Dr. Sahar Khoshakhlagh, LMFT

Dr. Sahar Khoshakhlagh helps people facing stress, anxiety, relationship strain, grief, and intimacy concerns. She is a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT) based in New York with twenty years of clinical experience. She works in English and Persian and draws on practical strategies to make daily life feel more manageable.

Dr. Khoshakhlagh uses clear, goal-focused tools alongside deeper relationship work. She often blends cognitive behavioral techniques with attachment-focused perspectives to spot patterns that keep problems cycling. Sessions aim to be collaborative and straightforward, with skills you can try between meetings.

Her background includes a Doctor of Psychology in Couples and Family Therapy and a Master of Arts in Applied Psychology, which shaped her focus on relational systems and intimacy dynamics. That training supports work on communication, trust, and repairing connection after hurts like infidelity or separation.

Therapy with her may include exploring family of origin issues, codependency, commitment or control struggles, and caregiver stress. She also supports people dealing with identity and LGBT-related challenges and the draining effects of compassion fatigue.

Practical matters are part of the plan. She uses assessments to set meaningful goals, mixes short-term strategies with longer relational work, and reviews progress as therapy continues. Her style is warm, direct, and curious, aiming to help people regain a sense of agency in their relationships and daily life.

How therapy approaches translate to online care

Dr. Khoshakhlagh commonly uses cognitive behavioral techniques and attachment-based ideas in her work. Cognitive behavioral approaches focus on identifying unhelpful thoughts and behaviors and trying small, practical experiments to change them; this helps with anxiety, stress, and everyday coping. Attachment-based work looks at how early connection patterns shape current relationships and helps people change recurring interaction patterns that cause pain.

She treats approach selection as a team effort. During early sessions she reviews goals and preferences and together they decide which methods to prioritize and when to shift gears. That collaborative review helps make sure the work fits the person's situation and changes as progress is made.

Online formats include video calls, phone sessions, live chat, and text-based messaging, which allow flexibility for different needs. Video sessions work well for deeper, interaction-focused work, phone sessions can be easier when bandwidth or camera use is a concern, live chat is useful for brief check-ins, and text-based messaging supports ongoing reflections between meetings. These options let people adapt therapy to their schedules while keeping steady momentum toward stated goals.