Dr. Margolies’ is a skilled, knowledgeable, and conscientious psychologist who genuinely cares about and is invested in helping improve the lives of her patients.
Over the course of her career, Dr. Margolies has treated many different types of people and problems in a range of settings including inpatient (McLean Hospital), outpatient (urban and inner city in N.Y.), suburban, and private practice.
Because of her training, experience, personality and natural way of thinking, Dr. Margolies is able to guide people in a manner that gives them a positive, personal, productive experience in therapy, rolling up her sleeves to find innovative, collaborative solutions that improve their lives.
Dr. Margolies approaches therapy in a multi-dimensional, flexible, integrative way, with a mindset that prioritizes sensing and understanding each person and their particular situation as it develops. What works at one point in therapy may not be as helpful at another point, and some people and problems are generally more suited to one approach versus another.
In addition, patients and others have noted that she has a finely attuned ability to put into words what is happening, in a new way, that gets at the heart of the matter and resonates with them.
Balancing Challenge & Support
Dr. Margolies fully believes in and respects the capacity of the people with whom she works to do better and live up to their own values. Holding this vision and faith in mind helps support and inspire her patients to challenge themselves, do better, and be more resilient.
Treatment Orientations
In terms of orientations, Dr. Margolies treatment is informed by her understanding of psychodynamic, interpersonal and attachment-based perspectives, including elements of family systems, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), specifically cognitive restructuring.
These modalities are within Dr. Margolies’ knowledge base and integrated into her own style which is intuitive, responsive, engaging, creative and empowering, often with a sense of humor. (The different therapies offered by Dr. Margolies are described in her article: Therapy Modalities Explained).
Most importantly, Dr. Margolies is fully present, authentically involved and “with” her patients in sessions, rather than passive or hidden behind a prescribed persona.
See excerpt below from an interview, featuring Dr. Margolies, for an inside look at how Dr. Margolies’ works with people who are in the throes of acting out in self-destructive ways.
Excerpt from an interview featuring Dr. Margolies about how to treat midlife crisis (conducted by author Jonathan Rauch)
“When people come in truly in crisis, they typically feel pressure to take immediate action in order to feel relief. They are tempted to do things that can blow up their lives. Sometimes unconsciously they feel they need to blow up their lives out of fear or the inability to make needed changes.
I find that people going through this state respond well to an active, emotionally engaged, grounding approach. This involves helping people understand what is going on, slowing things down, and containing them. This takes priority over exploring the past or getting overly focused on exploring their feelings of discontent. The therapist should understand and take the discontent seriously and offer hope and active help. But the first and most important thing is to protect people from doing things that can have an irrevocable, destructive impact on their lives.
This isn’t so easy to do, but I have had success by finding where the leverage is, the bottom line about what matters to each person, and bringing that into focus in a visceral way – how things will play out step by step if they continue their behavior and thought patterns, and helping them “own” this choice. People are often compartmentalized and need help waking up to the stakes and the reality of what they are doing and thinking, for example: fueling acting out through fantasy, and recognizing that this behavior is causing a portion of their distress—or intensifying it.
There are many underlying reasons people act out and it is often a communication from within that has to be translated and repositioned. Even when people don’t want to be acting out, they may not be able to keep their head about them and manage temptation and intense feelings, or an “addictive” pattern, so an important part of the work here is giving people the tools to help them regain control.”
Dr. Margolies is responsive and real in sessions, customizing treatment to the immediate and ongoing needs of each person. She uses a respectful, educational, collaborative, interactive approach – providing useful, relevant, explicit feedback, and answering questions, rather than making the process of therapy mysterious.
The latest research corroborates that there is no one technique or modality that is superior. Instead, the experience and outcome of therapy is most impacted by the personal qualities of the therapist, how the therapy is conducted, and whether the therapist is sensitively tuned in to the patient, including being able to modify their approach in real time based on the patient’s developing situation, as well as the patient’s shifting mood and reactions in session.
