It truly has been a long and winding road to my new profession as a therapist - a dream made possible by NYIPT. I am so grateful to Dr. Phyllis Cohen for helping me to achieve this dream. She has been my director, my mentor, my colleague, and one of my inspirations. Cliché as it is to say, words cannot express my gratitude to and love for such an incredible human being.
Although I began my social work career intending to be a therapist, my focus quickly turned to other endeavors. Over the course of 25 years I worked as a community organizer, graduated law school, worked for the federal courts, worked at a high powered law firm, taught at 3 major New York Law Schools, and worked for a university-based interdisciplinary center for family and child advocacy. Through all of these job changes I continued to ask myself, “what do I want to be when I grow up?”
The most life-altering event of all occurred in 1992 with the adoption of my son, Benjamin. This amazing boy transformed my life in the best ways and in some of the most painful ways. I learned, and continue to learn, what it means to be a parent. Having Ben in my life constantly enhances my ability to work with children and parents.
In 2003, overwhelmed by the conflict between working full-time and giving my son the attention he needed, I left my job, not knowing what the future would hold. It seemed like fate when Dr. Cohen showed me the NYIPT brochure. I applied to the program and the rest is history!
I no longer ask what I want to be when I grow up – I have found fulfillment in my new profession. All of my life experiences have enhanced the wonderful learning experience provided by NYIPT. I am now an adult and child therapist, Associate Director of Children’s Services at the Park Slope Center for Mental Health, and a private practitioner. None of this would have been possible without NYIPT.
I have so many people affiliated with NYIPT to thank: first, my wonderful supervisors: in the first-year, Betty Eigen, for her incredible empathy, insight, and support during a difficult personal and professional year; in the second-year, Ruth Price, for her extraordinary insight, support, and generosity in sharing her knowledge with me; and in the third-year, Regina Monti, for helping me understand more about the meaning of symbolic play and the art of interpretation; second, the many wonderful teachers on the NYIPT faculty; and third, my supervisor, colleague, and friend, Susan Caputo, Acting Director of the Park Slope Center for Mental Health and NYIPT graduate, who encouraged me to work with adults and helped me believe in my ability to do so. Dr. Cohen’s words now really ring true – learning to be a child therapist teaches you also to work with adults and the children who live inside of them.
Last but not least, I thank my family, Mark and Benjamin Lasky, for their belief in my ability to achieve this dream.
My son's first-grade teacher asked the class to write their reasons for loving their mommies for Mothers’ Day. Aside from personal statements about his daily experiences with me such as, "She tucks me in at night," he wrote, "I love my mommy because of her job helping children." I found his response to my work quite touching and it made me realize on how many levels my work was meaningful and important and how proud I was of what I did.
My early experiences as a child influenced my interest in helping children. I became a social worker almost 30 years ago but I have worked specifically with children for the last 21. However, until I joined the training program at NYIPT, I had not felt that the nature of the skills I had enabled me to intervene in ways that were most helpful to my clients. I realize I was being helpful, but only in relatively superficial ways. What I really wanted was to have the skills to form deeper, more trusting, long-term relationships with children and their families. I wanted to have the opportunity to understand and influence positive development in these children and to offer their families help in healthy, hopeful and productive ways of being.
My involvement with NYIPT has given me the opportunity to develop my knowledge and skills in helping children. My experience in the program has broadened me in so many ways, both emotionally and intellectually. During the three year process, as a candidate I often felt overwhelmed, yet over time the many ideas, theories, and understandings that I gained were combined with my increasing confidence in my abilities. And all of this must have been creeping in on "cats' paws!" There were times that I felt I was not “getting it” (or maybe even “losing it”), but I can now proudly say that I feel like I have become the child therapist I dreamed of being, and, though the work is still hard, it is as exciting and fulfilling as I hoped it would be.
NYIPT enabled me to return to my clinical roots and add a new dimension to my professional work by specializing in the treatment of children and adolescents and their parents.
My recent experience with a child patient exemplifies my growth as a child therapist over the last 3 years - growth I attribute directly to NYIPT As a candidate in the program, I recently met with a female adolescent, “T,” with whom I had worked for 3 years at the Park Slope Center for Mental Health. T is physically disabled, has learning disabilities, and had anger management problems at home and school. She also protected herself by making up fantastic stories that made her seem powerful.
Through our work together T had less of a need to invent stories and she became more able to identify her feelings, control her behavior, and express positive goals. Over time, T’s mother began to understand her daughter’s need to acknowledge her vulnerabilities and express her pain in order to minimize her negative behaviors.
When I was terminating therapy with T, her mother had been unable to bring T in for a final session to say goodbye. The end result was some desperate phone calls from T’s mother that T was acting out again and threatening to hurt herself. I arranged to meet with T, and in our last session I was impressed with T’s ability to articulate her need for a non-family member to talk to about her worries and other feelings. She also had the courage to tell her mother how much she needed her to take her therapy seriously and bring her consistently. Despite her stress level and her shame about her daughter’s disability, in that session T’s mother was able to hear her daughter, perhaps for the first time, and I was able to facilitate having her quickly reassigned to a new therapist.
In retrospect, I was struck by the power of our therapeutic relationship and of play therapy as a therapeutic milieu. I attribute my ability to work effectively with this child and her mother to all I had learned in my three years in the program, my experience at the Park Slope Center for Mental Health, and my three years of excellent supervision with Gloria Malter, Ruth Price, and Marilyn Rifkin.
Although my supervisors were all very different, each had something unique to offer and helped me apply the theory of child therapy to my professional practice. I am grateful to all my teachers and to Dr. Phyllis Cohen for her dedication to making this program a reality and always inspiring me to keep growing and helping children in need.
I want to thank my husband Scott for his emotional support and willingness to take on additional responsibility for our wonderful children, Ethan and Mattea while I was pursuing my training. Ethan and Mattea constantly remind me that children are our most precious resource and that working with children is incredibly important work.
When I started the NYIPT program I had been working as an Early Childhood Social Worker in the New York City Department of Education where I had the opportunity to work closely with young children and their families. I was assigned to several schools where I had a large case load and I found myself often frustrated because I was not able to engage in the kind of one-to-one therapeutic treatment I knew was crucial to the healthy and successful development of so many of these troubled children. As a result, I was forced to refer them and their families to agencies or private therapists.
I heard about NYIPT’s Postgraduate Training Program from colleagues and therapists to whom I referred, and I decided to go to an Open House. Although I was concerned about how I would be able to handle my full-time job as an Early Childhood Social Worker, my family obligations, and the demands of the NYIPT program, I decided to give it a try.
Balancing the rigors of the weekly seminars, the in-depth readings, and my caseload of clients at the Park Slope Center for Mental Health was often challenging, but mostly very rewarding. I was able to build a consistent and trusting relationship with the children at Park Slope and this enabled me to learn not only how to identify underlying problems, but also to reach short and long-term goals and effect positive change.
I am presently still working at Park Slope, where I provide my clients with a consistent and reliable relationship, one they may not have in their families. It is my hope that I can continue to help them develop the tools necessary for leading healthier and more productive lives. The experiences I have had working with these needy children have been invaluable. Knowing that I have been able to provide psychotherapy services to children who might not otherwise have been able to receive them makes me feel like I am giving back and not just simply receiving from this wonderful program.
During my three-years in the NYIPT program, I was truly fortunate to have had excellent supervisors who helped me synthesize a wide range of theories and integrate them into my work with children in the therapy room. The weekly professional seminars and workshops at NYIPT led by extremely knowledgeable mental health professionals, combined with the readings, all helped to enhance my understanding of different psychoanalytical theories and research. All of this has helped me gain a better understanding of clinical techniques and how to apply them to my work with children, not just at Park Slope, but also in my private practice and in my job as an Early Childhood Social Worker in the public school system.
When I began this program I had anxiety and high hopes, but mostly excitement about the challenges ahead. As I complete the program I feel a great sense of accomplishment in that I have been able to develop the skills and the confidence necessary to continue my work helping children and families.
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