Lea Cattan , LMHC

Lea Cattan is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) in New York with two decades of clinical experience. She centers sessions on the person's own goals and strengths, offering calm guidance for stress, anxiety, intimacy issues, parenting challenges, career concerns, and life transitions.

Lea uses Client-Centered Therapy to create a respectful, nonjudgmental space. She listens closely and helps people make choices that fit their values. Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT) informs her work on close relationships and intimacy concerns, helping clients notice and shift patterns that cause disconnection.

Her background includes long-term clinical practice in New York across a range of concerns such as abandonment, attachment issues, body image, caregiving stress, and adjustment after divorce or separation. She also supports people coping with chronic illness, blended family dynamics, and communication difficulties.

Sessions are offered in English and Russian, and she welcomes clients from outside the U.S. when that is appropriate. Lea frames therapy as a collaborative process where the person’s knowledge of their life guides the plan. She recognizes that starting therapy takes courage and aims to make the steps forward manageable and clear.

Lea combines steady listening with practical conversation techniques. She helps people sort through immediate worries and try new ways of relating to themselves and others. Her approach is straightforward and focused on usable next steps.

Online approaches that focus on connection and choice

Lea draws on Client-Centered Therapy and Emotionally-Focused Therapy to guide online work. Client-Centered Therapy centers the person's experience and priorities, with the therapist following the client's lead and offering reflective, supportive responses that help clarify priorities and next steps. Emotionally-Focused Therapy focuses on emotional patterns in close relationships and helps people name feelings and try new ways of relating to reduce repeated cycles of hurt and disconnection.

Finding the right approach is part of the process. Lea will discuss how these methods might fit your concerns and adapt them to your goals and preferences. The decision about focus and pace is collaborative, with regular check-ins to see what is or isn’t working.

Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging to make therapy more flexible. Video allows face-to-face conversation, phone can be a simpler option with lower bandwidth, live chat is useful for quick check-ins or brief sessions, and text messaging supports ongoing reflection between longer sessions. These options help people fit therapy into busy lives and different schedules while keeping the work practical and focused.