Ayden Ferstenberg (She/Her)

I’m a licensed psychologist specializing in couples therapy, sex therapy, and individual therapy, including trauma therapy. I work with thoughtful, self-aware individuals and couples who may have a strong understanding of themselves and their relationships, yet continue to feel stuck in patterns they struggle to change. Many of my clients are high achievers, people-pleasers, or intellectualizers who are accustomed to thinking their way through problems. They may know exactly what they “should” do, have read the books, developed insight into where their patterns come from, and still find themselves repeating the same behaviors, relationship dynamics, or emotional responses. In therapy, I help guide you to go beyond that. Together, we explore the deeper emotional and relational patterns that keep these difficulties in place while also developing practical, actionable skills that help you respond differently in your everyday life. In individual therapy, I work with concerns including trauma, perfectionism, people-pleasing, anxiety, relationship difficulties, life transitions, self-criticism, and feeling disconnected from yourself or your needs. The goal is not simply to understand your patterns, but to create new experiences of yourself and your relationships that make lasting change possible. In couples therapy, I help partners who feel caught in recurring conflict, disconnection, resentment, or difficulties with communication and intimacy. Rather than focusing only on learning better communication techniques, we work to understand the underlying emotional patterns between you and develop new ways of responding to one another.  I’m also a trained sex therapist, specializing in helping individuals and couples who feel disconnected from their erotic selves or are struggling with mismatched desire. Sex can become a place of pressure, rejection, shame, avoidance, or disconnection. I help clients explore what may be getting in the way of desire, pleasure, intimacy, and sexual connection, including relationship dynamics, body image, trauma, shame, difficulty accessing their own needs, and the ways they may have learned to disconnect from themselves. Our work is about more than solving a sexual problem; it is about helping you reconnect with your own sexuality, vitality, and capacity for pleasure while creating a sexual relationship that feels authentic, mutual, safe, and alive.  My approach is integrative, experiential, relational, and trauma-informed. I believe effective therapy requires both understanding and experience: insight can help us recognize a pattern, while deeper experiential work can help create the conditions for responding to life differently. I therefore combine evidence-informed therapeutic approaches with practical interventions tailored to your individual needs and goals. I also have specialized training in psycho-oncology and geropsychology and have experience working with the psychological and relational challenges that can accompany cancer, caregiving, aging, and other significant life transitions. If you are tired of understanding what is happening but feeling unable to change it, or if you and your partner keep having the same conversation without getting somewhere new, therapy can offer an opportunity to move beyond the familiar pattern and begin experiencing something different.