As a child, adults would often say things to me such as “Where do you get all of your energy?  I wish I had your energy.”  And I marveled at this strange question.  How could adults forget what it is like to be a kid?  As the three-year-old flower girl just before the start of my aunt’s outdoor wedding, I wanted to go down a nearby slide.  So I handed my flowers to my mother and took off down the slide.  This amused the adults in my family for years to come.  I clearly remember thinking, “No one told me I was supposed to stay put the whole time.”  How could they expect me to know that?  Had they forgotten that I was a child and did not yet know about weddings?  It seemed strange to me, but they had.

In college, I studied child development, including nine months teaching art at a boarding school for children with significant learning disabilities.  After college, I taught photography in an after-school enrichment program.  When I made my move to New York, it was to work in the children’s program of a battered women’s shelter, where I began to study the effects of trauma on children. 

My experience in the shelter system led me to graduate studies in social work, where I continued working with families in shelters.  After earning my Master’s degree, I was still unsatisfied with the tools I had acquired, so I enrolled in an intensive three-year clinical training program offered by New York Institute for Psychotherapy Training in Infancy, Children and Adolescents (NYIPT).  NYIPT is a highly-respected psychotherapy institute and the training which they provide was an invaluable experience for me.  While completing my training, I worked as the sole therapist in a large preschool, seeing groups and individual children in the classrooms, alongside teachers.  I continued working in the preschool after completing my training.  While building my private practice, I was accepted as a supervisee by Carlo Grand, PhD, co-director of the child and adolescent program at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR).  I fine-tuned my work under Dr. Grand’s supervision for three years.

Even with all of this advanced training, I still felt that I needed something more to address the cognitive and behavioral issues of children with learning disabilities and other concerns.  I was extremely privileged to be able to study with Dale Seiden, Ed. D., who developed and utilizes a unique, arts-based methodology to facilitate cognition and affective behavior in children who have special learningneeds.Using projects specifically designed to target each child’s cognitive issues, she provides intensely structured therapy that significantly improves skills and self-esteem of children with learning differences. After studying with Dr. Seiden, I have been able to incorporate many of her methods into my play therapy sessions. 

Dr. Seiden can be contacted at
25 Central Park West, Suite 1i,
New York, NY 10023
212.262.4404.