Individual Therapy in New York for the Patterns That Don’t Move
You can outwork most things. The career. The apartment. The life that looks, on paper, like it should be enough. What you cannot outwork is what runs underneath it. The loop that starts the moment you stop moving. The voice that gets louder when things go well. The sense that something is wrong even when nothing is wrong.
New York Therapy offers individual therapy NYC online throughout New York State. The practice is led by Travis Atkinson, LCSW, LICSW, who trained under Dr. Jeffrey Young (founder of Schema Therapy) and Dr. Sue Johnson (founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy). The work here is for people who have already tried therapy and found that something kept being missed.
What this work is actually for
Most individual therapy in New York is a version of the same conversation. You describe your week. The therapist reflects it back. You agree the patterns are difficult. You leave feeling heard. Six months later the patterns are still there.
The patterns are still there because they were not formed in the present. They were formed early, by people doing their best with what they had, and they got encoded before you had language for them. Insight does not dissolve them. Neither does labeling, breathing, or self-compassion practice. Reaching them takes methods built to reach them.
Individual therapy here is for:
- Anxiety that has outlasted every intervention you have tried
- The relationship pattern that survives every partner
- The internal critic that runs while you build something most people would envy
- Success that does not land, where the career and the life you wanted are in place and something still feels hollow
- Depression that returns predictably, no matter how stable everything looks
- The sense of being fundamentally other, sitting across from people who seem to belong to a club you missed the application for
This is not crisis work. It is the work after the crisis, once the chaos has settled and what is left is the shape of you, and you want to know whether the shape can change.
How a session actually works
Sessions are weekly, by secure video. You can choose between 45 and 60 minutes per session, with 60 being the recommended length for most of the work we do. You will not spend the first ten minutes reciting your week. We start with whatever is alive: the conflict on Sunday, the email you have been avoiding, the conversation in your head that woke you at 4 a.m. From there we work backward to the structure underneath.
Early treatment is assessment and orientation. Most clients complete the Young Schema Questionnaire and the Schema Mode Inventory, which map the specific patterns and inner parts that run your reactions. This is not a personality test. It is a working map we refer back to for the rest of the work.
The middle phase is where the methods diverge from most therapy. We use imagery rescripting, chair work, and limited reparenting. These are precise clinical interventions, developed over forty years of research, that reach states cognitive conversation cannot reach. They are also where most of the change happens.
The closing phase is integration: making the new patterns durable in the relationships, work, and self-talk that triggered the old ones.
Four methods, used together
Most therapists pick a lane. The work here uses whichever method fits the problem.
Schema Therapy
The primary lens for lifelong patterns, characterological depression and anxiety, complex relational history, and what diagnostic manuals call “personality” issues. It is the most researched integrative model for these presentations. Learn more about Schema Therapy →
CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)
The most studied therapy in the world and the right first move for many anxiety disorders, OCD, panic, and specific phobias. It does what it does well. It is also frequently misused for problems it was not designed to treat. Learn more about CBT →
Mindsight
Dr. Daniel Siegel’s integrative framework drawing on interpersonal neurobiology, attention training, and the science of how the mind perceives itself. Useful for clients who want to understand the neurological “why” alongside the experiential work. Learn more about Mindsight →
EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy)
Primarily a couples model, but individually-focused EFT (called EFIT) is a strong approach for clients whose core wound is attachment-based: people who learned early that closeness was unsafe. Learn more about EFT →
Method assignment does not happen at intake. We choose together, once we know what the problem actually is.
Why this practice
Most therapists who list Schema Therapy or EFT on their profile have completed a workshop. A smaller number hold certification. A very small number trained directly with the developers of the models they practice.
Travis trained under Dr. Jeffrey Young, the founder of Schema Therapy, for more than two decades. The mentorship began in the late 1990s and continued until Dr. Young’s death. He was also mentored by the late Dr. Sue Johnson, the developer of Emotionally Focused Therapy. With Dr. Johnson, he co-created the first EFT training video designed for couples therapists.
He has contributed chapters to Creative Methods in Schema Therapy, the field’s reference text on advanced experiential work. He teaches and supervises clinicians internationally.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know if I need individual therapy versus couples or group?
If what you want to change is mostly yours (your anxiety, your relationship to work, your inner critic, your history), individual is the right starting point. Many clients start in individual work and add couples or group later. Some do the reverse.
Do you take insurance?
New York Therapy is out-of-network. We provide a superbill you can submit for partial reimbursement, which most PPO plans offer for licensed clinical work.
Is online therapy as effective as in-person?
For the work we do, yes. Experiential methods like imagery rescripting, chair work, and mode work translate well to video when the clinician has trained in adapting them. The research on telehealth-delivered Schema Therapy and EFT shows outcomes equivalent to in-person.
How long does individual therapy take?
For specific anxiety or phobic conditions treated with CBT, usually 12 to 20 sessions. For longstanding patterns treated with Schema Therapy or EFIT, the work is longer, typically a year or more, because what we are changing is older.
What conditions do you treat?
Anxiety disorders, depression including recurrent and treatment-resistant presentations, trauma and PTSD, attachment wounds, characterological issues including diagnoses formerly called “personality disorders,” perfectionism, the high-functioning depression common in driven professionals, and the existential flatness that can follow external success.
Can I switch methods if it is not working?
Yes. The treatment plan is a working hypothesis. We adjust as the work reveals what it needs.
If you recognize yourself
The patterns that brought you here will not dissolve from being noticed. They dissolve from being met, with the right method, by a clinician trained in it, over the time the work actually takes.
Consultations are free and run 20 minutes. They are conversational, not diagnostic. We talk about what is happening, what you have tried, and whether the work here is the right fit.