Welcome - B. Beth Cohen, Ph.D.

Welcome to Our Affirming, Inclusive Practice.

Hello! I’m counseling psychologist Beth Cohen, and my spouse, George Dillmann, works with me as my practice manager. We’re glad you’ve found us. George and I are informal and invite you to call us by our first names, but if you feel uncomfortable doing that, you may call us "Dr. Cohen" and "Mr. Dillmann."

I offer online psychotherapy and counseling (I use those terms interchangeably) to adults in Ithaca, Tompkins County, and throughout New York State who are navigating a wide range of emotional, relational, and life challenges. I work with both individuals and couples, and I'm passionate about helping people heal, grow, and build more fulfilling lives.

We know how important it is to have a therapist who understands and affirms your identity and lived experience, and with whom you can finally exhale and show up fully as yourself. That's why we've created a truly inclusive, trauma-aware practice powered by intersectional feminism, anti-racism and anti-colonialism, and LGBTQ+ liberation.

Throughout this website, you’ll find extensive information about my services. We hope to destigmatize and demystify the therapy process through openness and transparency. We encourage you to explore these pages and see if our practice feels like the right fit for your needs.

Seeking help is one of the most courageous steps you can take for yourself, and we are deeply honored that you are considering working with us.

My Services

Adult Individual Therapy

I’ve provided therapy to adults all the way from 18 to mid-80s and every age in between. I strive to help each and every client improve the quality of their lives. My goal is to help improve your quality of life through therapy that empowers you to:

ü Increase your resilience in the face of stress in your work, home, community, or activism.

ü Develop practical skills and solutions to overcome anxiety and depression, heal from trauma, solve conflicts smoothly, improve your relationships, and navigate life’s challenges with confidence.

ü Gain greater clarity about who you are and how you want to live your life, including support in coming out as trans, queer, or another stigmatized identity.

ü Navigate different layers of oppression and/or privilege that you experience in our world.

Couples & Relationship Therapy

I help couples and partners improve communication and problem-solving skills, understand relationship patterns, and increase empathy and emotional engagement towards one another, which, in turn, improves the sense of connection between partners. I do relationship counseling with couples of all sexual orientations and gender identities. I also have experience with clients who practice polyamory and ethical non-monogamy (although it is not my primary area of expertise), and I approach these topics from a sex-positive perspective. In addition to working with marital or otherwise committed partners, I can also work with people in other relationships (e.g., parent and adult child, siblings, or close friends).

Why Choose Dr. Cohen?

Whether this is your first time to seek psychotherapy, you’ve been frustrated with previous therapy that didn’t meet your needs for understanding and acceptance, or you’re hoping to find another therapist you click with after you lost your previous therapist to death, retirement, or relocation—it can be difficult to find a therapist who’s the right fit for you. I’m honored that you’re considering me to be part of your journey. Here’s some of what makes me distinctive:

Strong social justice orientation	Social justice lies at the heart of who I am and the work that I do. I take seriously the impact of systemic oppression on mental health. Individuals cannot simply “self-care” their way out of structural problems. For this reason, I strongly believe that therapy must be attuned to the societal factors that impact clients’ lives, including sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and other forms of prejudice and discrimination. At the same time, I help clients find strategies (which may include activism) to manage and alleviate the emotional stress caused by social injustice in their everyday lives. Thus, my therapeutic approach is rooted in anti-oppressive, culturally-responsive, and feminist frameworks that honor your full, intersectional identity.
LGBTQIA+ affirming	I enjoy working with LGBTQIA+ clients from a wide range of identities, experiences, and backgrounds and I offer an affirming, identity-safe space. I particularly enjoy empowering trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming clients to develop greater self-understanding and self-acceptance; come out to themselves and others as they transition into their most authentic selves; and journey through any gender-affirming medical interventions they choose or not. I’ve also worked with family members to help them process their own emotions, and provide them with support and education to move beyond acceptance to celebration of their queer or genderqueer loved one.
Grounded in evidence-based therapy, but tailored to fit each client	How I think about and practice therapy is mainly cognitive-behavioral, which research has shown to be effective for a wide variety of psychological problems. However, I don’t follow CBT like a cookbook, but rather I draw also from a variety of other approaches, tailoring my work to fit you as an individual. Some of the other approaches I use are nonviolent communication (NVC); motivational interviewing (MI); feminist therapy; anti-oppressive, culturally-responsive, and decolonized frameworks; and the Gottman Method for couples/relationship therapy. LEARN MORE
Expertise plus warmth and approachability	I’m a licensed psychologist in the State of New York with a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology. I have extensive training in cognitive-behavioral therapy, nonviolent communication, the Gottman method of couples therapy, motivational interviewing, and Cognitive Processing Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). But at the same time, I’m down-to-earth, informal, warm, empathic, and a skilled listener. I’m very knowledgeable about a variety of issues that can make life horribly painful, and I’m a caring teacher of how people can reshape their lives in order to be able to take joy in being alive again.
Excellent listening skills combined with active involvement	Skilled listening isn’t passive and it isn’t quiet. Instead, skilled listening is active listening. As a skilled active listener, I ask gentle questions to draw you out and request clarification, I dig beneath your words for clues about what feelings and needs you may not have expressed, I say back to you in my own words the main gist of what I think you were trying to say, and I ask you whether I’ve understood you fully. Once you feel fully understood and ready to learn, I actively offer suggestions and opinions, and teach you techniques to feel better and get more actively involved in your life.
Skills to guide you through symptom alleviation, personal growth, or both	Most clients come to me when they’re suffering greatly from painful symptoms such as feeling depressed or anxious, and through therapy with me, they can get symptom alleviation. Some clients without severe symptoms, though, come to me for personal growth work such as gaining clarity about priorities, setting meaningful goals, navigating career transitions and professional challenges—thereby creating positive mental health and more fulfillment in life. I recognize that symptom cessation isn’t enough for health/wellness/wholeness; we need also thriving, growth, and joy. Our focus can be on either symptom alleviation or personal growth, and we can move from one to the other depending on your preference and needs.

How can I get the most out of therapy?

Decide on specific goals for therapy. If your goals are vague or undefined, our work is likely to wander around and you’re likely to be frustrated with lack of progress. I’ll ask you what you want to get out of counseling early on. If you aren’t sure, I can help you clarify and specify your goals. Specific goals give us a direction for our work together and can help us monitor your progress.

Focus on process goals. Once you’ve clarified the outcome you want to achieve, then it’s most helpful to focus on actions you can take, and things you can learn, toward your desired results. It may seem counterintuitive, but focusing on the results you want distracts from you doing what you need to do in order to get the job done. Focusing on the process – what you can do that’s within your control, that’s most likely to be successful – leads to the best progress. I can also help you clarify process goals. As an example, if the result you want is to be free of depression, a process goal could be to become aware of your thoughts that contribute to depressed mood, and learn how to develop and practice more balanced thoughts that make you feel better.

Be open to trying new ideas and skills. Whatever has produced your distress has probably been going on for a long time, and led you to develop habits of mind and behavior that aren’t working well enough for you now. It’s likely that many of your habits arose out of your creative attempts to cope with adverse life events when you were a child or younger adult, and they worked well for you at the time. It’s useful to look at how such habits may no longer be working for you, and focus on changing them. If you want a new outcome, you’re more likely to achieve it if you change your actions instead of repeating habits that aren’t working for you.

Recognize that therapy is ultimately a learning process. Most of us went to schools that taught things like reading, math, history, sports, art, and science, but unfortunately few of us went to schools that taught us how to tolerate distress, recognize and regulate our emotions, and get along well with others. Instead, we were often punished if we didn’t already magically know how to do these things. I think it’s tragic that these psychological skills aren’t routinely taught in schools. Therapy is an opportunity to learn these skills in adulthood.

Focus on what you can do rather than on what others can do to address your issues. Even if another person(s) is contributing to your problems, we can’t make them change. You’re more likely to make progress by focusing on what you can do (a process goal) rather than what someone else “should” do (a desired outcome). The most effective strategy for relieving your distress will likely be focusing on how you can respond differently to that person. You may be pleasantly surprised to find that changing your own behavior toward that person often yields the bonus positive effect of the other person reducing their bothersome behavior, and that changing your attitude toward the person and/or their behavior yields the effect of you feeling less bothered.

In our sessions, focus more on action and problem-solving than on venting and ruminating. Although it can feel good in the moment to express your negative feelings to a supportive listener, repeatedly expressing the same negative feelings without working on addressing the underlying concerns is likely to make you feel – over the long term – worse rather than better. Spending a smaller amount of our session time venting, and a larger amount of the time engaging in the kind of talk that’s focused on collaboratively problem solving with me, learning skills, and planning actions to take will increase your forward progress in therapy.

Be ready to do some work between sessions. Our sessions are only 45 minutes, generally once a week – that’s not much time in the context of your whole week and your whole life. So, you’re likely to make the best progress if you become actively involved in therapeutic work in between sessions. I’ll work with you to make sure that the kind and amount of “homework” I ask you to do is helpful and doable for you.

Have realistic and positive expectations for counseling. It’s realistic for you to expect that by working with me to learn and apply skills, you’ll likely see progress early on. That will probably motivate you to continue learning and practicing, and thus you’ll see substantial progress over time. In contrast, you’re likely to be disappointed if you come in with the unrealistic expectation that I will “cure” you simply with conversation and/or some grand insight without you having to do work in sessions and between sessions. (Although insight can be a helpful step toward making positive changes, insight alone is not enough to “cure” clients of their problems. Unfortunately, inaccurate popular cultural portrayals of therapy promote this unrealistic perspective.) You’re also likely to be disappointed if you come in with the pessimistic view that no progress is possible because you’ve supposedly tried every approach and “none of them work” – this negative expectation will dampen your motivation to participate actively, and thus you’re likely to make little progress.

Be patient with yourself and realize that progress does not occur in a “straight line.” Like any learning process, your overall upward improvement line will probably be jagged rather than straight. Don’t expect yourself to perfectly remember any new perspective or employ any new skill you’ve learned. Instead, take the big-picture view. Recognize that anyone trying to make positive changes in their life will probably have some bad days or struggle in particularly stressful situations, and that a temporary bad stretch does not put you “back at square one.” Then, let me help you remember the significant progress you’ve made and re-focus on what you need to do to get back on track. Having a perfectionistic view of progress makes it very difficult to stay motivated to address your issues.

Ask questions and give me feedback. I strive to be transparent about the therapy process, and to encourage you to take manageable steps outside your comfort zone. I’ve gotten feedback from many clients that I mainly achieve this balance. Nonetheless, I’m a fallible human, so there may be times that I say or do something that results in you feeling confused, hurt, or offended. Research has shown that the strength of the therapeutic relationship between the client and the counselor is one of the strongest predictors of success in therapy; therefore, I welcome your questions and feedback.

Give me feedback to help me keep our therapeutic relationship on track. Research has shown that the strength of the therapeutic relationship between the client and the counselor is one of the strongest predictors of success in therapy. I strive to give you acceptance, warmth, and accurate empathy, with the right balance of support and challenge, and thus to encourage you to take manageable steps outside your comfort zone.

Many clients have given me positive feedback that I’ve done those things well – but I’m a fallible human, so there have occasionally been times that I’ve said or done something that rubs a client the wrong way. When you notice feelings such as confusion or hurt from something I suggest or do, I welcome your questions or feedback and I’ll readily admit my fallibility and apologize. I can understand that you might be hesitant to give me negative feedback for fear that it would destroy our therapy relationship, especially if you had early experiences of being criticized or punished for confronting a caregiver or authority figure and concluded that it just isn’t safe to challenge anyone. I’d like to encourage you to give me feedback anyway; I hope my response demonstrates that therapy is a safe place to test that assumption and for you to learn that judicious confrontation can in fact strengthen and deepen relationships.

Make use of people in your support network. You’re more likely to make progress by involving supportive others in your counseling than trying to “go it alone.” Although it is still possible to make excellent progress in addressing your issues by yourself, it can be much easier when you have support from someone(s) else. It can be helpful to seek support and assistance from a close friend, family member, or relationship partner; to “bounce” ideas off them; to role play situations related to your issues; or even for them to attend sessions with you. You can also increase the likelihood of staying on track in pursuit of your goals by announcing your goals to someone you trust and inviting them to hold you accountable (with the caveat that the person doesn’t badger or guilt-trip you).

Updated Website Coming Soon!

Welcome to Our Affirming, Inclusive Practice.

My Services

Why Choose Dr. Cohen?

How can I get the most out of therapy?