Dr. Putterman works with adults, children, and adolescents who are managing their lives but find themselves limited by anxiety, longstanding ways of relating, or the quieter, persistent effects of the past. She has a particular focus on anxiety, relational patterns, and parenting.
She approaches her work with genuine curiosity about each person’s learned experiences and the patterns that have taken shape over time. She works collaboratively with individuals to deepen self-awareness and develop more effective ways of navigating challenges, so that changes are not only understood but also felt and applied in everyday life. She views therapy as a way of strengthening internal resources so that what is learned can be carried forward beyond the session.
She integrates psychodynamic psychotherapy with evidence-based and trauma-informed approaches, including EMDR, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy®. She tailors treatment to each individual, combining practical tools with attention to how people think, feel, and relate to others.
Over time, previously blocked experiences can open into more adaptive, integrated, and empowered responses, allowing for greater flexibility and a stronger sense of agency.
When anxiety or relational difficulties are rooted in earlier life experiences or shaped by significant events across the lifespan, her work may include processing developmental trauma as well as more discrete traumatic experiences. She works at the intersection of body, nervous system, and relational experience, drawing on somatic, parts-based, and attachment-informed modalities to support people whose histories live not only in thought and narrative, but also in the body and in patterns of connection.
Dr. Putterman specializes in anxiety and stress management, trauma-related concerns, obsessive-compulsive symptoms and obsessional tendencies, relationship and intimacy concerns, parenting, and career and school-related challenges. She works with individuals seeking relief from symptoms as well as deeper understanding, lasting change, and a more integrated sense of well-being.
In her work with parents, couples, and families, she helps identify and shift longstanding relational patterns so they can feel more securely connected and communicate more effectively, fostering greater steadiness in individuals and across the family system.
In her parenting work, she understands how exhausting and overwhelming family life can feel, particularly when anxiety or self-regulation challenges are present. She helps parents balance empathy with appropriate expectations while restoring clarity within the household. With specialized training in play therapy, child and adolescent CBT, parenting consultation, and couples and family systems therapy, she offers practical guidance alongside deeper relational insight.
While her training is rooted in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, Dr. Putterman integrates EMDR and advanced somatic and parts-based approaches into her clinical work. She has additional training in adapting EMDR for children and adolescents and is a Certified Advanced Practitioner of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy®, an attachment-informed approach grounded in the understanding that the nervous system shapes emotion, behavior, and relationships. Her work incorporates structural dissociation theory and a parts-based approach, drawing on the contributions of Janina Fisher and related models such as Internal Family Systems (IFS). She has also completed training in CBT for anxiety disorders, including OCD, as well as Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT).
Dr. Putterman has provided extensive psychological consultation to students, faculty, and parents at the Bank Street School for Children and Trinity School, and recognizes the complex stressors pre-teens and teens face. She has led workshops for parents and students on topics including adoption, body image, and psychotherapy with young adults, and has served as an adolescent group therapy supervisor in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at The City University of New York (CUNY). She has lectured and provided clinical supervision for over twenty years to psychiatric residents, psychology externs, interns, and fellows in the Department of Psychiatry at Lenox Hill Hospital, where she currently teaches trauma-informed embodied relational psychotherapy in collaboration with the Department of Psychology.
Dr. Putterman earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology from New York University and completed her child and adolescent internship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine–Montefiore Medical Center. She earned her BA from the University of Michigan, where she completed an independent concentration in the Honors Program in Psychology of Film.
