About Lea
Lea Cattan offers a client-centered approach to therapy rooted in respect for each person's experience. She is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) based in New York with 20 years of practice. Lea focuses on helping people handle stress, anxiety, intimacy concerns, parenting pressures, career challenges, and major life changes.
Her style centers on listening first and following the client's lead. Sessions aim to make sense of what feels stuck, identify strengths, and try practical ways to shift patterns.
Background and approach
Lea uses Emotionally-Focused Therapy tools to look at how feelings and attachment shape relationships and day-to-day choices. She draws on long experience to support people facing specific struggles like abandonment, adoption and foster care questions, blended family issues, and caregiving stress. Lea also works with concerns about body image, chronic illness and pain, codependency, and communication or commitment problems.
Lea welcomes conversations about divorce, separation, aging and geriatric issues, control issues, and coping after natural or human-caused disasters. She helps people sort through dependent personality traits and other relational patterns that get in the way of meeting goals. Sessions are offered in English and Russian, and Lea is available to work with international clients.
She encourages small steps and partner-like collaboration so people can build clearer next steps and steadier coping skills.
How client-centered and emotion-focused work translates online
Client-Centered Therapy puts the client's own experience at the center of sessions. Online, this means conversations begin with the client's priorities and move at a comfortable pace. The therapist listens, reflects, and helps people notice strengths and choices that feel useful for daily life.Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT) helps people map how emotions and attachment needs shape patterns in close relationships. In online sessions EFT can guide conversations that uncover old interaction loops and test new ways of asking for support or responding to conflict.
Choosing the right approach is a collaborative process. The therapist will talk with each person about goals, preferences, and what has or hasn't worked before. Together they decide which methods to try and can adjust as needed over time.
Online therapy offers practical flexibility. Video calls allow face-to-face conversation when visual cues matter. Phone sessions use less bandwidth and can be a simpler check-in during a work break. Live chat and text-based messaging let people write thoughts between sessions or manage brief check-ins without scheduling a full call. These options make it easier to keep therapy consistent around busy lives.
Frequently asked questions
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How much experience does she have?
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What session formats are available?
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Intimacy-related issues
- Parenting issues
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Adoption and foster care
- Aging and geriatric issues
- Attachment issues
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Career difficulties
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Divorce and separation
- Eating and food-related issues
- Emptiness
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- Fatherhood issues
- Fertility issues
- Forgiveness
- Guilt and shame
- Hoarding
- Immigration issues
- Infidelity
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Narcissism
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Self-love
- Sexuality
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Experience
- 20 years
- Licensed
- New York
- Languages
- English, Russian