Ellen Gregory, LMFT

Ellen is a NY State Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and the Founder and Executive Director of Midtown Marriage and Family Therapy, PC, a group psychotherapy practice in NYC providing therapy for adult individuals, couples, and groups.

Ellen has a deep passion for the therapeutic process and believes that given a consistent, safe space for healing, clients can achieve the life they desire. Ellen shows her clients healthy ways to seek and voice their needs, and wants, and how to heal from past pain, abuse, and trauma.

In addition to psychotherapy, Ellen coaches therapists on their journey of building a private prctice. Ellen has created FindingTheBusinessOwnerWithin.com, an online space to support psychotherapists and their practice.

Ellen is a Member of the Board for the Metro Chapter of the NYAMFT where she is Chair of the Marketing Committee, with a focus on creating community, collaboration, and professionalism for members. Ellen created and authors their online space NYAMFTMetro.com .

Elena Hull, LCAT, LMFT, Clinical Director

Elena is a NY State Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Creative Arts Therapist. Elena is the Clinical Director at Midtown MFT, a Retreat Specialist and Clinical Consultant for the Joyful Heart Foundation, and Private Practitioner.

Elena’s clinical approach is engaged, creative, practical, and compassionate. She acknowledges self-expression as a tremendous resource for healing, understanding that it offers us a place beyond anxiety and depression. Elena considers therapy an experience of reunion: reunion with our whole selves, our latent possibilities, our bodies, our intuition, and our purpose within community. She has experience counseling individuals, and couples through life transitions, repetition in relationship, trauma recovery (specifically sexual assault and abuse), anger, depression, and anxiety. Her directive approach is guided by the goals of personal transformation, self-awareness, spiritual connection, empowerment, and living a deeply fulfilling life.

As a Creative Arts Therapist, Elena combines her passion for creative expression with her therapeutic work, creating a safe space for deep healing and recovery of sexual abuse and assault.

Christina Curtis, LMFT, Assistant Clinical Director

Christina is a NY State licensed marriage and Famiy Therapist, the Assistant Clinical Director at Midtown MFT, and Intern Supervisor.

Christina works with couples and individuals dealing with stress in their intimate relationships as well as working with those experiencing bereavement, crisis and traumatic stress.  She operates within a depth-oriented and humanistic framework but also employs cognitive behavioral and somatic techniques in order to break the “stuckness” that many people experience during crisis.

As a writer herself, Christina is interested in developing her practice to include writers and artists in order to explore the unique strengths and challenges artists bring to the therapeutic process.

Christina is a published poet and essayist and sees her two passions, mental health and creative writing as complementary—working in tandem to support her evolution as a person and as a professional.

Rachel McDavid, LMFT

Rachel’s passion in the last several years has been learning, teaching and working with people using Nonviolent Communication (NVC) or Compassionate Communication as it is sometimes called, a modality founded by Marshall Rosenberg, which focuses on understanding feelings and needs through connecting with what is most alive in ourselves and others. Rachel leads anger management groups and workshops in which she teaches NVC skills to support people in learning how to manage their anger more effectively. In using NVC with her clients, Rachel offers tools, which allow clients to resolve issues on their own.

Rachel is also currently in a certificate program in Somatic Experiencing (SE) based on the work of Peter Levine. SE focuses on healing trauma through body awareness. Her interest in this topic is both to have greater understanding and tools for working with people who experience trauma and to incorporate a more holistic approach to healing by having more awareness of the body’s process as we experience pain and change.

In her theoretical approach, Rachel incorporates NVC, empathy and somatic work to her training in family systems and solution-focused therapies. With an emphasis on being a collaborator in the client’s process, she supports clients on their journey toward feeling more self empowered, understood and connected.

Rachel works with clients in identifying and changing the stories that are no longer serving them; in order to support them in shifting from the areas in which they feel stuck to having a greater sense of freedom and choice.

Rachel is a New York State Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist who received her Master’s degree from Antioch New England Graduate School. She also has an M.A. in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica, and is a member of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy (AAMFT).

Ami Bhalodkar, MPH, MS in MFT, Marriage and Family Therapy Associate

Ami strives to create a safe space for her clients to share, explore, heal, and grow. Her style of working with clients is systemic, holistic, collaborative, and creative. She deeply believes in a client-centered and strengths-based approach. Her counseling technique is a combination of insight oriented and solution focused therapy with the goal of bringing about both paradigm shifts and behavior change.

As someone who grew up in America as part of a tight-knit Indian family, Ami is particularly sensitive to the impact clients’ family of origin, culture, and/or religion have on shaping their beliefs and informing their day-to-day choices. In addition, as a result of her own personal experiences, she is keenly aware of the unique challenges facing intercultural and/or interfaith couples and families. Given her multicultural background, professional experience in the HIV/AIDS field, and non-judgmental and warm nature, Ami is able to connect with others regardless of their age, gender, race, sexual orientation, culture, and/or life experiences. She has a genuine desire to help people improve the quality of their lives and is able to recognize and bring to light the best in them.

Ami earned her Masters Degree in Marriage and Family Therapy from Iona College and is currently working toward her licensure as a Marriage and Family Therapist.

Ami earned her first Master’s in Public Heath from Emory University and worked in the field of HIV/AIDS for ten years as a counselor, researcher, and program director. She earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in South Asian Languages and Cultures and Pre-medical Studies from Columbia College. In addition, Ami graduated from the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary in June of 2003 as an ordained Interfaith Minister. She is a member of the faculty at the seminary, offers premarital and spiritual counseling, and performs wedding ceremonies.

Ami is a certified PREPARE (premarital) counselor, PREP (relationship) facilitator, and Bringing Baby Home (parenting) educator. She is able to offer all of these programs either in a one-on-one format or group workshop. She also has a strong background and interest in the use of spirituality as a healing and change agent in marriage counseling NYC.

Genna Brocone, BS, MS in MFT, Marriage and Family Therapy Associate

Central to Genna’s therapeutic view is the use of long-term, in-depth therapy to challenge emotional and behavioral responses to our lives and environment. By discovering alternate meanings and hidden strengths, we are given the opportunity to develop understanding and compassion for our life experiences, accept those experiences as a part of who we are, and learn to live as whole beings. Within the secure therapeutic environment, patterns of interaction and outdated coping mechanisms, which may no longer serve our best interest, can be uncovered, and new ways of approaching our lives examined.

Genna’s clinical approach is client-centered, emotionally-focused, collaborative and compassionate. She creates a trusting, professional client-therapist relationship wherein the ways we relate to self and others can be safely explored. Genna’s primary focus is working with individuals, couples and families to improve relationships and life-balance, develop new, healthy coping mechanisms, break old patterns of behavior and lead fuller, richer lives.

Allison Lefkowitz, MA in MFT, Marriage and Family Therapy Associate

Allison provides a warm, non-judgmental and supportive environment for healing. Her clinical approach is psychodynamic, client centered, holistic and relational. Allison believes our earliest relationships have a great influence in the way we experience relationships today. She affirms if we gain perspective and insight on our past we can begin to create choice and transform our present and future.  Allison prefers a collaborative approach with her clients, and believes that everyone has within them the ability to solve their problems, and is committed to assisting each client in discovering solutions to their difficulties and achieving their goals.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, California and a new-comer to NYC, Allison has a deep understanding of the difficulties and challenges that arise when making major transitions in one’s life and is committed to supporting her clients through any periods of change that they may have.

Prior to entering Hofstra’s MFT graduate program, Allison worked several years in the entertainment industry, as well as studying both commercial and animation voice over. She was also a member of a comedy improv troupe and feels that many of the fundamentals of acting and improv are wonderful tools in assisting her clients, and incorporates this into her therapy.  Because of her creative background, Allison loves working with artistic individuals, and provides a space for them to fully express themselves while still holding and paying attention to the “creative spirit” of the client.

Allison also has a special interest in working with clients with panic and anxiety disorders and brings a collaborative, creative and eclectic approach to free the client from the confines of anxiety, worry and stress. Part of her work with anxious clients incorporates the practice of mindfulness meditation, a Buddhist tradition that brings a calm awareness to the one’s mind, body and soul. Mindfulness allows the individual to become an active observer to their thoughts, feelings and emotions while gaining the benefits of concentration, relaxation, and the ability to take a moment to just breathe.

Larry Torrent, Holistic Therapist, Marriage and Family Therapy Intern

Larry has studied personal growth and development over the course of the last 20 years.  This path lead him to the Helix training program, a rigorous four year personal and professional training program for counselors.

As a holistic therapist Larry sees the client as a complete person; mind, body and spirit.  His education at the Helix Training program coupled with his graduate work in Marriage and Family Therapy affords him the ability to work in many different disciplines and practices to effectively engage clients from diverse experiences and belief systems.  Working from this blended and inclusive therapeutic model, Larry seeks to bring his clients closer to wholeness through psychological understanding, spiritual awareness and mindfulness practice, while looking at how these factors play in the body.

Larry is in the process of earning his Masters Degree in Marriage and Family Therapy at Mercy College.  He received a Bachelor Degree in Liberal Arts from Excelsior College.  Larry continued his studies in counseling at the Helix Training program, where he became certified as a Non-denominational Pastoral Counselor. Larry is a member of the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy.