Hello, World!
COMPLEX TRAUMA • SEXUAL TRAUMA • ADDICTION • ATTACHMENT & RELATIONSHIPS
You can understand exactly why you do something and still not know how to stop.
Maybe you shut down when conversations get too close. You want connection and then need distance. You keep functioning while something underneath feels exhausted, disconnected, ashamed, or stuck.
You don’t need to know whether to call it trauma, attachment, addiction, or anything else before reaching out.
See if this sounds like you ↓Sometimes the hardest patterns are the ones that make no sense from the outside.
Especially when part of you understands exactly what’s happening and another part keeps responding the same way anyway.
You want closeness. Then closeness feels like too much.
You may genuinely love someone and still pull away, shut down, become irritated, or need distance when things get emotionally close.
You go blank when something matters.
During conflict or difficult conversations, the words disappear. Later, you know exactly what you wanted to say.
You look fine from the outside.
You work, parent, show up, take care of things. Most people would have no idea how much effort it takes to keep everything moving.
You keep returning to something you wish you didn’t need.
Substances, behaviors, distraction, staying busy, checking out, or another way of getting relief may have become difficult to let go of.
You carry shame that doesn’t respond to logic.
You can know intellectually that you shouldn’t blame yourself and still feel as if something about you is wrong.
Intimacy, trust, or your body feel complicated.
Past experiences may show up now around closeness, sexuality, boundaries, vulnerability, or feeling comfortable with another person.
The thing you’re trying hardest to stop may have once been helping you get through something.
Pulling away can protect you from being hurt. Going numb can make something unbearable more manageable. Staying busy can keep you from having to feel what happens when things get quiet.
A substance or behavior can bring relief when you don’t know another way to get it.
That doesn’t mean every coping pattern is still helping you. Some can become painful, destructive, or limiting. Understanding why something developed doesn’t mean pretending it isn’t hurting you now.
You don’t have to fit neatly into one category.
Trauma, coping, relationships, shame, addiction, and attachment often overlap. We can start with what is affecting you now.
Complex Trauma & CPTSD
Childhood experiences, chronic emotional unsafety, shutdown, hypervigilance, shame, emotional numbness, difficulty trusting, or feeling as though your past keeps showing up in the present.
Sexual Trauma
Working carefully with the impact of sexual trauma on shame, trust, boundaries, intimacy, sexuality, relationships, and your experience of your body.
Addiction & Compulsive Coping
Looking beyond the behavior itself to understand what substances, compulsive behaviors, avoidance, distraction, or another coping pattern has been helping you manage.
Attachment & Relationship Patterns
Pulling away when someone gets close, difficulty trusting, people pleasing, fear of abandonment, shutting down during conflict, or repeatedly finding yourself in relationships that feel familiar in painful ways.
Sometimes context matters.
Many of the people I work with are navigating trauma, addiction, sexuality, relationships, family expectations, or shame within Orthodox Jewish life.
There can be layers to these experiences that are difficult to explain to someone unfamiliar with the community. You don’t need to spend therapy teaching me every basic piece of the world you come from.
At the same time, I won’t assume your experience because I understand the context. Your relationship with family, faith, community, marriage, sexuality, and identity is yours.
You want to understand yourself without being reduced to a diagnosis or a list of symptoms.
You don’t need to arrive with perfect insight. But this work tends to fit people who are interested in getting curious about what is happening underneath the patterns they’re struggling with.
- You want depth, but you also want therapy to connect to your actual life.
- You’re willing to get curious about patterns instead of only fighting them.
- You want a therapist who can be warm and direct.
- You don’t want to be rushed into talking about things before you’re ready.
- You’re looking for individual outpatient therapy rather than crisis or intensive treatment.
Thinking, “This sounds a little too familiar”?
You don’t have to decide whether I’m the right therapist from a website. A free 15-minute consultation gives us a chance to talk briefly about what brings you in, what you’re looking for, and whether working together makes sense.
Sury Klein • LMSW (NY) • LSW (NJ) • CASAC-T