Paul Chiariello, LMSW: Therapist for Men NYC, Online Across New York

What kind of therapist for men do you find in Paul Chiariello?

I am Paul Chiariello, LMSW, a licensed psychotherapist in private practice with New York Therapy. My caseload is adults and couples, and I lead structured men’s therapy groups for men who want more clarity, confidence, and direction in life. Most of the people I see are capable. They run teams, raise families, and handle pressure that would flatten others. Then they notice the same argument at home, the same shutdown under criticism, the same dread as the weekend closes. They cannot think their way out of it, and they feel that failure sharply. That gap is where my work lives.

Therapy with me is active. We identify the patterns shaping your reactions, relationships, and decisions, then practice changing them. Insight matters, but understanding alone rarely shifts a pattern that has run for twenty years. Sessions are collaborative, direct, and focused on your daily life between appointments. This page covers how I work, who I see, what the men’s groups involve, and how to tell whether to start. It matters because the pattern you cannot interrupt is costing you more than you think, in your relationships, your work, and your health.

Why do many men carry emotional pain for years before they seek therapy?

Men are less likely than women to seek therapy, even when the mental health conditions are the same. Women talk to friends, doctors, and therapists sooner. Men wait. Each year roughly six million men in the United States experience depression. Most of their colleagues would describe those men as fine. Many never identify it as something that needs treatment, because it does not look the way they expect. Male depression often shows up as irritability, overwork, withdrawal, drinking, or a flat feeling that nothing in life lands anymore. Anxiety hides inside productivity. Men often externalize emotional suffering through maladaptive coping, and emotional pain gets converted into physical symptoms: a tight chest, poor sleep, headaches that no doctor can explain. The mental health issues are there. They are wearing a disguise.

The numbers behind this are sobering. Rates of substance use disorders run higher among men than women. Men die by suicide at close to four times the rate of women, per CDC figures, and most were not in treatment for any mental health conditions when it happened. In today’s world there is still a quiet rule that a man handles things alone. That rule has a cost.

I see the softer version of this every week, and the mental health issues underneath it are treatable. A man books an initial consultation after his partner asks him to. Or after panic attacks start arriving in parking garages. Sometimes after realizing he has not felt much of anything in a year. He arrives apologetic, as though needing support were a failure of character.

It is not. Seeking support is a decision, and it is often the first decision in a long time that a man makes for himself rather than for his role. Men’s health includes mental health, and treating one without the other rarely holds.

What does men’s mental health treatment look like in practice?

Work on men’s mental health is not a different kind of therapy. It is therapy that takes seriously how men have been taught to handle emotions and stress, and starts there rather than against it. Men’s mental health challenges are common. The treatment gap is the problem.

Many men arrive with little vocabulary for what they feel. They know “fine,” “stressed,” and “angry.” Anxiety gets called stress. Sadness gets called tired. Women are taught more words for emotions earlier, and men pay for the difference for decades of life. Early therapy sessions build emotional awareness in small increments. Noticing the body before the thought. Naming what you feel before acting on it. Catching the moment anger covers for hurt. This is not about becoming someone else, and it is not about feelings for their own sake. It is about having access to the full range of your emotions. Then work stress, grief, or self doubt do not have to leak out sideways at the people you love. Life gets quieter inside, and the challenges stop feeling like proof of something wrong with you.

From there we get practical. Depending on what brought you in, that may mean:

• Anxiety and overthinking: learning to interrupt problematic thoughts and negative thought patterns before they spiral, and to tolerate uncertainty without controlling everything around you. Anxiety treatment also means learning to develop coping strategies that work at 2 a.m., not only in session.
• Depression and flatness: rebuilding behavioral momentum, reconnecting with values, and treating the self-criticism that keeps the mood low. Men who experience depression often describe numbness rather than sadness.
• Anger and reactivity: understanding the sequence underneath a blowup and widening the gap between trigger and response.
• Relationship difficulties: changing a communication style that reads as cold or controlling, and learning to turn toward a partner instead of defending.
• Life transitions and direction: divorce, a new child, a career change, a parent’s decline. Working out what you want from the next decade rather than inheriting a script about what a man is supposed to want.
• ADHD and ASD Level 1: executive functioning skills, emotional regulation, and reducing the shame that often grows around neurodivergence in adulthood.

Many clients come in for one of these and discover that two or three are connected. They usually are. A man with work stress and a short fuse at home is usually carrying one pattern, not two problems. Mental health rarely sorts itself into the categories on an intake form, and neither does a life.

Which approaches do you use, and why these?

My work draws on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, schema therapy, and emotionally focused approaches. I also integrate dialectical behavior therapy skills and mindfulness where they help. Each one does something the others do not.

CBT is an effective method for the fast layer. The automatic thoughts, the avoidance, the rules you follow without noticing. ACT adds psychological flexibility, the ability to feel something uncomfortable and still act on your values. Schema therapy reaches the older layer, the beliefs formed from past experiences that make a neutral comment feel like an attack. Emotionally focused work addresses what happens between you and the people closest to you. Somatic therapy integrates mind and body to release stored tension, and it comes in when emotions live mostly in the body and words arrive late. Psychodynamic therapy ideas inform the work when origins matter.

I do not run these as separate modules. They form one approach that adjusts to what is most useful in a given session. Some weeks are about skill building for anxiety or depression. Others are about sitting with something you have avoided for years. Clients benefit most when the therapist can move between the two without losing the thread.

What happens in men’s group therapy, and how does it build positive masculinity?

I lead three ongoing men’s therapy groups each week. Two meet on Tuesday evenings and one on Wednesday evening, all online. The groups are for men who want stronger self-esteem, healthier relationships, and a clearer sense of direction in their careers and personal lives. Most members are successful professionally and feel uncertain about identity, emotional expression, or how they show up with the people closest to them. Some are managing anxiety, depression, or career stress alongside the rest of life and have never said so out loud to another man.

Group therapy offers support that individual work cannot fully replicate, and it challenges you in ways a therapist alone cannot. It also builds understanding between men who assumed they were the only one. The most common sentence in a new member’s first month is not a confession. It is some version of: I thought it was only me. You get direct feedback from other men. Your relational patterns unfold in real time, with people who will tell you what they see. Then you practice saying the hard thing, with support, and staying in the room afterward.

The groups are structured and guided. Conversations do not drift, nobody is left to perform, and the support is real rather than performed. Over months, members build emotional range, steadiness, accountability, and a form of positive masculinity that has nothing to do with bravado. For many men it is the first non judgmental space they have had with other men since adolescence. A safe space of that kind is an empathetic space too, and the isolation that comes with adult male life starts to lift. Members describe the relationships in the group as some of the most meaningful relationships in their lives, and the emotional intimacy they build there carries home.

How does couples therapy rebuild emotional intimacy?

I also see couples. Online couples therapy is available to anyone located in New York. My training there is in Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples, built to deepen emotional connection, and schema therapy for couples, which reaches the deep-rooted patterns that repeat in relationships. Supervision adds the Gottman Method and its research on what builds healthy relationships. Much of that work centers on emotional intimacy, the capacity to share deep thoughts and feelings and to receive the same from your partner without flinching. It is where many men feel least equipped, least supported, and most judged, and where understanding your own emotions pays off fastest. Men are less likely to seek therapy, and emotional intimacy is usually what pays for the delay.

Emotional intimacy relies on trust and communication, and it erodes quietly. Women often notice the erosion first, and men often hear the complaint as criticism of their character rather than a request for closeness. Underneath, the complaint was an invitation the whole time, wrapped badly. One partner stops bringing things up because it never goes well. The other reads the silence as distance and pushes harder. Traditional masculinity norms make this worse, because many men were taught that repressing emotions is strength, and then find that the same habit reads as absence at home. Repressed emotions do not disappear. They turn into relationship difficulties with a delay, and sometimes into physical symptoms and stress that get treated as medical problems.

Couples therapy with me is practical. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy pulls its weight here too, on the relationship issues themselves, and I teach the communication skills that let closeness return. We slow the argument down, name the cycle, and work on the moves each partner makes inside it. After infidelity, the work is more structured: accountability, rebuilding trust over time, and addressing the underlying emotional issues that preceded the betrayal. Done well, that work moves a couple from crisis back to connection. The goal is for both partners to improve communication and to feel wanted again.

Dual-career couples in New York bring their own unique challenges, and women and men in those couples often describe the same loneliness in different words. Two demanding jobs leave little room for the small moments that keep a relationship alive. Those relationship challenges respond fast once the pattern is visible.

What shaped the way you think about people?

Before becoming a psychotherapist, I worked in sociology research, conflict resolution, and curriculum development. I completed a Fulbright in Indonesia and a Master of Science in Sociology of Education from the University of Oxford. Then I worked with humanitarian organizations in post-conflict settings, including Uganda, Bosnia, and India. Hard places. That work shaped how I think about identity, resilience, and the way people hold their shape under stress, in work and in life.

I later earned my Master of Social Work from Columbia University and completed advanced clinical training in evidence-based psychotherapy. My advanced training and certifications include:

• Advanced Schema Therapy coursework for individuals and couples, completed to certification level.
• Level 2 training in Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples.
• Certified Trauma Professional.
• Advanced training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy through New York University.

I practice under the clinical supervision of Travis Atkinson, LCSW, founder of New York Therapy. Travis is a Certified Gottman Method Couples Therapist, an Advanced Certified Schema Therapist, Supervisor and Trainer, and a Certified Emotionally Focused Couples Therapist and Supervisor. That supervision means complex cases get a second experienced mind on them. It is one reason many men who have tried therapy before find this round different.

How do you find a therapist for men in New York City?

New York City offers more specialized therapy and mental health resources for men than almost anywhere. That makes choosing harder, not easier. Specialized directories help you find therapists who match cultural and neighborhood preferences, and directories that filter by specialty will locate therapists focused on men’s issues. Insurance networks can point you to in-network mental health services, though many of the most experienced clinicians in the city practice out of network. Telehealth widens the field further, giving you access to specialists across the state rather than within a subway ride.

If you are in crisis, call or text 988. NYC’s 988 initiative offers free, confidential support around the clock, and therapy can begin once you are safe.

How do you know if Paul is the right therapist for you?

Fit is the most important factor in whether therapy works, more than any specific technique. Research on mental health treatment keeps landing on the same finding: feeling understood by the therapist predicts outcome. Some people want a therapist with depth of training. Others are relieved to find a male therapist who does not need everything explained twice. Whether you see a licensed psychologist or a clinical social worker matters less than whether the person across from you understands how you work.

You are likely a good match if you want therapy that is active, collaborative, and grounded in evidence, and you want change that carries into daily life. The match is weaker if you want to talk without being asked to do anything differently. I will push, respectfully, because that is what produces meaningful change. Within a few sessions you should have a sense of whether this is working. If not, I will say so and help you find the right therapist for what you need. Trying more than one therapist before the fit is right is normal and worth exploring.

What do therapy sessions with Paul look like, and when does lasting change arrive?

The first session is an initial consultation in the fuller sense of the word. We map what brought you in, what you have tried, and what you want to be different. By the end, you should have a working understanding of the pattern, not only a list of symptoms.

Then we set realistic goals for the challenges you named, and we name the challenges you did not. Early on, the aim is relief: better sleep, fewer blowups, less dread before the week starts, and support that does not depend on you having it together. As therapy progresses, the work moves toward the deeper layer, the beliefs and relationship habits that produced the symptoms. Individual therapy sessions run weekly at the start. Many clients move to every other week as lasting change takes hold, and some step into a men’s group.

The outcome I am after is not that you feel better in my office. It is that you handle a hard conversation differently. That you notice the dip in mood before it becomes a month, and treat yourself with the same understanding you offer everyone else. Personal growth, in other words, that shows up in your relationships, your work, and your well being rather than in your vocabulary. You should feel the difference in your emotions and your life, and so should the people around you. Self care, in this sense, is less about routines and more about how you talk to yourself when things go wrong.

Frequently asked questions about therapy for men in NYC

Ready to start with a therapist for men in New York?

You do not need to have the problem fully articulated before you book. Most men who contact me can describe the symptom and not yet the pattern. Finding the pattern is the first part of the work, and feeling understood while you do it is the second. A single conversation is enough to tell whether this is the right fit. If it is, we build from there, toward a life where the hard conversations happen and the mood does not run you. The people who matter get the best version of you.