Gary Katz

Director, LCSW, CSAT, CPTT

Hi and welcome.

I am the founder of The Center for Intimacy Recovery in New York, which focuses primarily on intimacy and relationships. What I have found is that without a sense of intimacy with oneself, people can’t fully experience intimacy with someone else. Our hearts are fragile so we develop strategies to keep them safe and avoid getting hurt. Often these strategies later become maladaptive and stop serving us or they hold us back from achieving the connection and intimacy we are actually seeking. The Center for Intimacy Recovery helps clients to find ways to have the intimacy and connection in life that they are seeking.

Prior to opening the Center for Intimacy Recovery, I worked in education for over 20 years. I received my Bachelors of Education in Israel and my Masters of Social Work from Rutgers University.

To gain a better understanding around healthy sexuality and treatment for compulsive and destructive sexual behaviors and the trauma created through intimate betrayal, I have studied at the Modern Sex Therapy Institute where I have studied healthy sexuality. I have also studied with the International Institute of Trauma and Addiction Professionals where I became a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist and a Certified Partner Trauma Therapist.

I am always seeking to learn more and find the best methods and modalities to help our clients have the deepest experience possible in their mind, body, and soul. That seeking led me to be trained in AEDP (Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) which teaches that “crisis and suffering provide opportunities to awaken extraordinary capacities that otherwise might lie dormant, unknown and untapped. Key to its therapeutic action is the undoing of aloneness and thus, the co-creation of a therapeutic relationship experienced as both safe haven and secure base. Once that’s established, we work with emotional experience, working experientially toward healing trauma and suffering, and toward expanding emergent positive transformational experiences.”

Seeking to further explore and work with how feelings and trauma are experienced and stored in the body rather than the mind, I have also been trained in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy which as explained on their website:

Is a complete therapeutic modality for trauma and attachment issues.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy welcomes the body as an integral source of information which can guide resourcing and the accessing and processing of challenging, traumatic, and developmental experiences.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is helpful in working with dysregulated activation and other effects of trauma, as well as the limiting belief systems of developmental issues.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy helps clients cultivate their strengths, while providing enough challenge to stimulate growth, long lasting change, and well-being.

I have also trained in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) which is a psychotherapy tool that enables people to heal from the symptoms and emotional distress that are the result of disturbing life experiences. Repeated studies show that by using EMDR therapy people can experience the benefits of psychotherapy that once took years to make a difference. It is widely assumed that severe emotional pain requires a long time to heal. EMDR therapy shows that the mind can in fact heal from psychological trauma much as the body recovers from physical trauma. When you cut your hand, your body works to close the wound. If a foreign object or repeated injury irritates the wound, it festers and causes pain. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. EMDR therapy demonstrates that a similar sequence of events occurs with mental processes. The brain’s information processing system naturally moves toward mental health. If the system is blocked or imbalanced by the impact of a disturbing event, the emotional wound festers and can cause intense suffering. Once the block is removed, healing resumes. Using the detailed protocols and procedures learned in EMDR therapy training sessions, clinicians help clients activate their natural healing processes.

I have also trained and worked at SATTI (the Sexual Addiction Trauma and Training Center), and served on the board of NCADD (National Council of Alcohol and Drug Dependency) and JACS (Jewish Alcoholics, Chemically Dependent Persons and Significant Others).

I can be reached at garykatz@intimacyrecovery.com