I’m Valery, a psychotherapist who works with adults and couples who want to understand themselves more deeply, change longstanding patterns, and create more fulfilling relationships with themselves and others.

I believe that many of the difficulties that bring us to therapy, anxiety, depression, relationship conflict, insecurity, emotional reactivity, disconnection, or simply the feeling that something isn’t quite right, make more sense when we understand what is happening underneath them.

Often, the ways we think, feel, relate, protect ourselves, and respond to other people were shaped long before we consciously chose them. They may once have helped us adapt, belong, stay connected, or protect ourselves. But over time, those same patterns can begin to limit us.

My work is about making those patterns visible and understandable and then helping you change how you experience and respond to them.

I bring over a decade of clinical experience to my work and have spent much of my career working with adults and couples. My approach integrates psychodynamic and attachment-based therapy with experiential, relational, trauma-informed, somatic, and nervous-system-focused approaches. Rather than relying on one method, I draw from different ways of working depending on the person in front of me and what will help us reach the heart of the issue.

With individuals, we may explore the relationship between your present struggles and the deeper emotional patterns shaping them: how you see yourself, what you expect from others, what happens when you feel hurt or threatened, what you protect yourself from, and what you may have learned to suppress or disconnect from.

But insight is only part of the work. I also incorporate practical, experiential and somatic approaches that help you work directly with emotions as they arise, regulate your nervous system, build greater capacity for difficult feelings, and practice responding differently in real time. The goal is not simply to understand why you are the way you are, but to help your emotional and physiological responses actually begin to change.

With couples, I help partners look beneath the content of their arguments to understand the emotional dynamics driving them. What looks like a fight about communication, sex, commitment, household responsibilities, or another recurring issue is often connected to something deeper: feeling dismissed, unwanted, controlled, criticized, unimportant, unsafe, or alone.

Couples work is also highly experiential. We pay attention to what happens between you in the room: how each partner’s nervous system responds to disconnection, conflict, vulnerability, or closeness, and practice slowing those reactions down and creating new ways of reaching for and responding to one another. This gives couples practical ways to regulate themselves during conflict, interrupt familiar cycles, communicate more effectively, and build greater emotional safety and intimacy.

My style as a therapist is warm, engaged, curious, and direct. I don’t believe therapy should be a place where you talk while I simply listen from a distance. I will listen carefully, but I will also ask questions, offer observations, notice patterns, challenge you when it may be helpful, and work collaboratively with you to understand what is happening beneath the surface.

I’m particularly interested in the places where psychology meets the larger more existential question of who we are. Therapy can help us understand our conditioning, histories, defenses, and emotional patterns, but I also believe we are more than the patterns we have accumulated. Part of our work can involve learning to recognize what has shaped you without reducing yourself to it.

Ultimately, I hope therapy helps you become more of yourself: more emotionally free, more connected, more capable of intimacy, more able to trust your own experience, and more flexible in how you respond to life.

Therapy is not about becoming a perfected version of yourself. It is about understanding yourself deeply enough that you have more choice. and creating the conditions for something different to emerge.

If that is the kind of work you are looking for, I would be glad to meet you.