Dr. Putterman has over three decades of clinical experience, including more than twenty-five years in private practice as a licensed psychologist in New York City. She works with adults, children, and adolescents, with a particular focus on anxiety, relational patterns, and parenting. She approaches her work with curiosity about each person’s learned experiences and the patterns that have developed over time. Engaging collaboratively, she helps individuals deepen self-awareness and cultivate more effective ways of navigating challenges. As this work unfolds, previously blocked experiences can evolve into more empowered responses that better meet current life circumstances. When anxiety or relational difficulties are rooted in earlier experiences, her work may include processing developmental trauma or discrete traumatic events using EMDR and attachment-informed somatic approaches.
She works with parents, couples, and families to recognize and shift longstanding relational patterns so they can feel more securely connected and communicate more effectively. Her work fosters greater steadiness in individuals and across the family system.
She supports family members in resolving conflict and reconnecting in ways that feel both grounded and sustainable. Drawing on extensive training in play therapy, child and adolescent CBT, parenting consultation, and couples and family systems therapy, she offers practical guidance alongside deeper relational insight. 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 balance and clarity within the household.
Dr. Putterman specializes in anxiety and stress management, trauma-related concerns (including developmental trauma and the impact of more recent life events), obsessive-compulsive patterns, relationship and intimacy concerns, parenting, and career and school-related challenges. She works with individuals seeking not only relief from symptoms but deeper understanding, lasting change, and a more integrated sense of well-being.
Dr. Putterman believes that helping individuals avail themselves of their own internal resources strengthens resilience and supports fuller engagement with life. She invests in ongoing learning to best support this process.
While her training is rooted in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Dr. Putterman integrates EMDR and advanced somatic approaches into her work with adults, children, and adolescents. She is a Certified Advanced Practitioner of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy®, an integrative, attachment-informed approach grounded in the understanding that the nervous system shapes emotion, behavior, and relationships. She has also completed advanced training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for anxiety disorders, including OCD, as well as Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT).
Having provided years of psychological consultation to students, faculty, and parents at the Bank Street School for Children and Trinity School, Dr. Putterman recognizes the complex stressors pre-teens and teens face and helps them navigate this important developmental stage. She has led workshops for parents and students on topics including adoption, body image, and psychotherapy with young adults. She has also served as an adolescent group therapy supervisor in the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at The City University of New York (CUNY).
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. She has also 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. She currently collaborates with the Department of Psychology to teach embodied relational psychotherapy.
