The work
The work I do is relational and pattern-focused. I don't run through intake checklists or assign exercises between sessions. I pay attention to what happens in the room: what you're saying, what you're not saying, the moments when something shifts or goes flat or speeds up. That's the material we work with.
Most people arrive already knowing the story of their situation. They've told it to themselves a hundred times and always land in the same place. What's missing is a different angle, someone watching in real time who can name what's invisible from inside it. That's what I offer. Not interpretation from a distance, but attention in the room, offered as it happens.
I work with individuals and couples. Individual work is usually about finding the pattern underneath the presenting problem, the thing that keeps recurring in different forms across different circumstances. Couples work is about finding what the argument is really about, which is rarely what it appears to be about. Both come down to the same thing: seeing what you haven't been able to see, and from there, actually being able to do something different.
The bind finance puts you in
Finance selects for and then rewards a particular setup: total performance, strict discretion, and a baseline that resets with every bonus so that satisfaction is always one cycle out. It also makes a mental-health record genuinely costly. A diagnosis or a course of treatment is not a private matter when compliance, licensing, and the firm are in the picture, so a lot of people who are struggling simply do not create one. The result is a population that is paid extraordinarily well to look fine and is quietly not.
This is a way to do the work with no record for anyone to read: no insurance claim, no diagnosis, nothing that touches compliance or the firm.
What finance professionals bring
The shapes are consistent across the desk, the fund, and the deal team. The analyst years that hardened into a personality and never softened back. The drinking that is scheduled with the same precision as everything else. The marriage run by calendar invite. The identity fused with the P&L, so a bad run reads as a verdict on the self. And underneath the compensation, the specific, disorienting emptiness of having won the exact game you were told to win and feeling nothing where the satisfaction was supposed to be. It is the most orderly unhappiness there is, and it responds well to being looked at directly.
The arrangement
I am a US-trained psychodynamic therapist working online and privately, across every time zone finance lives in. No insurance billing, no diagnosis, no clinical record that compliance or the firm could reach. You pay directly, in any currency, and we work around the desk rather than a fixed slot. We start with a free 15-minute call.
Questions finance professionals ask
What people bring to online therapy
The people I work with in English come for a wide range of reasons: anxiety, depression, stress and burnout, anger management, grief and loss, relationship difficulties, loneliness, self-esteem issues, procrastination, sleep problems, attachment patterns, self-sabotage, perfectionism, identity questions, and existential concerns. Online counseling makes this work possible from wherever you are, whether you need an English-speaking therapist, a virtual counselor, or simply someone who can work in your language at a depth that matters.
How it works
Sessions are online via secure video call. I work with individuals and couples (60 minutes). Before your first session, we have a free 15-minute call to see if this feels like the right fit for you.
Selected research on this approach
My work is psychodynamic and depth-oriented. These are some of the studies on the effectiveness of that kind of therapy. They describe research on the method in general, and are not claims about any individual outcome.
- Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 65(2), 98-109. doi:10.1037/a0018378
- Steinert, C., Munder, T., Rabung, S., Hoyer, J., & Leichsenring, F. (2017). Psychodynamic therapy: as efficacious as other empirically supported treatments? A meta-analysis testing equivalence of outcomes. American Journal of Psychiatry, 174(10), 943-953. PMID 28541091
- Leichsenring, F., Abbass, A., Heim, N., Keefe, J. R., Kisely, S., Luyten, P., Rabung, S., & Steinert, C. (2023). The status of psychodynamic psychotherapy as an empirically supported treatment for common mental disorders: an umbrella review based on updated criteria. World Psychiatry, 22(2), 286-304. PMC10168167