Psychotherapist in Mount Kisco, NY
Meet Marisol Kaminski, LCSW
I believe healing happens in relationship.
For more than twenty years, I have had the privilege of sitting with people as they find their way through some of the most difficult — and sometimes most transformative — periods of their lives.
Again and again, I have been moved by the ways people adapt to what they have lived through. Behaviors or patterns that may appear self-defeating from the outside often make profound sense when we understand the experiences that shaped them.
I don't approach therapy by asking
What's wrong with you?
I am much more interested in understanding
What happened?
What did you need?
How did you learn to protect yourself?
And what might become possible now?
I see therapy as a deeply collaborative process — one in which we become curious together about the parts of you that have been hidden, protected, silenced, or burdened, while also discovering the strengths and capacities that may have been there all along.
How I Work:
Relational, Experiential & Integrative Psychotherapy
My work is relational and experiential. I pay attention not only to the story you tell me, but to what happens in the present moment — in your body, in your emotions, in the ways different parts of you respond, and in the relationship developing between us.
I draw from Internal Family Systems (IFS), EMDR, somatic and body-based approaches, relational psychotherapy, mindfulness, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), depending upon what is most useful for each person. I also draw from DBT-informed skills when they are helpful. In my work with couples, I integrate attachment-based approaches, including Emotionally Focused Therapy and the Gottman Method.
For anxiety and depression, CBT can offer very practical ways of noticing the relationship among thoughts, feelings, behavior, and avoidance — and of experimenting with new responses. I weave these tools into the deeper relational and experiential work rather than treating them as a separate formula.
Different moments in therapy call for different ways of working. Sometimes we need to understand. Sometimes we need concrete skills or new ways of responding. And sometimes healing happens through an experience that reaches somewhere words and insight alone cannot.
Therapy begins with relationship. There is room for warmth, humor, directness, uncertainty, and the ordinary messiness of being alive. I believe the relationship we create together can itself become part of the healing.
“Make room for every part of you that asks to be welcomed home.”
Experience & Training
More than twenty years of clinical work with adults and couples.
I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with more than twenty years of experience working with individuals and couples, with particular expertise in trauma, eating disorders, addiction and compulsive behaviors, and relationship difficulties.
My own longstanding contemplative practice has deeply influenced the way I understand attention, compassion, and the possibility of change.
Education
NYU Silver School of Social Work · Master of Social Work, 2011
Columbia University · Master’s in Elementary Education, 1992
Binghamton University · 1990
Postgraduate & advanced training
Relational Psychoanalytic Training
William Alanson White Institute
Relational Psychoanalytic Training
Metropolitan Institute for Psychoanalytic Therapy
Eating Disorders, Addictions & Compulsive Behaviors
William Alanson White Institute
EMDR
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Gottman Method Couples Therapy
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)
Sue Johnson's model
Therapy is about becoming freer to inhabit more of who we already are — to live with greater choice rather than being governed by old fears and adaptations, to become more available for love and relationship, and to discover capacities for creativity, vitality, and joy that may have had little room to emerge.