Greenpointers’ newest series, “Greenpoint at Work,” is taking a deeper look into the lives of people who work in the neighborhood.
For this edition, we spoke to Stephanie West, owner and clinical director of West Therapy Group (861 Manhattan Ave #18), to answer that age old question: what does your therapist do when you’re not in session?
Read our last “Greenpoint at Work” interview here.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Tell us a little bit about you, and how you ended up in this field?
This is a second career for me. I moved to New York about 20 years ago and had been working for almost that long as a Pilates instructor. I had been in my own therapy for a long time and found that working privately with people, I ended up being also their therapist in addition to being their Pilates instructor, and something I worked through in my own therapy about what it would be like to transition into going into this field myself.
I went back to school and became a therapist. I went to Hunter College and graduated in May of 2020, so right at the height of the pandemic. I worked for about two years in private practice, and I decided to start bringing on supervisees, so people who need hours towards licensure. I was missing that mentor piece—that’s the part I think is most important to me. It’s grown into a team of six, including myself.
What kinds of therapy do you practice?
There’s two main branches of therapy that we usually get put into. There’s more of the behavioral, and then there’s more psychodynamic. Ours would be more psychodynamic, and more specifically, I studied and trained at a psychoanalytic institute. It comes from more of a psychoanalytic frame, which is really taking the person’s whole experience into consideration, from childhood to how those experiences play out in their adult relationships and in their adult decision-making, transitions, things like that. And then, of course, where they want to take it from there. So it’s psychodynamic/psychoanalytic.
What does a typical day look like for you?
A typical day at work for me would probably be to have a couple of patients, mostly in-person. We’re about 85% in-person, so most of the work I do is in the office. I still do see people virtually, but most people who are coming in want to work in person. Half of my day is seeing patients for ongoing psychotherapy, and maybe 25% of my day is supervising. I have these five supervisees that I need to give individual supervision to, and the other 25% of my day probably goes to my own therapy, my own supervision that I go to—we’re kind of hitting it from all angles.

Ok, that leads me to ask. I think there’s kind of a conception from TV and movies about maybe a Russian nesting doll situation of therapists having their own therapists. Do most have that, or is that an individual thing?
In my experience, it’s fairly common for therapists to have therapists and to be in and out of therapy over the course of a lifetime. You can be just endlessly curious about people. Most of the time, separately, we have either a peer supervision group, or an individual supervision we attend with another therapist that helps us with our casework—not our personal issues, but the casework and what it’s bringing up in me and how I’m experiencing vicarious trauma, for example, or I need some help on this case because I’ve not worked with this specific personality disorder before. I would say, without painting myself into a corner, that we should. We should be continuously learning about ourselves and about the work that we do. There’s a lot of things that don’t change, but there’s a lot of things that are constantly changing as well.
What do you like most about your job?
I like a lot of things about my job. I think right now what I like most about my job is mentoring young therapists. I have a couple of interns and the supervisees, because we’re kind of working into the fabric of the world of therapy, and I feel like I’m making more of a difference helping therapists become themselves. Just like in therapy, which is another favorite part of it, is helping people become more themselves, and whether that’s a person, a patient, or one of the people that I mentor becoming themselves as therapists.
In the most HIPPA compliant terms, do you feel like you can characterize the clients you see in Greenpoint, or are people’s neuroses the same all over?
I would say a little bit of both. The people that are drawn to working with me, and I find this true of all of my therapists who are all unique, talented, bright, intelligent individuals with super diverse backgrounds, that a previous version of you will always find you through therapy. The people I do my best work with hold a previous version of me somewhere inside them, where we can now mutually empathize and really get into a depth of work that we may not be able to if I wasn’t able to relate. That’s not to say that I don’t work with people who I have very different backgrounds from, but even under those circumstances, there’s a basic understanding of pain or not being seen that is more to your second option of, ‘Is this just a general neurosis,’ yes. Everybody wants to be seen. Everybody wants to be heard, wanted, needed, loved. We can all kind of relate on that. In a more specific way, the previous versions of me, things that I’ve struggled with, things that I’ve worked through or are currently working through, they will find me.
What are some of your favorite local spots?
I love Fornino (849 Manhattan Ave.)—it’s right next door. My team and I go there a lot and have our Christmas party there. I personally like going to Friducha (946 Manhattan Ave.) and Naked Dog (47 Java St.). I really miss Upright Coffee—it was right across from the office, and we loved the staff and they had been there for so long. We really miss them and need another coffee shop to go in there. I feel very much a part of the neighborhood, especially now that I have a business in the neighborhood. So many acquaintances, so many warm faces, so many people that you see every single day. That’s the best part of it, everything kind of feels local.
What do you do when you’re not at work?
I have a dog that I love to walk. Her name is Pepper, and she’s incredible—she’s a little rescue dog. She takes up a lot of my time. I’m a big walker. I know every street in all the order of Greenpoint, I know the whole map, I know it all, so I do a lot of walking. It’s taken 42 years to figure out what my hobby is but right now, British crime thrillers on audiobooks—oh my god. I’m consuming so many of them. It’s such a nice palate cleanser from what I do, and they’re actually so much fun.
Good luck to her. Greenpoint and the country need more people like her.
Relationships between the sexes have relatively speaking been destroyed from dating, romance, sex, marriage, having kids etc.
The demo nightmare is upon us no longer delayed. A medicare advisor at my senior center informed us that our medicare premiums especially drugs have skyrocketed. Mine went up 44%.
He said the main reason is demographics, relatively speaking the number of young workers in the pop. have figuratively speaking disappeared.
So the current seniors can be paid, the rates skyrocketed and will only get worse year by year.