He closes the deal at 6:40 PM. Sends three follow-up emails from the back of an Uber. Walks through his front door, sets down the bag, and hears his partner say, for maybe the third time this month, that he feels far away. Not angry. Not dramatic. Worse: resigned. He is competent everywhere and reachable nowhere. The inbox is clean, the performance review is strong, and somewhere underneath all of it, there is a low hum he cannot name.
Group: The Schopenhauer Effect, a recent film set in a Manhattan group-therapy room, frames the difference this way, in paraphrase: individual therapy can feel like sitting alone with your mother, while group is closer to the dinner table with your father and your siblings, where you watch how you relate to other people in real time. Not what you say about yourself, but what you do. Your interruptions, your silences, the way you make yourself indispensable so nobody can get close enough to disappoint you. A group shows you the thing about yourself that you cannot see alone.
New York Therapy runs online men’s groups built for this person. Three distinct groups, led by Senior Clinician Paul Chiariello, LMSW, each with its own culture and dynamic, are designed for high-functioning men across New York who are tired of being admired and ready to be known.
Key Takeaways
New York Therapy offers online group therapy in NYC and across New York State, with three men’s therapy groups for professionals led by Paul Chiariello, LMSW.
Groups address relational patterns, work stress, emotional regulation, and executive functioning in a confidential, clinically structured setting.
Group therapy can stand alone or complement individual therapy for deeper, faster change.
All group sessions are held via HIPAA-compliant telehealth; you must be physically in New York State to participate.
You can schedule a free 15-minute online consultation with Paul to explore whether a group fits.
Free, confidential, and no obligation to continue. No intake form or history required.
What does "group therapy NYC" look like when you are a high-functioning professional?
You manage a team of forty, litigate patent disputes, or operate on someone’s spine before lunch, and the idea of logging into a video call to talk about your feelings with strangers sounds, at minimum, inefficient. Maybe you have googled “group therapy NYC” late at night and then closed the tab.
New York Therapy provides evidence-based online therapy and group psychotherapy across New York State, centered on men’s groups for professionals who want depth, not a drop-in support group with a rotating door, and not the kind of support group you age out of. These are process groups and group psychotherapy, not classes. The work is relational: how you manage conflict, avoid intimacy, overfunction at work, and underfunction at home.
Group sessions focus on interpersonal relationships, emotional regulation, and the impact of executive functioning challenges on both career and personal life. Sessions are HIPAA-compliant telehealth, accessible from anywhere in New York, with members joining from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Westchester, Long Island, and beyond.
A typical evening: you log on from your home office. Six or seven men appear on screen. Paul opens with a brief check-in. Someone brings a situation from the week, a fight with a partner, a moment of shutting down in a meeting, or one of the mental health problems that brought him in. The group responds, not with advice, but with what they noticed, what it stirred in them. A closing round. Seventy minutes, and you have seen yourself from an angle your mirror does not offer.
How is group therapy different from individual therapy when you are used to being "the expert in the room"?
Individual therapy gives you privacy and control. You set the agenda, you narrate, you analyze. Group therapy strips that structure away and replaces it with exposure: other people watching you in real time, noticing what you do rather than what you report. For something like social anxiety, this matters. Individual therapy can talk about social anxiety, but a group puts you in the room with it, which is closer to exposure therapy than a one-on-one hour can manage. A man with social anxiety practices being seen here, week after week, until the social anxiety loosens its grip.
You are good at insight. The patterns come out fluently in your telling: the childhood origin, the named defense, the tidy arc. In individual therapy, that fluency can become its own hiding place. The group setting gently interrupts this by reflecting interpersonal dynamics as they happen. Group psychotherapy in NYC leverages the group dynamic to reveal attachment patterns, schema-driven reactions, and habitual defenses: people-pleasing, dominance, withdrawal, or the quiet move to become the therapist in the room. These are the relational patterns that individual work can name but rarely replicate.
There is a case for doing both at once. Individual therapy handles the deep schema and trauma work. Group work provides the interpersonal experiments and accountability that individual sessions cannot simulate. A client notices his tendency to take over conversations mirrored in how he speaks in group. He practices restraint. Curiosity replaces control. He carries that into a dinner conversation with his partner, and something shifts.
What happens in one of New York Therapy's online men's groups?
Paul Chiariello, LMSW, leads three men’s therapy groups, each with its own culture, age range, and relational texture. Each group meets weekly via secure video, and because the group meets at the same hour each week, it becomes a fixed point. These are not other groups where someone lectures on coping strategies and sends you home with a worksheet.
A standard session follows a predictable arc: opening check-in, live interpersonal process work, targeted interventions drawing from schema language, cognitive behavioral exercises, or mindfulness, and a brief closing reflection. The group meets for 60 to 75 minutes, long enough for depth, short enough to respect a New York schedule.
Recurring themes: difficulty with healthy relationships, anger that leaks sideways at work, numbing with alcohol or overwork, loneliness in New York despite professional success. Open discussions about these patterns, when held in a room of men facing similar challenges, carry a weight that no self-help book replicates.
Groups are closed or semi-closed. Members are screened before entry, and new groups are formed deliberately, so each of the new groups starts with the right mix. You are expected to show up. Not because of a rule, exactly, but because the man across the screen starts to count on you being there.
What kinds of men join these groups, and what do they talk about?
Typical profiles: mid-30s to mid-50s executives, founders, physicians, attorneys, creatives, academics, and senior managers across New York. Some young adults in their late twenties, early in demanding careers, also find their way in, and these young adults often shift the room in useful ways. What makes the room work is that nobody in it shares your exact life. A surgeon hears something a founder cannot. That gap is the point. It lands differently than venting to the one friend who also works in finance.
Common topics: emotional disconnection in long-term partnerships, conflict escalation, intimacy avoidance, fear of dependence, and repairing trust after a breach. Performance themes run alongside: burnout, imposter feelings, perfectionism, and executive functioning struggles like planning and follow-through despite high capability.
One member, mid-forties, runs a desk at a bank and has not cried since his father’s funeral. A divorce cracked something open. He came in to manage the anger and stayed once he realized the anger was grief wearing a louder coat. This is the kind of man these groups are built for, though he sat in two sessions, certain he had nothing in common with anyone on the screen. He was wrong about that, which is usually the first useful thing a group teaches.
How does Paul Chiariello, LMSW, facilitate these men's groups?
Paul functions as both a steady facilitator and active participant in the group process, naming defenses, attachment patterns, and interpersonal dynamics in real time. He is not a passive moderator, but one of the trained, compassionate therapists in the room who will tell you, gently and directly, what he sees happening between you and another member.
His clinical approach is grounded in Schema Therapy, attachment theory, interpersonal process, CBT, and mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques. Therapeutic approaches he draws from include here-and-now feedback, gently challenging avoidance, inviting slower breathing before difficult disclosures, and linking current reactions to earlier relational experiences. He might use cognitive behavioral exercises to help a member identify a schema firing in the moment or introduce practical tools for a member struggling with emotional regulation at work.
Each group develops its own tone over months and years. Paul protects this culture so members feel a consistent safe space, a safe space that takes months to build. When a new member joins, ground rules are revisited. A rupture, when it happens, gets repaired in the room, not swept aside. That repair work, awkward and imperfect, is often where the most significant self-awareness emerges.
How does group psychotherapy in NYC become a "safe space" without feeling like a performance?
The most common fear: that group therapy will feel like a networking event, a professional panel, or a TED talk where everyone performs vulnerability without risk. Men used to boardrooms and client dinners know how to perform. Performing is not the point here.
Concrete ground rules create a safe and supportive environment: maintaining confidentiality is non-negotiable, no socializing about group content outside sessions, speaking from personal experience, and pausing the urge to fix until someone asks for help. Seeking safety in a room of peers requires structure, not sentiment.
Safety builds through consistent attendance, predictable structure, and a norm that vulnerability is met with seriousness, not mockery. That safe environment is what lets a man try new behaviors he would never risk elsewhere. When a member takes a relational risk, say naming that he felt dismissed when someone interrupted, the group’s response becomes a live experiment in trust repair. Discomfort is expected early on. A certain level of tension is used therapeutically to shift long-standing patterns. Emotional support in this context is not cheerleading; it is the steady mutual support of men willing to stay present with each other’s difficulties.
How can group therapy support your relationships, not only your mental health symptoms?
Most men inquire about group therapy because of relationship pain, not because they received a mental health diagnosis or tracked their mental health on a scale. The partner who says “you’re not here,” the friend who stopped calling, the colleague who avoids them: these are the signals that bring men through the door.
The group becomes a live training ground for intimacy, boundary setting, conflict repair, and honest feedback. Maladaptive schemas appear in how group members relate to each other and to Paul. A member practices telling another member, “I felt dismissed when you interrupted,” and then translates those interpersonal skills to a conversation with his partner. Interpersonal skills and communication skills are not taught in a vacuum; they are forged under pressure, in real time, with real consequences.
Over months, the men who stay tend to find more room for closeness, and a wider vocabulary for what they feel. These are some of the unique benefits a group offers that individual work cannot, the slow opening toward a brighter future with the people who matter. No promises attached. What the group offers is a place to try something, then take it home and see if it holds with a partner, a kid, or a colleague. The skills travel to family members too, the parent or sibling a man has stopped talking to. Men who do this work tend to improve relationships across the board, not only the one that brought them in.
Where do mindfulness and executive functioning come into this?
Mindfulness shows up in small doses. A grounding pause after a hard exchange. Or a nudge to notice what the body is doing when an old pattern fires. For men built for speed, the pause itself is the unfamiliar part.
A lot of the men carry the kind of executive-functioning load that no one would guess from their resume: the smart, capable guy who still cannot make himself open the email he has been dreading for nine days. The group gets into the practical fixes, sure, but mostly into the feeling underneath the avoidance.
And when the suggestion to try something comes from another member who lives on the same calendar, it tends to stick in a way a therapist’s tip never quite does.
Is online group therapy as effective as in-person group therapy for New Yorkers?
New York Therapy’s groups are fully online, and many members report appreciating the convenience, privacy, and absence of a crosstown commute at 6:45 PM. The clinical research on telehealth group work has caught up with the convenience: well-run video groups tend to produce results in line with in-person group therapy, the same outcomes members would get in a room together. For men whose calendars do not bend, that matters.
Practical benefits: joining from home, easier attendance for demanding jobs, and flexibility for parents or caregivers. Specific NYC realities, late hours, unpredictable commutes, confidentiality needs for public-facing professionals who want to avoid waiting rooms, make online group sessions a premium advantage rather than a compromise. Some members are initially skeptical about virtual intimacy and assume that in-person group therapy must be deeper. They tend to be surprised by how quickly emotional depth develops when cameras are on and distractions are limited.
How does New York Therapy ensure privacy and discretion online?
Sessions are held on HIPAA-compliant telehealth platforms, not consumer video apps. Unique meeting links and encrypted connections are standard. Members use headphones, closed doors, no recording, and no participation from public spaces like cafes or open-plan offices.
For high-visibility clients, executives, public figures, or those in small professional worlds, group composition is carefully screened, and identifying details remain confidential. Legal and ethical standards in New York State guide all online practice, including documentation and data security. If you want an extra layer of privacy first, you can start with an individual consultation and decide about a group later. Most men do worry about who else is in the room. It is a fair thing to ask about on the first call.
How do you know if one of Paul's men's groups is the right fit for you?
Ambivalence about joining a therapy group is completely normal, especially for men who have built careers on self-reliance. Being the one others lean on makes it harder to imagine leaning into a room of strangers.
Indicators of good fit:
Recurring relational patterns that individual therapy has named but not shifted
Loneliness despite a busy, successful life
Stalled progress in individual work, or a sense that you need new perspectives
A wish to understand your impact on others, not only your internal experience
Who is not a fit right now: acute crisis requiring higher levels of care, active psychosis, untreated severe substance dependence, or inability to commit to regular attendance. Other criteria Paul assesses include readiness for feedback, tolerance for group process, and whether group therapy or a different treatment plan better serves your current needs.
It starts with a short call. Fifteen minutes with Paul to talk through fit, goals, and timing, no charge and no pressure. If a group looks right, a full individual session follows to go deeper. You can set up that first call here.
Can you work with Travis or Tiffany individually while joining a men's group?
New York Therapy offers individual therapy with one or more therapists alongside Paul’s groups. Travis Atkinson, LCSW, LICSW, the practice’s founder and director, works with individuals and couples using Schema Therapy, Emotionally Focused Therapy, and the Gottman Method. Tiffany Goldberg, LMSW, provides individual and relational therapy informed by years of work in trauma, recovery, and family systems, with a focus on resilience and lasting behavior change. Their individual work can run alongside what happens in the group.
Some men see Travis or Tiffany for individual Schema Therapy or attachment-focused work while participating in Paul’s men’s groups. Therapists collaborate internally, with client consent, to align goals across modalities for more coherent care. You can also keep an existing external individual therapist and join Paul’s group, provided coordination is possible and clinically appropriate. The right therapist for your individual work and the right group for your interpersonal work do not have to be the same person.
Free, confidential, and no obligation to continue. No intake form or history required.
Frequently Asked Questions about Group Therapy NYC with New York Therapy
What happens in one of the men's groups week to week?
A typical session arc includes a brief mindfulness or check-in, focused exploration of live interactions, time for members to bring recent situations, and a closing round. There is no obligation to share “on schedule,” but members are encouraged to speak regularly so the group can know and provide support. Themes evolve organically: some weeks focus on work conflict, other weeks on parenting, dating, or grief. Practical tools may be introduced, but the emphasis stays on how members relate to themselves and each other in the moment.
How long do people usually stay in a men's therapy group?
Many men stay at least 6 to 12 months to consolidate change, with some choosing to remain several years as their lives shift. There is a minimum initial commitment period, typically around 12 weeks, to protect group cohesion. Members and Paul periodically review whether the group is still meeting goals. Leaving a group can itself be an important piece of work, done thoughtfully rather than by disappearing.
Do I have to live in New York City to join, or is all of New York State eligible?
You must be physically located in New York State during group sessions, but you do not have to live in NYC. Members join from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, Westchester, Long Island, and upstate cities. Paul is licensed to work with adults across New York. International travel or being in other states during sessions is not permitted for legal and licensing reasons.
Can group therapy replace individual therapy for me?
For some men, group therapy is their primary modality. Others combine it with individual therapy for a period. Whether a group can stand alone depends on symptom severity, safety, and goals, which are assessed during the intake consultation. Certain kinds of trauma processing or crisis stabilization may be better addressed in individual work before or alongside a group. Paul makes that call with you during the consultation, not from a checklist.
Is group therapy as effective as individual therapy?
For many men, yes. The research on group psychotherapy puts its outcomes in the same range as individual therapy across a wide set of mental health concerns. What changes is the mechanism. You are not just talking about your relationships, you are having them, live, with feedback in the moment. For some people, that does more than a one-on-one hour ever could.
How do therapists keep a group feeling safe?
Safety is the facilitator’s job before it is anyone else’s. Paul sets the ground rules out loud, screens who comes in, and holds the room steady when a conversation gets close to the bone. Maintaining confidentiality stays inside the session. Nobody gets to mock what another man just risked saying. Open discussion only works once people trust the container, so building that safe space and trust is the first piece of clinical work, not an afterthought.
How many people are in one of the groups?
Most well-run process groups land somewhere around seven to ten members. Big enough that the room holds a real range of personalities and reactions, small enough that you are never just a face in a crowd. Paul keeps each group in that range on purpose. Below it, the energy thins out. Above it, people start to disappear.
What can you learn from the other men in the group?
More than you expect. Watch another man handle conflict without going cold, and you have a model to borrow. A lot of the work touches schema coping modes, the old survival strategies that once protected you and now get in the way: the detached protector who numbs out, the overcompensator who takes charge of everything, the compliant surrenderer who keeps the peace at his own expense. Seeing those modes play out in someone else helps you gain insight into your own and makes them easier to catch. Peers hand you coping skills and new strategies that a therapist alone rarely can, because they are living the same pressures.
Is group therapy more affordable than individual therapy?
Usually, yes. Because the clinician’s time is shared across the room, a weekly group session tends to cost less per session than an individual hour with the same caliber of therapist. For men who want consistent, serious work without an open-ended individual fee every week, that math is part of the appeal. The practice is out of network, so reimbursement depends on your policy with your insurance provider, and your out of pocket costs vary with that plan. Specific rates come up on the first call.
How many kinds of therapy groups are there?
Many. The field runs to more than thirty distinct group formats, from process and interpersonal groups to skills-based, support, and psychoeducational ones, each built for a different purpose. New York Therapy’s men’s groups are process groups: the focus is on what happens between people in the room rather than a fixed curriculum. Knowing the category matters because a skills class and a process group ask different things of you.
What are DBT and mindfulness-based groups for?
They target different problems. Dialectical Behavior Therapy groups teach concrete skills for emotional dysregulation, the kind of intense reactivity that hijacks a conversation before you can think. Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy groups work on depression and anxiety, especially the relapse loop, where a low mood pulls old thought patterns back in. Paul’s men’s groups are not strictly DBT or MBCT, though he folds in mindfulness and cognitive tools where they help. If a structured skills group is the better fit for you, that comes up in the consultation.
What is the difference between a men's process group and a support group?
A support group tends to be peer-led, open-door, and organized around a shared situation: a diagnosis, a loss, a phase of recovery. People come and go. A men’s process group at New York Therapy is different work. It is closed, screened, and led by a clinician, and the focus is on what happens between the men in the room. Both have value. A peer support group can carry you through a hard stretch, and many men use a support group at some point. Group therapy of this kind goes after the pattern underneath, the reason the same conflict keeps showing up in different clothes.
What coping skills do men take away from group therapy?
Less than you would write on a worksheet, more than you would expect. The coping skills that stick are the ones you practice live: catching the impulse to go cold mid-argument, naming a feeling before it leaks out sideways, asking for something directly instead of testing whether someone will guess. Across a run of group therapy sessions, men tend to pick up new coping strategies from each other more than from any handout.
Watch another man hold steady through a hard moment and you have a new coping skill you can borrow. Those small relational moves travel home, into a marriage, a friendship, a tense call with a parent.
Can younger professionals and men in their late twenties join?
Yes. While the core membership runs from the mid-thirties to the mid-fifties, some young adults in their late twenties find their way in, often during a period of fast change: a first leadership role, a new city, the end of a long relationship. Those life transitions tend to expose the patterns a busy career had kept hidden. New York Therapy places younger group members where the fit is right, so younger men and young adults are placed so that a man in his late twenties is not the only one of his stage in the room.
The aim is a group whose members can recognize something in each other, even across a decade or two of age difference.
How does group therapy help men build healthier relationships?
The room is a rehearsal space for the relationships that matter outside it. A man tries saying the thing he usually swallows, and the other group members show him what landed and what did not. That feedback is how communication skills get built, not in theory but under a little pressure. Men gain insight into the moves they make without noticing, the charm that keeps people at arm’s length, the silence that reads as disapproval.
Improve those, and the marriage shifts, the friendships deepen. Group therapy works on healthy relationships by giving men a place to practice them first, with witnesses who will tell the truth.
What does a typical week in group therapy look like?
One evening a week, the group meets for around seventy minutes over secure video. The group therapy sessions follow a loose arc rather than a script: a check-in, then whatever the room brings, then a closing round. Some weeks a single member’s situation takes most of the hour. Other weeks the work spreads across several men. Because the group meets in the same window each week, it becomes a fixed point in an unpredictable schedule, a group setting that holds steady while the rest of the calendar moves.
That rhythm is part of what makes group therapy work over months rather than a single dramatic session.
Can group therapy run alongside individual psychotherapy?
Often it works best that way. Individual psychotherapy gives you a private space to go deep into history and the hardest material. Group therapy gives you a live setting to test what you learn there against other people. Many men keep both running for a stretch, with the individual hour feeding the group work and the group feeding the individual hour back.
The diverse perspectives of seven or eight other men surface things a single clinician, however skilled, cannot show you on their own. For some, group therapy alone is enough. For others, the pairing moves things faster.
Does group therapy help with grief, divorce, and major loss?
It can hold a lot of it. Men who come in around a divorce, a death, or the slow loss of a marriage often arrive braced to manage, not to feel. The group gives that weight somewhere to land. Sitting with other men who have carried similar losses tends to do what solitary coping cannot: the group dynamic loosens the grip. There is research on post-traumatic growth that points in the same direction, that people often find a new footing through connection rather than alone.
Group therapy does not erase the loss. It changes who you carry it with, and that tends to change how heavy it stays.
Are there group therapy options focused on specific issues?
The wider field has groups focused on almost anything: groups focused on addiction recovery, groups focused on grief, a skills group for anger or anxiety, a structured skills group for emotion regulation. Each format asks something different of you. New York Therapy’s men’s groups are process groups rather than a single-issue skills group, which means the work follows the men rather than a fixed syllabus. If what you need is a tightly focused skills group instead, Paul will say so on the first call and point you toward other groups built for the problem in front of you.
How does group therapy build community support between members?
Quietly, and over time. The men do not socialize outside the room, but inside it a real community support and mutual support take shape. Group members start to track each other’s lives: the job interview last week, the hard conversation with a teenage kid, the anniversary of a death. That kind of steady attention is rare for high-functioning men, who tend to be the ones other people lean on.
Younger group members and young adults often feel this first, surprised that a screen full of near-strangers, doing group psychotherapy together, can hold real weight. The community support that group therapy generates is not a substitute for friendship. It is something adjacent and, for many men, harder to find anywhere else.
How do I get started with group therapy at New York Therapy?
Step one: tap the button to book a free 15-minute consultation with Paul. No commitment, no intake form, no history required. A first conversation.
Free, confidential, and no obligation to continue. No intake form or history required.
Step two: In that call, you and Paul decide together whether a group makes sense now, or whether individual work or another option fits better. A mutual decision, not a pitch.
Step three: If the group looks right, you schedule a full individual session with Paul. Ahead of it, he sends several questionnaires built to surface the core themes you will work on, so you arrive with real material instead of small talk.
Step four: if everything lines up, you join one of the three men’s groups, the one whose culture and stage fits you. A quiet arrival into a room of men already doing the work. Not a form to complete. A threshold to cross.
The first move is small and concrete: fifteen minutes with Paul, no charge, no commitment beyond the conversation itself.
Author and Clinical Attribution
The man from the opening is still competent. He still closes deals and sends the follow-ups. But the dinner table has more than one chair now. He is learning to be seen, not only admired. It is slower work than any deal he has closed, and it does not come with a performance review. Some nights, his partner says he feels closer, and he does not flinch.
This article is provided by The Office of Travis Atkinson, LCSW, PC (newyorktherapy.com), an online psychotherapy practice serving adults across New York State. Group therapy content is informed by the clinical work of Paul Chiariello, LMSW, Senior Clinician and leader of three men’s therapy groups for professionals across New York State.
If you are ready to do serious work with clinicians who understand high-pressure New York lives, you can schedule an online consultation.
Free, confidential, and no obligation to continue. No intake form or history required.
