Emily McNamara, Ph.D.

My Approach:

I work from an integrative perspective, drawing primarily from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), psychodynamic relational therapy, and attachment theory to help you tune inward to better understand your relationship with yourself and those around you. I take a person-centered approach to care, viewing you as the expert on yourself and the therapy space as a place where I can help you build awareness of your own internal conflicts, dilemmas, thoughts, feelings, and actions to create change. I listen closely to help you identify your personal goals and values, and join you actively in the room to bring about growth and change, so that together we can decide how you can take steps to move closer to what matters to you. Using this integrative approach, I have expertise working with adult individuals and couples struggling with anxiety, recovering from trauma, relationship and intimacy issues, major life transitions, family conflict, grief and loss, health problems, identity issues, perfectionism, obsessive and compulsive traits, and personality disorders.

Professional Background:

I earned my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Temple University, where I also received a master’s degree in General Psychology. I graduated cum laude from Williams College with my bachelors degree, majoring in Psychology. My graduate research focused on optimizing adult anxiety disorder treatments, and my dissertation examined the relationship between social media use, loneliness, and social anxiety in young adults.

Before joining MPPS, I worked at Montefiore Medical Center where I provided outpatient individual, group, and couples therapy as well as inpatient therapy to support patients during their hospital stay. I also previously worked at NYU’s Family Military Center in Manhattan, providing trauma-focused individual therapy and emotionally-focused couples therapy (EFT) to veterans and their partners, and worked at Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia, serving the LGBTQIA+ community and providing ACT, dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and psychodynamic therapy to individuals with personality disorders, anxiety, depression, and chronic medical conditions. While at Temple University, I worked as a clinician in Temple’s Adult Anxiety Clinic, providing adults with cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) for social anxiety disorder.