Dr. Catherine Harris is a psychologist who provides evaluation and psychotherapy to adults, children, and adolescents as well as couples and families struggling with a range of issues including anxiety and mood disorders, relationship challenges, and trauma. Dr. Harris provides LGBTQ+ affirming care and is well versed in issues around sex and gender.
Dr. Harris aims to help individuals who face longstanding maladaptive patterns in how they perceive themselves and relate to others. Her approach is relational, psychodynamic, and trauma-informed. She helps patients understand how their histories and relationships have shaped the ways they have learned to cope, connect, and protect themselves. While insight is an important part of this work, she believes understanding why you feel or behave a certain way is only the beginning. Therapy can also create opportunities to experience difficult emotions differently, develop greater freedom and flexibility in longstanding patterns, and build more fulfilling relationships. Her therapeutic style is warm, engaged, curious, and collaborative, with attention to what unfolds within the therapeutic relationship itself.
Dr. Harris has particular expertise in Complex PTSD and works with individuals whose distress may be less visible from the outside, including those who appear highly capable while privately struggling with painful emotions or disconnection. She also works with individuals who have been diagnosed with—or are wondering about—personality-related difficulties, including borderline or narcissistic patterns.
Dr. Harris earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and completed her predoctoral internship at Kings County Hospital Center. Her clinical training has included work at the Brooklyn VA, North Central Bronx Hospital, the NYU Postdoctoral Program for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Across these settings, she has worked with patients with a wide range of clinical concerns and backgrounds.
Dr. Harris’s research focuses on childhood maltreatment, trauma, PTSD, and Complex PTSD. Her doctoral research examined Complex PTSD using data from a prospective longitudinal study of individuals with documented histories of childhood abuse and neglect. She is particularly interested in bringing contemporary psychological research on complex trauma into conversation with psychodynamic thinking and using both to inform individualized clinical care.