relationship — instead of shape-shifting into what others need. I bring that lived experience and clinical expertise into the room to help you discover that authenticity, compassion, and curiosity toward yourself and others don't have to be in competition — they can happen at the same time.
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Let’s face it - American society was founded on anti-Black racist beliefs that harm all people of color / the global majority. I believe that anti-Black racist beliefs perpetrate harm from micro- to macro-levels: from person to person, within our communities, within our workplaces and educational institutions, how they are baked into and enacted through legal policy, and even the beliefs we’ve internalized about ourselves.
I am committed to the life-long learning of anti-racist practice and unlearning of white supremacist implicit biases and beliefs. In the therapy room, this means I’m critically investigating how power, identity, and implicit biases may be showing up or impacting our work.
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Sexuality feels like a taboo subject to many, even in the therapy room. I view each person’s experience of their sexuality as uniquely their own, and an integral part of being human.
I approach talking about sex in an open, non-judgmental, and inclusive way, and believe that exploring sexuality can be a window into unspoken wounds, deep relational desires, and that fantasy offers your mind-body’s creative solutions to healing those wounds and fulfilling your needs.
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Through both training and my work with those who have experienced severe, big T trauma (sexual assault, childhood abuse and neglect, for example), I have learned that the impact of trauma can shape almost all parts of your life - beliefs about the world and yourself, to how you feel in your body, to even how you experience time.
I understand how to work with and improve post-traumatic symptoms, such as depersonalization, panic, or hypervigilance. I also understand how to approach your care in a way that honors your experiences with compassion, does not push you anywhere your system isn’t ready to go, and cultivates your sense of agency and efficacy.
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I see gender identity and expression as a spectrum that is highly individual to each person, and recognize that trans and non-binary people have always faced very real threats to their safety, rights and personhood that are alive and well today.
As a cis-gender provider, I believe that continually educating myself re: the trans experience is an ethical responsibility, I also believe that naming power dynamics in the therapy room is an important step to establishing psychological safety and trust.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Relational therapy is built on the understanding that the patterns you carry — the roles you tend to play, the ways you communicate, your relational fears and hopes — don't exist in isolation. They emerge in relationship, in the dynamic you co-create with another person. That dynamic is exactly what we use as material.
As a relational therapist, I bring careful clinical discernment to when and how I share what's happening for me in the room — and it is always, without exception, in service of you and your treatment. The difference might sound like this: rather than saying "that sounds difficult for you," I might say "I notice how I want to move closer to you when you share how hard that's been." The first reflects your experience back to you. The second does something more: it shows you that you have the power to impact another person — and by extension, that you hold that same power in the relationships that matter most to you outside of this room.
For some, this takes a little getting used to. But most people find it quietly profound to feel that a real person is genuinely curious about, invested in, and moved by them — rather than feeling like they're spilling their guts to a blank slate.
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The difference lies in what we choose to talk about — and specifically, in making the implicit explicit. In relational therapy, I'm not only tracking the themes of what you're sharing, but what's happening between the two of us as you share it.
Here's what that might look like in practice. Say I offer you genuine recognition of your strength — "I'm so struck by your ability to keep moving forward when things get hard" — and you laugh it off: "I guess, but this is just what I've done forever." On the surface, that's a small moment. But implicitly, something important just happened: you minimized your strength and deflected the affirmation. In relational therapy, that moment doesn't pass unnoticed — it becomes an opening. What is it like to not let affirmation in? What fears come up when you consider accepting your own strengths? What would shift if you could take in sincere praise from someone who means it? That's the work.
In sum, being a relational therapist means naming the dynamic between us, exploring how it echoes your relationships outside of this room, and using what we find together as the material for the changes you want to experience.
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Absolutely. Relational therapy refers to the relationship between client and therapist — not the relationships you have outside of therapy.
The way you show up with me — what you share and what you hold back, how you receive care, how you handle disagreement or disappointment, whether you make yourself small or take up space — all of that is relational data. And it tells us something meaningful about how you show up everywhere else in your life, whether you're partnered or single, in relational crisis or simply curious about yourself.
Ready to Begin?
Book a free 15-minute consultation call –
no commitment, just a conversation.