About Lydia

Lydia is a trauma-focused, relational therapist and coach who works with adults, children, 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, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Trauma-Focused CBT, Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Internal Family Systems (IFS). 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

  • Shame and low self-worth

  • Difficulty trusting others

  • Dating, relationship or communication struggles

  • Self-harm and suicidal thoughts

  • Post-traumatic stress and complex trauma

  • Interpersonal violence and emotional abuse

  • Childhood abuse and neglect

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, a respected training center for family and relational therapy. Her time at Ackerman deepened her ability to understand individual struggles within the broader context of family systems and intergenerational patterns. This approach allows her to help clients see how their relationships, past and present, shape their emotional experiences, behaviors, and patterns of connection.

She also completed her meditation teacher training at the Nalanda Institute in 2019, which supports her integrative and mindful approach to therapy. This training helps her guide clients in cultivating self-awareness, nervous system regulation, and presence, which are all essential tools for healing and sustaining meaningful change.

Lydia began as a social worker and community organizer and later became 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 trying to find their way around in a new system, undocumented construction workers organizing to protect against exploitation, young people exploring their gender and sexual identity, the parents of said youth struggling to understand and accept their children’s choices, war 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.

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

Interests and Orientation

Lydia loves to dance and is passionate about understanding humanity through the dances and rhythms that have been passed down for thousands of years. She has traveled to Haiti, New Orleans, and the Republic of Congo 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 nature – soil, bugs (!), roots, trees, and rocks. She also enjoys creating art and smothering her French Bulldog, Charles.

Lydia is committed to repairing harm that has been done over generations. She is continually learning how to embody this in the present and engages in her own therapy, mindfulness, and ancestral healing with the purpose of understanding what repair looks like in the present. Lydia actively advocates for an end to the occupation of indigenous territories, worldwide. Lydia is engaged in her own lifelong journey undoing internalized biases and rewiring patterns of thinking and understanding in the body that perpetuate harm, both systemically and individually. Lydia believes in the power of rest and dreaming as resistance and revolutionary healing.