Safia Albaiti is a licensed therapist who received her Master of Social Work at Smith College School for Social Work in 2023. She works with children, adolescents and adults, across the lifespan, in individual and couples therapy. She primarily uses a relational psychodynamic framework and a family systems approach, and works with clients to integrate somatic, skills and narrative based interventions when those needs and desires are called upon in therapy.

Safia brings in her training as a social worker to attend to the sociopolitical and collective in our everyday lives, and the self determination and depth of every client’s therapeutic journey. She is interested in exploring how much of what we personally experience as symptoms, interpersonal difficulties, role conflicts and stuckness is also a product of the many social contracts and norms that shape how we were raised in society, what we were told was the way to a good life, and that may no longer exist or are experienced as broken, in sometimes traumatic or unnameable ways. She believes in attuning to the potential of the therapy space to work through what comes up in a safe contained way that can move towards healing and self actualization.

Safia is a Yemeni Muslim immigrant, committed to foregrounding antiracism, feminism, and queer dignity as a liberating sense of being. She also believes in foregrounding working class dignity and the hidden injuries of class and class dislocation, that are often displaced and shamed away in narratives of self. Safia has also worked with individuals who have experienced migration and sexual trauma and those who have been diagnosed with being on the psychosis spectrum. She integrates the spiritual in her therapeutic orientation for those clients who would need an affirming space for that part of their identities, and more broadly believes in what the early psychoanalysts would have understood as the importance of attending to the organization and structure of “die seelische” (the soul), be it religious or humanist.

She has worked with children who have experienced a range of difficulties, including sexual and physical abuse, separation anxiety, grief and loss, adjustment in school, developmental delays and family conflict. She believes that children use their unique strengths to become very involved in their own therapeutic work, when given the space and time to move through the process on their own terms. She uses a blended approach of Trauma Focused-Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and play therapy. Safia has also volunteered with the NYC National Lawyers Guild and its George Floyd/BLM Civil Litigation Taskforce to help align the organization to more trauma-informed advocacy in civil rights litigation against police and prison brutality and carceral trauma.