About Anna
I’m Anna Holtzman, LMHC, a psychotherapist based in New York.
I work primarily with thoughtful, capable women who carry a great deal internally, often while appearing composed and dependable on the outside. They may be the ones others rely on, at work, in relationships, in their families, or behind the scenes of everyone else’s wellbeing. They are often women who reflect deeply, care deeply, and want meaningful change, not quick fixes.
Many of the women I work with have spent years adapting to environments where responsibility, achievement, caregiving, or keeping things together became more familiar than rest, pleasure, or emotional honesty. Over time, they may begin to feel disconnected from themselves in ways that are difficult to explain, especially because their lives often look successful from the outside.
Before becoming a therapist, I spent many years working in publishing and television in high-pressure creative environments where I became deeply interested in the gap between how people appear externally and what they're carrying privately.
During that time, I also experienced years of debilitating migraine. Through discovering mind-body approaches, I was able to break the chronic cycle of migraine, fundamentally changing the way I understood the relationship between emotions, the nervous system, and physical health. That experience has deeply informed my clinical orientation and continues to shape the way I think about healing.
My clinical work integrates psychotherapy with advanced training in somatic and nervous-system-based approaches. I hold a Master's degree in Mental Health Counseling from NYU and a Bachelor's degree from Barnard College. I am also certified in Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) and have completed advanced training in Somatic Experiencing.
I don’t see therapy as a place where someone comes to be fixed or optimized. I see it as a space where people can begin hearing themselves more clearly again beneath the pressure of who they’ve learned they need to be.
Clients often describe me as steady, thoughtful, direct, and deeply attuned. I care a lot about creating a therapy space that feels emotionally honest, grounded, private, and free from performance.
If you’re interested in exploring whether this work feels like a fit, you’re welcome to reach out through the contact form.
Featured in...
Speaking with Her Wealth: Unscripted by Sorelle Wealth Partners, Anna explores a pattern she sees in many accomplished women: becoming highly skilled at reading other people while gradually losing trust in their own inner authority.
Women who appear confident, capable, and successful on the outside can still find themselves organizing their decisions around maintaining harmony, meeting expectations, or seeking reassurance from people they perceive as having greater authority.
Together, they explore how these patterns develop within families and relationships, why they often persist even in adulthood, and what begins to change when women learn to trust their own lived experience again—not instead of listening to others, but alongside it.
Speaking with Diana Oehrli on The Pressures of Privilege, Anna explores the emotional complexity that can accompany wealth and privilege—especially the pressure to minimize your own pain, adapt yourself to fit, or question whether your struggles are legitimate.
Their conversation looks at the subtle code-switching that can happen around wealth, the shame that can make people hide important parts of their lives even in therapy, and the lifelong tension between belonging and being fully yourself.
They also discuss Anna’s own experience with chronic migraine, “goodism,” and the practice of developing a more compassionate relationship with the parts of ourselves we’ve learned to judge or suppress.
Writing
Does My Suffering Count?
There's something I hear often in therapy:
"I feel like I shouldn't be complaining. I have so much to be grateful for."
When someone says this, I tend to be less interested in the problem they're describing than in the moment they interrupt themselves. Because what they're really revealing isn't a lack of gratitude. It's a learned belief that their emotions don't deserve space.
Healing begins not when we prove that our suffering counts, but when we stop requiring proof before meeting ourselves with compassion. Read more...
The Rooms We Leave Dark
Money is one of those subjects we’re told not to talk about, even though it shapes so much of how we live, relate, choose, and imagine our futures.
In this essay, I explore what can happen when shame causes women to look away from money—and how that avoidance can subtly interfere with our sense of agency, voice, and self-trust.
Drawing on my own experience with family wealth, I reflect on what changed when I finally began looking more directly at a part of my life I had kept at a distance for years. Read more...
Why Wealth and Success Sometimes Make It Harder for Women to Speak Up
We tend to think of money and success as pathways to freedom. But for many women, having more to protect can actually make it harder to risk disappointing people, challenging expectations, or rocking the boat.
Success and privilege can raise the stakes of people-pleasing, especially for women who’ve been conditioned to preserve harmony and prioritize others’ needs before their own.
Through stories from career, family wealth, and relationships, this piece looks at what it takes to turn external success into something that actually feels like freedom. Read more...
When Goodness Becomes the Price of Belonging
As a psychotherapist who works with women navigating complex family systems, I've found myself paying increasing attention to conversations in wealth advising spaces. Much of the discussion centers around questions of purpose, stewardship, responsibility, and philanthropy. These are important conversations.
But when I think about the type of client I tend to work with — women who think, feel, and care deeply, and who often put the needs of others before their own — I find myself wondering if there’s another conversation we need to be having first, before I support them in how they navigate wealth responsibly, contribute to the world, or build a sense of purpose.
Because something I've often seen in these women is that they've unconsciously come to believe that, due to their financial privilege, their worthiness must be earned rather than assumed. Read more...
For more writing, visit the archive here.