Alexandra Butler, LCSW, offers psychotherapy to both individuals and couples in New York. She works with adults across the lifespan, from their 20s to their 80s, on relationship issues, difficult transitions, career and creative blocks, parenting, aging, end of life, grief, and trauma. Her approach is integrative, drawing on relational, psychodynamic, narrative, and somatic approaches. She received her master’s degree from Columbia University in 2010.

With couples, Alex helps partners look beneath the repetitive, sometimes persecutory content of their arguments to the unconscious phantasies and anxieties that drive them. She also works closely with the mechanics of communication, paying attention to how each partner’s nervous system responds in the moment. Together, this helps couples move out of entrenched positions and into genuine dialogue.

Another part of Alex’s practice focuses on parents of twice-exceptional (2E) and neurodivergent children, some of whom are discovering their own neurodivergence in real time! She helps parents advocate for their children, strengthen communication, set sustainable boundaries, and find approaches that work for their families. She also leads skills groups for adults in their 20s and 30s who are caring for their parents. Her work with neurodivergent families and caregivers is rooted in both her clinical training and her personal experience.

Alongside her clinical work, Alex is a writer. She is the author of Walking the Night Road (Columbia University Press), a memoir about early parental loss, and the poetry collection Circling the Same (OHWOW). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, and Cultured Magazine. She co-wrote two short films: The Song is You, featured in The New Yorker’s Screening Room series, and Ivy Holland, produced by Tribeca Films. She teaches memoir writing at the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop.