Depth psychotherapy informed by neuroscience and nearly twenty years of clinical private practice in manhattan

About Kimberly Christopher, LCSW

I am a psychotherapist, and I don't believe people are broken. I believe something in each of us knows how to heal, and that suffering often begins when we lose touch with it. My work is to help you find your way back.

I have practiced in New York City for nearly twenty years, and I have sat in meditation, on a yoga mat, and in silence for longer than that. Both have taught me that the mind and the body are one conversation. What the mind cannot say, the body carries. Ignore it, and it speaks louder; silence it, and it finds another way to be heard, usually through symptoms. Science now confirms what the contemplatives long knew: that the brain can heal and that we remain able to change throughout our lives.

So I work with the whole person. My therapeutic roots are in psychodynamic depth therapy, in object relations, self psychology, and the relational and intersubjective traditions, along with humanistic and existential thought. To that foundation, I have added formal training in EMDR, Internal Family Systems, cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), Somatic Experiencing, and nutrition and integrative medicine for mental health. With couples, I draw on the Gottman Method, Internal Family Systems, and Emotionally Focused Therapy.

I first encountered EMDR in 2008, and it changed my sense of what therapy could do. It was developed for trauma and is now used for anxiety, depression, grief, and shame as well. It has been at the center of my practice ever since, because it reaches the stuck places that years of talking leave untouched.

These are my instruments. What heals is the moment you are no longer alone with it.

Who Comes to Me

Self-knowledge is rarely what my clients lack. They are professionals, executives, artists, entrepreneurs, and people in public life, accomplished by every outward measure and privately carrying something no one sees. They can describe their patterns with precision. And the very habits that once protected them now keep them apart from the people they love.

If you recognize yourself here, you have probably understood your patterns for a long time. Understanding, though, was never where they began. They were laid down before language, in the body and in your earliest attachments, and the nervous system keeps faith with what the mind has long since put to rest. It learned to stay vigilant and to repeat whatever once ensured your safety, and it continues to do so well after the danger has gone. Therapy has to reach that depth to be of real use.

Many of the women I see are in midlife, in the upheaval of perimenopause and menopause that medicine so often waves away. Many of my clients are couples who want more than better communication and are ready to ask what is really driving the distance between them. I work with relationships in all their consensual forms, including ethical non-monogamy and polyamory. I also have long experience with people for whom privacy is a necessity.

There are also times when life breaks open without warning: a death, a betrayal, the collapse of something you had built your days around. I am available for those times as well. In a crisis, I work closely and practically, offering additional or extended sessions for as long as they are needed, until you can feel the ground beneath you again.

Specialties

• Couples and relationships: betrayal and infidelity, partners of sex addicts, couples on the brink, separation and divorce, co-parenting, and high-conflict or narcissistic relationships

• Substance use, recovery, and compulsive behaviors

• Partners and adult children of alcoholics, and of people with narcissistic or borderline traits

• Trauma, using EMDR and somatic psychotherapy

• Anxiety, mood disorders, chronic stress, and burnout

• Health anxiety and chronic illness

• Professionals, business leaders, and public figures, along with their partners and adult children

• Midlife women, including perimenopause and menopause

Where I Come From

I grew up in Greenville, Ohio, in a house where love and kindness lived alongside a steady undercurrent of anxiety and sadness. My father was quiet and reclusive. He ran a dime store and invented board games in our garage, and I think that solitary making was his refuge. My mother was a devout Christian Scientist who spent much of her time in prayer, seeking shelter from sorrow and fear. Her faith comforted her. It was only later, in my own psychoanalysis, that I understood it had served her needs more than mine. I became a student of human nature because I needed to make sense of that strange, isolated childhood.

My early life was organized around physical discipline. I trained in ballet, jazz, and modern dance and competed in gymnastics, track, swimming, and diving. Competitive training of that kind rewards the capacity to override pain, fatigue, and fear, and over time I lost reliable access to my body's signals and, with them, a clear sense of my own needs. The enjoyment I had first taken in movement did not survive it. Leaving competition was the start of a long process of restoring that connection. It also gave me a firsthand understanding of how a person can become estranged from their body while continuing to perform at a high level, which I now recognize in many of the people I treat.

The Path to This Work

Yoga found me in grief, after several significant losses. Later, after a divorce, I returned to graduate school while raising two sons alone, and I graduated with high honors from New York University in clinical social work. I was a PhD candidate when my brother and my father died, and my mother suffered a stroke. I left the program. What mattered was the people in my life, and that choice shaped everything that followed.

Those years taught me that the most important things rarely arrive on schedule, and that the capacity to sit with what is hardest in another person depends on having sat with it yourself.

Spirit and Practice

My way of working is rooted in science and in soul. Alongside my clinical training, I completed Donna Karan's Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program, a 500-hour certification in integrative and yoga therapy. I am a Level II Reiki practitioner, trained by Margaret Ann Case and Pamela Miles, and I practice self-Reiki every day.

My own seeking has taken me through Buddhism, meditation, Kundalini, Tantra, inner child work, energy medicine, and intuitive healing, among other traditions. I keep a daily practice of connecting with the Universe and the Divine, and I bring what I find there into my work. These practices are where my steadiness comes from, and they let me meet people in parts of their experience that thinking alone does not reach.

For me, healing means recovering a self that can be present to its own life. Symptom relief is part of that, and only part.

The World We Heal In

No one suffers in a vacuum. The culture that taught me as a girl to override my body teaches many people to do the same. Women in midlife are told their distress is only stress. People whose relationships don't fit the expected shape learn to hide them. Those who have lived under a controlling partner, family, or institution are often doubted when they finally speak. I hold these as shared wounds as much as private ones, and I believe that when one person recovers their voice, the people around them have more room to recover theirs.

I divide my time between New York City and the Berkshires, where I share a practice with my husband, psychologist John Christopher, PhD. I have two grown sons, a grandson, and two rescue cats, Loki and Luna. I love travel, photography, gardening, biking, the beach, and vintage finds from flea markets.

Begin

If what you've read here resonates — if you recognize yourself in the description of who this practice serves, or if something in this approach feels like what you've been looking for — I'd welcome a conversation. Beginning is often the hardest part. A brief consultation call is enough to start.

Schedule online: Book a Consultation‍ ‍Text: 212-529-8292 Email:‍ ‍holisticmindbody

Kimberly Christopher, LCSW — New York University · Advanced EMDR Training, EMDRIA · 500-Hour Integrative Yoga Therapy, Urban Zen · Level II Reiki Practitioner