About Lydia

Lydia is a trauma-focused, relational therapist and coach who works with adults, children, teens, families, and couples. She believes that the client is the expert in their experience and she engages with a curious, collaborative, strengths-based perspective. Lydia draws from the Ackerman Relational Approach, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Trauma-Focused CBT, and Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT). She is a trained meditation teacher and integrates mindfulness and body awareness into her sessions.

Lydia supports clients who are navigating:

  • Loneliness and disconnection

  • Exhaustion, anxiety, and depression

  • Stress management

  • Adjustment to a high-pressure, high-visibility lifestyle

  • Desire to feel more joy

  • Lack of clarity on life path or deeper calling

  • Desire to reach a fuller potential

  • Dating, relationship or communication struggles

  • Shame and low self-worth

  • Difficulty trusting others

  • Self-harm and suicidal thoughts

  • Post-traumatic stress and complex trauma

  • Current or past interpersonal violence and emotional abuse

  • Past experience of childhood abuse and neglect

  • Divorce or separation

  • Parenting and/or family challenges

  • Grief

  • Ancestral or intergenerational trauma/patterning

  • Decolonizing the mind and body

  • Gender expansiveness and fluidity

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Training and Work History

Lydia received her Master of Social Work degree from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College in 2014 and trained at the Ackerman Institute for the Family from 2020 to 2022.

She also completed meditation teacher training at the Nalanda Institute in 2019, which supports an integrative and mindful approach to therapy. She also completed Nalanda’s Contemplative Psychotherapy program from 2021 to 2022. Mindfulness training helps her guide clients in cultivating self-awareness, nervous system regulation, and presence, which are essential tools for healing and sustaining meaningful change.

Lydia has been trained in both EMDR and IFS and is working towards certification in both.

Lydia began as a social worker and community organizer and before honing in as a clinician. She has worked with survivors of domestic violence and emotional abuse, survivors of childhood abuse and neglect, recent immigrants to the United States finding their way in a new system, undocumented construction workers organizing against exploitation, young people exploring their gender and sexual identity, the parents of said youth struggling to understand and accept their children’s choices, combat veterans reintegrating into life at home, and families with foster children.

From 2015-2018, Lydia ran a nonprofit organization that supported unaccompanied immigrant youth as they adjusted to life in New York City.

Lydia has worked closely with children, teens, and their parents/caregivers in both individual and joint sessions to facilitate smoother communication within the family. She is passionate about helping children and their caregivers understand each other better.

She speaks English, Spanish, French, very beginning Arabic and broken sentences in Haitian Kreyol. She can understand some words in Korean after watching countless K-dramas.

Interests and Orientation

Lydia loves to dance and is passionate about understanding humanity through dances and rhythms that have been passed down for thousands of years. She has traveled to Haiti, New Orleans, Kongo, and Benin to study dance. Lydia loves to travel in general to see how people all over the world have developed different rituals and ways of interpreting the human experience. She loves to be held by warm, ocean water and adores the earth – soil, bugs (!), roots, trees, and rocks. She believes that much healing comes from connecting with the earth. She enjoys creating art and smothering her French Bulldog, Charles.

Lydia is committed to repairing harm that has been done over generations through colonialism, occupation, slavery, extraction, racism and patriarchy (to name a few). She is continually learning how to embody this relationally, in the present. She is committed to undoing and rewiring internalized biases and behavior that perpetuate harm.

Lydia believes in the power of rest, dreaming and fostering loving community as resistance and revolutionary healing.

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