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A Female Therapist for NYC Women

Private psychological care for New York City women, substance use, anxiety, perimenopausal drinking, trauma history, and the family-system patterns that get tangled up with all of it. Telehealth across NYC, Westchester, and the tri-state area.

A Different Kind of Practice for NYC Women

If you are a New York City woman searching for a female therapist, you have probably already noticed how thin the options actually are once you look closely. The big telehealth platforms, BetterHelp, Talkspace, match by availability rather than fit. The Manhattan psychiatry directories tilt toward male clinicians and toward medication-first approaches. The therapy directories list dozens of female clinicians, but most are early-career, generalist, and not equipped for the specific patterns that bring women into treatment in their thirties, forties, fifties, and beyond.

What many NYC women are looking for is what we do: a private, doctorate-level female psychologist who has spent 25 years working with women whose presenting problems are tangled together. The drinking that started as a coping tool and became its own problem. The anxiety that has gotten worse around perimenopause. The depression that lifts and returns and lifts again. The trauma history that keeps surfacing in places that should be unrelated. The marriage that has reorganized itself around someone else's addiction.

We work primarily by Zoom with NYC patients, with a Princeton, NJ office available by appointment when in-person sessions make clinical sense. Most patients use telehealth. The format is a clinical decision, not a constraint.

Who We Treat in the NYC Area

High-Achieving Professional Women

Manhattan and Brooklyn women in finance, law, medicine, media, and tech leadership. The drinking pattern that started as a way to decompress after intense work has stopped being optional and has begun creating consequences. The work is private, scheduled around the realities of demanding professional life, and built around women who are not used to asking for help.

Women in Their 40s and 50s

Perimenopause changes the relationship to alcohol for many women, sleep gets worse, anxiety gets sharper, and the same two glasses of wine that used to feel manageable now produce hangovers that take three days to clear. Drinking that was always controlled stops being controlled in a specific, hormonal, identifiable pattern. More on drinking problems after 50 →

Wives, Mothers & Family Members of Someone with an Addiction

Women whose own lives have been reorganized around a husband, child, or parent's addiction. The exhaustion, anxiety, and self-erasure that come with this position have specific clinical patterns and benefit from individualized work, not generic codependency-recovery framing. More on how to help a spouse with an addiction →

Women with a Trauma History

Women whose drinking, anxiety, or relationship patterns connect back to early or sustained trauma. This work is paced carefully, pulled toward what is workable in the present, and conducted in a way that does not retraumatize. A female clinician at the start of this work matters for many patients in this category.

Why Telehealth Works for NYC Women

An office visit in Manhattan means the building lobby, the elevator with neighbors, the receptionist, the waiting room with the person you might know from the gym. For women whose presenting problem involves drinking, family dysfunction, or trauma, that environment is not neutral. It adds friction to a process that should not have any.

A Zoom session from your apartment, your office with the door closed, or your car in the parking garage is a different experience. The work happens. Sessions actually fit a schedule. The privacy is real, not performed.

For most NYC women in this practice, telehealth is the default and the office is the exception, not the other way around.

Dr. Lori Washton, Clinical Psychologist

Dr. Lori Washton

Clinical Psychologist · Women's Treatment Specialist

For 25 years, Dr. Washton has worked with women across the full range of clinical issues that bring them into treatment. Her practice specializes in women's substance use, the alcohol patterns that emerge in the perimenopausal years, women's anxiety and trauma history, and the family-system positions that often surround a woman's own struggle. She works most often with high-functioning women whose drinking has become the way they manage everything but is no longer working.

She is licensed to practice psychology in New York and New Jersey, authorized for telepsychology in most PSYPACT states, and listed in the Psychology Today directory.

"For many women, the drinking is the visible problem but not the whole problem. The work is figuring out what the drinking has been doing for you, and what could do that work better."

More for Women

Women's Treatment, Full Practice Overview

Comprehensive look at our treatment approach for women across the full clinical spectrum.

Why Women Hide Their Drinking

The specific reasons women's drinking goes underground, and what changes when it surfaces.

Anxiety and Drinking in Women

How anxiety and alcohol use feed each other, and what to do about both at the same time.

Female Alcoholism, A Clinical Look

Why women's drinking presents differently, and what that means for treatment.

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