You know yourself pretty well.
You just don't know why you keep doing this.
You've done the journaling. You've read the books. You know your patterns
And somehow you're still repeating them…
In your relationships. In how you fight. In how you go quiet when you should speak up.
That's your nervous system doing exactly what it learned to do a long time ago.
I’m Michelle
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist in New York
I specialize in helping navigate relationship anxiety, anxious attachment, and relationship conflict and communication patterns that feel hard to break on your own.
Most of my clients are high-achieving, self-aware, and deeply capable…
But internally stuck in cycles of overthinking, people-pleasing, emotional reactivity, or disconnection in relationships
These patterns didn’t come out of nowhere.
If you grew up as the responsible one — the eldest daughter, the caregiver, the one who held it together — you learned early how to stay composed, anticipate everyone else's needs, and keep the peace even when you were overwhelmed.
If you come from an immigrant or Asian American background, you may be navigating layered cultural expectations, family roles, and unspoken emotional rules that shaped how you learned to relate, communicate, and love.
These experiences often shape what shows up later as anxious attachment patterns, relationship anxiety, and difficulty with emotional safety that escalates conflicts in relationships.
They are not flaws.
They are adaptations; strategies that once helped you stay connected, accepted, and safe.
But it may not serve YOU today.
Why you react the way you do, even when it doesn't make sense to you
How your childhood taught you to survive in relationships, and why those same tools are now getting in the way
What it actually feels like to communicate without shutting down, spiraling, or over-explaining
How to stop repeating the same patterns with your partner, your family, and yourself
In our work together, you'll start to understand:
This isn't about venting every week and hoping things shift.
This is deep, real work
The kind that creates lasting change
This is the work I do with clients
I use a relational, psychodynamic, and culturally informed approach as a relationship, anxiety & couples therapist in NYC to help you understand your patterns.
In our work, we slow things down so you can see what’s happening beneath the overthinking, shutdowns, people-pleasing, or conflict cycles.
We focus on building awareness around how you relate, communicate, and respond in relationships—so you can begin to shift those patterns in real time.
The goal is to move from reactivity and assumption → toward clarity, emotional steadiness, and self-trust in relationships.
So that you become more grounded in yourself, so you can show up differently in your relationships.
We also make space for what’s been carried for too long: resentment, grief, anger, sadness
So it doesn’t keep running your relationships.
You don’t have to keep doing this alone
Whether you're an anxious people pleaser worn out from managing everyone else's feelings, a couple caught in the same conflict on repeat, or someone quietly carrying relationship anxiety — you landed here for a reason.
Anxious attachment didn't develop overnight. It shifts in a consistent, safe relationship — one where you're finally allowed to be fully honest.
Credentials & Background
MS in Marriage & Family Therapy, The Family Institute at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL
BS in Psychology, Fordham University, NY
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist (LMFT), New York
PREPARE/ENRICH Facilitator
My work draws from…
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)— to help you and your partner break the cycle and actually feel close again
Internal Family Systems (IFS)— because a part of you is still trying to protect you the way it learned to when you were young
Narrative Therapy— to help you separate who you are from the stories you were handed
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)— to shift the thought patterns keeping you stuck
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)— to help you stop fighting yourself and start moving toward what actually matters
Culturally-Sensitive Therapy— with deep awareness of immigrant, Asian American, and Filipino family dynamics
Somatic Psychotherapy/ Experiencing — because your body holds the patterns too, and we work with that, not around it
Relational Self-Awareness— understanding how you show up in relationships, and why