Alyson Curtis, MA, LMHC
Hi, I’m Alyson! I’m a licensed therapist in New York and I’m incredibly passionate about providing attuned treatment to my clients so that they not only feel seen and heard, but so that we actually hit the bullseye with what it is they wish to find relief from or improve upon. It was my own experiences with therapy that deepened my convictions in providing attuned care to people. What exactly does that mean? While it may seem like it’s baked into the job description for all therapists to actively listen, remember the details of your life, and to execute intervention with delivery and timing that feels just right, it can actually feel like finding a needle in a haystack to get that kind of care. I pride myself on providing therapy that feels tailored specifically for you.
The Attuned Therapist
Alyson Curtis, LMHC
CBT Therapist in New York
I am a licensed Mental Health Counselor in the state of New York. I began my journey towards practicing psychotherapy eleven years ago when I earned my B.A in Applied Social Psychology. I completed my masters at Brooklyn College where I was trained in both Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Psychodynamic Therapy. I served as a therapist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice where I trained in LGBTQ affirmative and trauma-informed therapy. I later became certified in Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT) at the Albert Ellis Institute. Since becoming a therapist I have received numerous trainings in a variety of modalities including: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Attachment Theory, Emotionally Focused Therapy, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and Reality Therapy. To date, I have spent several years working in private practice, treating a wide variety of issues including: anxiety, depression, panic attacks, bereavement, obsessive-compulsive disorder, complex trauma/CPTSD, codependency, and narcissistic abuse recovery. My specialties focus on eating disorders, body image, working with neurodivergent and highly sensitive folx, Poly/ENM affirmative care, kink/sex work affirmative care, complex trauma, and dating anxieties.
A Bit About Me
As a queer, neurodivergent (AuDHD, gifted, highly sensitive) person, I felt constantly misattuned to in my experiences growing up. At the time, I didn’t even realize what was going on or why it was happening. I just know I felt off or dysregulated most of the time, and confused by most people and systems for how much they seemed to miss the mark either with me, or with themselves and others. This constant abrasion I felt with the world led me to develop an eating disorder in childhood that would last until my mid-twenties. Those chapters were filled with dysregulated moods, irritability with others and environments, and a longing for symbiosis with myself and the world.
Though at the time, my eating disorder seemed like, if I could just fix that, all would be okay, little did I know I was really about to embark on a recovery journey that would ultimately teach me how to attune, not just to my physical needs and not just with eating, but with all my needs, emotional, mental and spiritual too. Late life diagnosis also catalyzed huge parts of my attunement journey, which makes total sense. When we understand ourselves better, we have more opportunity to attune better.
Ergo…
Attuned Therapy
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, attunement means: to bring into harmony. In simple terms, I like to describe attunement in a few examples. To attune to yourself is to know you tend to get overstimulated at Trader Joe’s during popular times, and instead, make it apart of your schedule to go during less busy times. To attune to your partner is to see them passing out on the couch, knowing they get cold when they sleep, and putting the blanket over them. Sounds simple enough right? Maybe not so much…
There are what we’d think would be more obvious, “easy” forms of attunement, like eating when you are hungry or sleeping when you are tired. But for many of us, due to our upbringings and social conditioning, those pathways of attuning to ourselves aren’t so simple. In fact, they can be totally screwed up. Somewhere along the way, we received messages to eat through our lunch break at work, that staying up late is bad and so we battle ourselves on the daily to try to fit in with society’s sleep ideals, or that going home for the holidays is a given without any space for your boundaries or needs.
Society bombards us with innumerable messages about what is right, and the truth is that those rules don’t work for many of us. A more critical truth is that for people who identify with any forms of neurodivergence, these rules tend to make even less sense, and exacerbate our capacity to cope with daily life. And yet, how many of us have masked for years that we’re okay, when we’re really not? Moreover, consider pausing and reflecting to think about how many micro-misattunements to large life and values-based misattunements you’ve committed under the pretense to fit in with society. It is a crime so many of us unwillingly commit, just to function within a society not built for us.
The Good News
Is that it doesn’t have to be this way. While I cannot fix society, I can help you learn to attune to yourself more accurately and frequently with the goal of you feeling more regulated emotionally, physically, and spiritually on the daily as well as more in alignment with your authentic self and the life you wish to lead. This can be life changing if you’ve ever felt like you were swimming upstream most days, in most areas of your life, with no true grasp as to how to fix this. Through a variety of mindfulness and behavioral tools taken from Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Attachment and Existential Therapies, we can bring YOU into harmony, so that you can focus on achieving your dreams.