Carpe Diem Mental Health Counseling, Pllc

I'm a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, licensed in both New York and Florida, and I've spent over a decade walking with people through the hardest chapters of their lives — including years in clinical leadership, where I develop and implement treatment programs.

I work with adults and couples through trauma, burnout, grief, and the questions of identity that surface when life asks us to change. Much of my work is with people navigating race, culture and belonging, and I see clients in English or Español — not translated, but thought through in the language you feel most yourself in.

I also work with the emotional weight of chronic illness, including lipedema and lymphedema. If you've been told your pain is "just weight," you won't have to convince me of it here.

I earned my Master of Arts in Mental Health Counseling from The City College of New York, and my training centers on schema therapy, trauma-focused work and exposure therapy.

My approach starts with clearly defining the problem — then zooming out to look at the whole system around you: community, family, work, and the roles you carry. When we see the fuller picture, we can find the specific, actionable steps and different choices that lead to real, lasting progress.

Much of that work draws on schema therapy, which means tracing today's struggles back to patterns learned early — often before you had words for them — and gently rewriting them, so change lasts instead of repeating. Alongside it I use practical tools from CBT and DBT for what's happening right now, and trauma-focused approaches when the past is still running the present.

We work on both: relief this week, and the reason it keeps happening.

Mostly, I listen. You tell me what brought you here in whatever order it comes out — there's no right way to start, and you don't need to have it organized beforehand.

I'll ask questions to understand the shape of it: what's happening now, what you've already tried, what's at stake, and what you'd want to be different. If something feels too raw to go into yet, say so and we'll leave it there. Nothing gets forced open on the first day.

By the end you'll have a clear sense of what working together would look like, and I'll usually offer one thing you can take with you — so the first hour is useful, not just paperwork.

You don't need to prepare anything. Come as you are.