I’m Dr. Sherry, a licensed clinical psychologist in Brooklyn. I work with adults who are functioning on the outside but privately feel like something has gone flat. The heaviness doesn’t always announce itself. It can look like going through the motions, losing interest in things that used to matter, or lying awake, wondering why you’re not okay when nothing is obviously wrong. If that’s where you are, depression therapy gives us a place to start making sense of it. My approach is relational and insight-oriented: we look at how your important relationships and experiences have shaped you, and we work together to understand the patterns that are keeping you stuck. That understanding is where real change begins.
A lot of people who come to see me aren’t in crisis. They’re getting to work, maintaining their relationships, and meeting their responsibilities. But underneath the functioning, something doesn’t feel right. The pleasure and meaning has gone out of things. The future feels harder to imagine. Sleep is either elusive or the only real escape. They’ve been telling themselves that they should be fine, but can’t figure out why they’re not.
Depression doesn’t always look dramatic. It can be quiet, slow, and surprisingly easy to rationalize away. It can feel like exhaustion or cynicism or a loss of appetite for life. What makes it hard to name is also what makes it hard to address alone. A lot of people find themselves analyzing their depressed mood without quite being able to change it.
Depression usually makes more sense than people first realize.
Many people I work with are thoughtful and highly self-aware, yet still feel stuck in painful emotional or relational patterns. They want deeper self-understanding, not just symptom relief.
Depression therapy with me may be a good fit if you:
Depression is rarely just a mood. It’s usually a signal connected to something real: a pattern in your relationships, a set of beliefs about yourself that you picked up when you were young, a life that’s drifted away from what actually matters to you. Therapy is where we figure out what it’s connected to. Here’s what the work actually involves:
I’m a licensed clinical psychologist in Brooklyn, and I’ve been working with adults navigating depression for over a decade. My style is interactive, curious, and collaborative. I pay close attention to emotional patterns, relationship dynamics, and the strategies people use to protect themselves.
I share what I notice, ask whether it resonates, and help us understand what may be happening beneath the surface. I pull from psychodynamic theory, ACT, and IFS. But more than any modality, what I bring to the session is close attention, frank observations, and the patience to keep following the thread until something makes sense.
If you’re curious whether this might be a good fit, a free consultation is how we begin. No commitment, no pressure. Just a conversation.
There is often more beneath depression than hopelessness or emotional numbness.
Reach out to schedule a free consultation.
There is no single path into depression or out of it. My training spans several approaches, and I draw from whichever combination makes sense for the person I’m working with. Therapy works best when the approach actually fits the person.
Depression often has relational roots. The way we learned to connect with others early in life, the dynamics we absorbed without choosing them, the patterns that repeat in our closest relationships, all of these can be threads running through what shows up as low mood, withdrawal, or loss of pleasure. In relational therapy, we pay attention to what happens between us in session as a way of understanding what happens in the rest of your life. When a pattern surfaces here, we talk about it directly. That’s often where the most useful work happens.
Psychodynamic therapy operates on the premise that depression isn’t random. It’s connected to something, and usually that something has a history. We look at how early experiences and significant relationships shaped the way you see yourself and the world. I’m particularly interested in the emotional undercurrents beneath what you’re saying, the shift in your face mid-sentence, the feeling that surfaces and then gets talked around. Naming those things and sitting with them instead of analyzing them away is a central part of how this work moves.
ACT helps people reconnect with what matters, even when depression creates emotional paralysis. Instead of waiting to feel motivated first, we focus on taking small, meaningful steps toward the life you actually want. We get clear on your values, and then we get behavioral about how to move toward them, one action at a time.
IFS starts from the idea that all of us contain different emotional parts or ways of being, and that those parts do not always want the same things. One part may want closeness, while another fears vulnerability. One part may push hard for achievement, while another feels exhausted or overwhelmed. Psychological health is less about getting rid of these conflicts and more about understanding and relating to them differently.
IFS can help people understand conflicting parts of themselves with more compassion and less self-judgment. Instead of fighting yourself constantly, therapy helps you get curious about why different parts react the way they do. In my work, I borrow IFS language and concepts as a way of helping people build a less adversarial relationship with themselves.
Depression often affects the body as much as the mind. Therapy can help people notice emotional experiences physically instead of staying stuck entirely in their heads. I pay attention to what’s happening somatically in session, including shifts in posture, breathing, affect, or physical tension when something emotionally important emerges.
Tracking feelings in the body can help people notice emotional experience before it becomes intellectualized, disconnected from, or pushed away. Bodily awareness helps anchor emotions in the present moment, making difficult feelings feel more understandable, manageable, and integrated over time. Sometimes the body holds important information before the mind fully catches up to it.
KAP can help when traditional therapy feels emotionally stuck or intellectually repetitive. Many people experience insights more deeply when they become emotionally and physically felt. I offer KAP as a safe, legal, supervised option at my Brooklyn office, and I continue working with people through the integration process afterward.
Depression shows up differently for different people. Some of the presentations I work with most often:
This is the version of depression that doesn’t announce itself loudly. It just makes things feel thinner over time. The things you used to look forward to doing don’t quite land the way they did. You’re present for your life without really being in it. A lot of people with this presentation spend a long time telling themselves they should be grateful or fine before they realize something has shifted. Therapy gives us a place to figure out what that shift is about and what’s underneath it.
Many people who come to see me are doing well by most external measures. They’re reliable, productive, and present for the people who depend on them. But the internal experience is different: a chronic heaviness, a sense of going through the motions, an exhaustion that rest doesn’t touch. Because “high-functioning” depression often doesn’t look like depression from the outside, it can be very easy to dismiss. Therapy is a place to take it seriously.
For many people, depression is deeply entangled with how they relate to others. Difficulty asserting needs, a tendency to withdraw into themselves, and a sense of loneliness that persists even in close relationships. These patterns often have long histories. Relational therapy is particularly well-suited to this kind of depression because the relationship in the room becomes part of what we work with.
Sometimes depression is less about a broken chemistry and more about a life that has drifted away from what actually matters. This shows up as a kind of flatness or purposelessness, a sense that you’re doing everything right and it still doesn’t add up to much. ACT is particularly useful here because it asks very directly: what do you value, and are you moving toward it? That clarity is often where energy starts to come back.
Big changes, even ones we choose and want, can leave grief in their wake that looks a lot like depression. Career shifts, the end of relationships, changes in identity, or life stages. When the transition is supposed to be positive, and you still feel numb, that’s especially disorienting. Therapy is a place to make sense of the whole picture, not just the parts of it that are supposed to be celebrated.
Most people arrive unsure how to explain what feels wrong. That’s completely okay. The first few sessions are a chance for me to start getting to know you carefully and understand what’s been happening beneath the surface.
I’ll ask questions about what brought you in, your relationships, your history, and the emotional patterns that seem most important. You do not need a perfectly organized explanation before starting therapy=. Part of our work is gradually making sense of what’s actually going on together.
A lot of people begin therapy still confused about what exactly feels wrong. That uncertainty is completely normal and often part of the work itself. One of the goals of early therapy is to help things become clearer, more understandable, and easier to put into words.
You do not need everything figured out before reaching out.
A free consultation is where we start. You can tell me what’s been going on and ask whatever questions you have about how I work. We’ll figure out together whether this feels like a good fit. No commitment. No pressure. Just an honest conversation about whether we’re right for each other.
Frequently Asked Questions About Depression Therapy
Depression rarely announces itself clearly. The symptoms of depression are often subtle: a persistent low mood that doesn’t lift, loss of interest in things you used to enjoy, difficulty concentrating, changes in sleep or appetite, withdrawal from people, and a physical heaviness that rest doesn’t touch. Many of these are internal and easy to rationalize as stress or tiredness.
The warning signs of depression worth paying attention to are often quieter than people expect. A flattening of mood that persists for a few weeks, a loss of motivation that doesn’t match your circumstances, or a quiet sense that something is off. If that feeling hasn’t lifted, it’s worth talking to someone.
Depression is not one uniform experience. Major depressive disorder involves persistent low mood and loss of interest lasting two weeks or more. Persistent depressive disorder is lower-grade but long-lasting, often normalized as just being someone’s personality. Situational depression follows a specific stressor. High-functioning depression looks fine from the outside but isn’t. Seasonal affective disorder follows a seasonal pattern, typically worsening in winter.
Several things can look like depression without being it. Thyroid disorders, vitamin deficiencies, sleep disorders, and chronic pain all produce overlapping symptoms.Burnout isthe most common look-alikes. Grief shares many features as well. Getting a clear clinical picture early matters, which is part of what the first few sessions are for.
Depression is rarely one thing. Genetics and neurobiological factors can play a role, as can early experiences, attachment patterns, and how you learned to relate to yourself and others. Loss, chronic stress, societal pressures, and relational conflict can all contribute as well. Sometimes depression also emerges when people have been living in ways that feel disconnected from what actually matters to them.
A lot of people try very hard to understand or work on these struggles by themselves before reaching out for therapy. Often part of the difficulty is that depression can be hard to fully recognize or shift from inside your own perspective alone.
Isolation, reduced activity, sleep disruption, increased self-criticism, and rumination all tend to feed depression even when they feel like the only available response. Substance use as a way of managing low mood tends to deepen the cycle rather than relieve it. Part of the work in therapy is identifying which loops are running and finding a realistic way to interrupt them.
Depression can last for weeks, months, or longer, depending on the person and what may be contributing to it. For some people, it’s a single difficult period connected to a particular life experience or stressor. For others, it becomes a more recurring pattern that ebbs and returns over time.
Part of what therapy can help with is recognizing depression earlier, understanding what may be connected to it, and developing a different relationship to it instead of feeling blindsided each time it returns.
For many people, depressive episodes do lift, particularly with treatment. Some people experience one episode and don’t have another. For others, it recurs. What therapy builds toward isn’t a permanent cure so much as a different relationship with depression: recognizing it earlier, understanding what it’s connected to, and knowing what to do when it surfaces again.
There is no single best treatment. The right approach depends on the person and what’s underneath the depression. Relational, psychodynamic, and insight-oriented therapy work well when depression has significant relational or historical roots. ACT is useful when depression involves disconnection from values. Medication can help when biological factors are prominent. Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy is an option when other approaches have reached their limit.
Treatment for depression can include psychotherapy, medication, lifestyle changes, and approaches like Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP). Factors like sleep, movement, social connection, and daily structure can also meaningfully affect mood and emotional functioning.
I tend to think about depression holistically, meaning we look at the full picture rather than treating symptoms in isolation. In my work, I draw from relational, psychodynamic, and ACT-based approaches, and I collaborate with prescribers when medication is part of someone’s treatment. I also offer KAP at my Brooklyn office for people who feel emotionally stuck or have not responded fully to more traditional approaches.
Antidepressants address neurobiological aspects of depression and are most useful for moderate to severe presentations, particularly when biological factors are prominent. They tend to work better in combination with therapy than as a standalone treatment. I am a psychologist, not a psychiatrist, so I do not prescribe medication. I can make referrals to and coordinate care with a trusted prescribing provider when medications may be helpful.
Across decades of psychotherapy research, the single strongest predictor of successful therapy is considered to be the quality of the therapeutic relationship. A strong therapeutic relationship is present when the client feels that both parties are working together toward goals that they’ve agreed on, and when they trust that their therapist understands and cares about them. For this reason, I always recommend that people consult with a few therapists before beginning therapy to make sure that they feel comfortable with the therapist.
It can also be helpful to consider the treatment modality and whether it’s the right fit for you. For example, CBT and DBT are more skills-based approaches, whereas psychodynamic approaches are better suited to understanding the roots of issues like depression.
Behavioral activation, learning to observe thoughts rather than accepting them as facts, maintaining minimal social contact even when it doesn’t feel natural, protecting sleep, and getting clear on what actually matters to you. These aren’t substitutes for therapy, but they support the work and make difficult moments more navigable in between sessions.
Different people need different things from therapy, so there is no single “right” therapeutic style for everyone. In general, though, therapy tends to feel most helpful when there is both emotional safety and enough honesty to help people notice patterns, perspectives, or feelings they may not fully see on their own.
I also think it matters that therapy feels collaborative. People deserve space to talk openly about what is or is not feeling helpful, and good therapy usually involves adjusting the work together over time rather than forcing a one-size-fits-all approach.
Key takeaways and next steps: symptoms of depression include persistent low mood, loss of interest, sleep and energy changes, fatigue, and withdrawal. Treatment options range from therapy to antidepressants to KAP. High-functioning depression is real and worth treating. Recovery is possible. The next step is a free consultation with a Brooklyn depression therapist.
Book A Consult
