About Me
I am a native New Yorker, in love with my city from the time I was tall enough to look out the window of a taxi: All those people! All the sparkling lights!
Once I was old enough to cross a street, at six-and-a-half, this became a gritty and personal love: The pigeons! The strange people! The friendly people! The scary people! The soot! The dogs you could pet, and the dogs you could not pet!
Growing up in mid-Manhattan in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I was a protected, but somewhat free-range kid. When you’re given a little freedom, you become very attentive. This way of being alive and alert was the beginning of life as a creative human, and the beginning of becoming a therapist. The city pressed me to hear, see, feel, and understand. It also called me to write, draw, and paint.
I figured I was going to become a writer and illustrator. I certainly worked at it. In the course of three decades, I became a “blocked” writer, an unblocked writer, and an unpublished writer. I also became a Russian translator.
In an incredible stroke of good fortune, translation with incoming Soviet refugees led me to social work – and there was a powerful “click.” I became a therapist – an even more powerful “click.” A nerdy sort of person who’s always seeking to refine my work, I ultimately became an experiential therapist. Something one is always in the process of becoming!
So: I’m a New York therapist – it’s all baked together.
Throughout difficult times in my own life as I grew, the city was my friend. Its places and its people held me in moments when no one else would. But New York is a very complicated place for living. It is a laboratory of catalysts for emotional ups and downs. For a decade or so, I myself fell deeply in hate with New York. This was pretty damned depressing.
Psychotherapy is powerful medicine. But ... another medicine with tremendous power to restore us and transform our experience is art. Not only through creating it, but through receiving it, taking it in. An open sense door … an instant of contact … a recognition … an experience that means something. And suddenly, momentarily, we are less alone.
In that spirit, I’m offering a small bit of the art form that helps me when I am down in and on the city: the tender, clear, unsparing, and relentlessly loving eye of street photography. It’s an art that reveals … all of us, separate yet together, living – so alive! – and forgetting – as we must – from moment to moment.
Each of us perfectly beautiful, just as we are, in each passing moment.
May each of you, reading this, find your own way to the art that is your best ancillary medicine, and to the treatment that helps you discover the work of art that you are, just as you are, in being, and becoming.
(all photographs courtesy of Cal Eagle)
Education and Training:
BA, Barnard College, magna cum laude, 1978
MSW, Hunter School of Social Work, Honors, 1994
Graduate, Martha K. Selig Educational Institute, 1998
Advanced Training Program, Couples and Family Therapy, Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services, 1998-2002
Certified in Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples (EFT), ICEEFT
Advanced Training in Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), 2012-present