Wellness from the Inside Out: A Conversation with Aliza Shapiro
Meet Aliza Shapiro, LCSW — licensed psychotherapist, founder of Therapy In The City, and one of the most grounded voices in modern mental health. With a multistate practice spanning NY, FL, and CA, Aliza supports adults, young adults, and adolescents navigating anxiety, depression, OCD, and life transitions — with an approach built on insight, skill-building, and changes that actually last.
Aliza holds a Master's from the Silberman School of Social Work with a concentration in neurobiology and the treatment of depression, advanced training in CBT, DBT, Emotionally Focused Therapy, and ERP, and studied Leadership and Management at Wharton. Her insights have been featured in Healthline, Glamour, VeryWellMind, and Popsugar, and she serves as a consultant and board member for Popsugar Wellness, Healthline, Miami Concierge Pediatrics, and Teen Health 101.
What sets her apart is how she bridges the clinical with the personal — weaving evidence-based models with spirituality, values alignment, and the broader architecture of a well-lived life. We sat down with Aliza to talk nervous system regulation, the mind-body connection, and what it actually means to feel well from the inside out.
Q: You built Therapy in the City from a deeply personal place — you were a sensitive, openhearted kid whose emotions felt bigger than you knew how to hold. How did that experience shape the kind of therapist and founder you became?
A: I feel truly lucky to say that what felt like my greatest vulnerability as a kid became one of my greatest strengths in my adult life. I was a super deeply feeling kid, and despite my parents best efforts to send me to therapy, I never found one who could actually reach me. Therapy felt stiff and awkward, and outside of those sessions, I didn't have the resources to understand myself either. So I just kept feeling everything, without ever quite learning what to do with it.
When I got to college and started taking psychology courses, it felt like someone finally handed me the instruction manual. I was learning about the power of the mind, attachment, the nervous system, relationships, and the ways our emotions can be processed to alter the lives we create. For the first time, I had language for things I had felt my entire life but never understood, and I knew almost immediately that this was the work I was meant to bring to the world.
I built my practice from that learning, and from the empathic, heart centered place I've always operated from. It’s been my dream to create a practice where the fit between client and clinician is treated as seriously as the efficacy of the clinical work itself, and that is exactly what we’ve been building. My goal, for every therapist at TITC and for myself, is to hold both: the warmth to make someone feel truly understood, and the skills to help them actually transform.
Q: A morning (or nightly) ritual you swear by?
A: Prayer, meditation, matcha
Q: DBT teaches emotion regulation as a skill, not a personality trait. For women who've spent years white-knuckling their way through stress — high-achieving, high-functioning, quietly depleted — what's the first real shift that changes everything?
A: The first real shift (and don’t shoot the messenger) is realizing that white-knuckling your way through life is not resilience. It's a strategy so many successful, high-achieving women learned young, either because it was modeled for them, or because somewhere along the way they were taught that pushing through was the price they had to pay to receive love and belonging.
When we've been operating from stress or a state of ‘proving’ our whole lives, we don't actually have the space to build emotional resilience – we're too busy surviving. But once we begin to learn it, at any age, in any season of life, it changes everything: how we work, how we love, how we rest, and how we succeed. Because it's entirely possible to be successful, reliable, and driven, while living a life that is full, spacious, and entirely your own, it's just that most of us never learned how.
Q: Current Favorite Book/Podcast/Playlist/App?
A: Current reads: The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer and Mind your body by Nicole Sachs!
Q: You use social media to destigmatize therapy for 370K followers. What's the conversation you keep having online that you wish the wellness world would finally take seriously?
A: I think one of the greatest divides between therapists and the wellness world at large is that healing, plain and simple, doesn’t always feel calm. We've been sold this idea that if you're doing the work right, you should start feeling more peaceful, more regulated, and more at ease, now. So if someone starts therapy (and begins to feel something they've been suppressing for years) and it feels harder instead of easier, they begin to panic. They assume it’s not working. Or worse, they assume they're broken.
Here's the part we need to put on a carousel: Real growth is often messy before it's peaceful. If you've spent your whole life avoiding a feeling, the first time you actually sit with it, it's going to hurt. That isn't a red flag. That's you finally emotionally processing the thing you've been running from in order to free it. If the wellness world made more room for that truth, and shared it as fervently as the polished after photo where everything looks glowy and resolved, there would be more room for deep growth. Healing isn't a straight line to calm. If you’re doing it right, it’s actually a straight line through discomfort to get you there.
Q: What's your favorite Juna product and how do you incorporate it into your everyday routine?
A: Chlorophyll drops in my water daily!
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