Today we’d like to introduce you to Rachael Benjamin.
Hi Rachael, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I was greatly influenced by my grandmother Glaydes, she was a social worker in my small town where I grew up in eastern Kentucky. She worked for the red cross and the foster care system in the county and always brought curiosity and warmth to people she met. My great grandmother Lillian was also a key influence as she was a special education teacher who told me stories of her students when I would spend time with her most Friday nights from 5-11 yrs old. Both were widows that had to find there way after their husbands died suddenly when there kids were teens. My parents were also pillers of the community helping in hospice care, church committees and my father working with children and families in CASA network programs through the Kentucky court system.
I came from a culture that had disparity of weather and poverty, and also a tight community, that valued people, their struggles and their stories and really tried their best to help each other. Fast forward, to the patientce of my writing instructor Martha who helped me work through my learning disparity in college and also I received a Lilly Grant my senior year of college to work at National Council for Community and Justice where I met Majabene a social worker who further inspired me to be curious about people, their stories, and their process. I think all these formitive experiences gave me a curiosity, slowness, and ability to be present with myself and people from all walks of life. An ability to hold space for my patients.
I went to Columbia University in 2003, for my masters in social work, this was a city post 9/11, it was a city recovering from trauma and that felt mixed into the learning. I went into social work school thinking I would work in directive service as a community worker, then I got a job with Institute for Community Living in 2006 in a clinic as a therapist that was in a Brooklyn women’s shelter for women diagnosed with severe and present mental illness. This job changed the course of my profession as I worked with Reniee a very bold, kind, persistent therapist and supervisor. I worked with Renie as my supervisor for 4 years both in the shelter and then at a community clinic in downtown Brooklyn. During my time there I also had 2 years of group supervision with the American Cognitive Behavior Institute. At the shelter and in the clinic I learned that I loved working in community settings as a therapist because it felt like there was a lot of threads of connection and often people that might slip through the cracks of society. Meeting them where they were at in their humanity, their pain, their feelings and process was both a deep learning experience and humbling as a young therapist.
In 2012 I moved to a private group practice, in Tribeca. I worked with the influences of mainly within the psychoanalytic framework and group supervision, I learned and grew my clinical skills both with in the new population of a private setting and in the structure of a group practice where there was a community of clinicians. We read Wincott, Freude, Koht, Parker, ect. and had a long term analytic supervision. I learned to listen, hold and understand my patients process in new ways and help in a process of making each treatment individualized and relational. Holding both what was coming up in the therapeutic relationship but also in the patients process within themselves. To help them look and notice and see patterns and processes they could understand and shift as they noticed how they worked internally. And to process life’s griefs and challenges and move with more understanding vs. reacting to what was happening.
It was through this influence and work that in 2020 I helped develop a maternity wing of the group practice to help new mothers understand themselves and their process of working through the transition that is parenthood. I had some training with the 20/20 Mom project and utilized learning with the Selini Institute to help form my understanding of both maternal mental health and all that can come up in the time around fertility and postpartum. This speciality continues to be of interest to me to talk with new parents and pregnant parents and parents going through fertility treatments and surrogacy process this time of life is a unique growth moment full of pain, discovery, grief, feeling and internal relational process.
In 2026 I decide to move into a private practice and to provide care to both in Tribeca and in NJ. I moved with my family to NJ in 2018 and have loved the community of Maplewood and South Orange, I find that the smaller town, the deep artistic professional community, and the NYC commuter community brings it own process of stress and internal struggles. I wanted to offer slower, deeper individual, couples and family therapy to my own community.
My hope in having space to work with patients in NJ is I can provide therapy to professionals, parents, and those in need of therapy in my town as well the city. I have an office both in South Orange now and in Tribeca and plan to grow my NJ practice in years to come. I see patients in person and online. My practice is Out of Network meaning I do not take insurance but am operating on a fee range so as to be somewhat flexible to people seeking therapy.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I think becoming a therapist is such a long process to bring into mastery, you get to be a part of a persons process in therapy and you yourself as a clinician are in a process ALWAYS of learning. Therapy as I practice it is usually a slower process where each session a individual, couple, or family is discovering something new in an extended conversation of getting to know themselves, someone else, and widening the lens of understanding and processing emotions to be both fuller and become less stuck, that takes a lot of time.
I have been in this learning for 20 years and I’d say the last half a decade has been the most formative in really feeling I have a more seasoned approach and I’m still learning all the time in reading, in listening to patients, in different talks and training I attend and reflecting on past learning.
As a business owner, this is new so I think the challenge is to be in process of learning what therapeutic needs my state and community have in NJ. I am well versed in what is needed in NYC area but NJ is a slightly different environment. I’m open to learning as a small business operator to be in process both in community and with my potential and current patient population.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a solo practitioner. It is both a craft/art and an educated process being a therapist. You utilize technique of understanding mental health without over pathalogizing. I practice relational therapy so I look at how the patient is feeling in their relationships both with themselves and others around them and the world. I look in the treatment at how they and I are co-creating the therapeutic process and relationship to find out what that can tell us about how they are struggling in the world and what needs to be worked through, understood, processed, felt vs. just managed.
I work with individuals, couples, and families in a private practice setting. I practice therapy that is relationally based in its understanding and individually tailored to the patients I see, both utilizing education based learning, and creativity to help each patient with their individual issues.
I utilize the word patient not client as I think that word helps focus on the role. The therapist is to be patient in the relational process of understanding, in developing the treatment. I think about how I often say to patients ‘lets slow this down’ and ‘widen the lens of understanding’ helping them develop patient in a process of discovery vs. pain/stuckness.
I love working with new parents, who are in a process of understanding themselves, the relationship to themselves, their process of the role/life stages brings up in them to understand, in their relationship and what they need to grieve around the loss of what might or might not be working in their current process both in their internal and external lives.
I have also worked a lot with new parents, fertility issues and assisted reporductive interventions, patients who have surgery journeys and patients who are in process of grief and loss in these moments.
I tend to work with high achieving professionals men and women and help them in the journey of understanding how anxiety or ways they operate are no longer serving them yet got them to where they are now respecting that process and the parts that are no longer working. I work with individuals who have been through a fair amount of traumatic events to understand them but also feel how they may be moving in life with the trauma leading and how that might not be serving them anymore.
I enjoy working with couples who are trying to understand themselves better. Vs. rush to a conclusion about the relationship or each other to slow down and really look at it and try to move through it differently.
I have also worked with adult families both in sibling work and in adult parent to adult child work, to understand the process that families come from and get stuck in. To imagine new ways they want to build the relationship and break down barriers to stuck stories or pain points.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
Oh so much :). I think about young clinicians who are staring out. How school helps but its all about doing the work over and over, build the learning and getting lots of help in supervision, your own therapy, and to be patient with your growth.
I think about how much I’m still learning as a therapist it feels like I will always be reading, training and learning. I would say to younger clinicians, don’t expect you know it all, stay curious about yourself, your patients/clients, and know there are many seasoned therapist happy to talk about things with you because they learn by helping you too.
Pricing:
- Individual therapy in NJ $200-275
- Couples and Family therapy in NJ $300-375
- I try to work in a range as I know people are entering at different abilities
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.rachaelbenjamintherapy.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachaelbenjamin
