Written by Maria Boncyk, LCSW | Reviewed July 2026
This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional mental health advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis, please contact the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988.
Maria Boncyk, LCSW provides fully virtual individual therapy for relationship difficulties and breakups to clients across New York and Massachusetts. She helps teens and adults understand recurring relationship patterns, navigate conflict and trust issues, and recover from painful endings. A free 25-minute consultation starts the process.
When Relationships Bring Out a Version of You That You Do Not Recognize
Whether you have years of relationship experience or are newly navigating dating, you may run into patterns, dynamics, or situations that trigger reactions that do not feel like the you that you recognize. Maybe you become anxious and clingy the moment someone pulls away, checking your phone compulsively and hating yourself for it. Maybe you go cold and distant exactly when a partner gets close, sabotaging something good without understanding why. Maybe every relationship follows the same arc, intense beginning, growing resentment, explosive arguments, painful ending, and you are starting to suspect the common denominator. Breakups bring their own particular disorientation. Losing a relationship can unravel your routines, your social world, and your sense of identity all at once, and the grief is real even when the relationship needed to end, even when you were the one who ended it. Trust struggles, jealousy that embarrasses you, difficulty being alone, fear of commitment, all of these are more common than the polished surfaces of other people’s relationships suggest, and all of them make sense once their origins come into view.
How Individual Therapy Changes Your Relationships
This is individual therapy focused on your relational life, and whether to approach a relationship concern through individual or couples therapy is situation-dependent, something Maria will discuss honestly in your consultation, and meaningful progress happens either way. Her approach draws on relational and attachment-based work because relationship patterns are rarely random. The ways you learned to bond, protect yourself, and handle conflict were shaped in your earliest relationships, and they replay in adult partnerships with remarkable consistency until they are seen and worked through. In sessions, we examine what actually happens in your relationships, the triggers, the escalations, the retreats, and trace those dynamics to their origins. Psychodynamic exploration surfaces the expectations and fears you carry into intimacy, often without knowing it. Where relationship pain connects to older wounds, betrayals, abandonments, or a childhood where closeness was unsafe, EMDR therapy can reprocess those experiences so they stop steering your present. The therapy relationship itself offers something rare: a place to practice honesty, disagreement, and repair with another person in real time.
Ready to Take the First Step?
Relationship & Breakup Therapy sessions are held virtually, so you can meet with Maria from anywhere in New York or Massachusetts. Request a free 25-minute consultation to see if it feels like the right fit, with no commitment required.
What to Expect From the Work
Therapy begins with a free 25-minute consultation, then weekly 50-minute virtual sessions from anywhere in New York or Massachusetts. If you are arriving mid-crisis, in the acute pain of a breakup or a relationship rupture, early sessions provide stabilization and a place to think clearly amid the emotional flood. From there, the work deepens into pattern recognition and change. Clients working through a breakup often find the acute grief softens over the first couple of months while the more valuable work, understanding what the relationship revealed about their patterns, continues beyond it. Clients addressing recurring dynamics should expect several months of work, because rewiring how you attach is deeper than adjusting communication techniques. Maria is warm, open, and direct throughout. She will help you clarify the patterns that are not serving you, without shame or judgment, and she will tell you the truth about what she observes, which is precisely what makes this work effective.
Who This Is Right For
This therapy fits teens and adults who keep encountering the same painful dynamics across different relationships, who are struggling inside a current partnership, or who are working through a breakup, separation, or divorce that has hit harder than expected. It is a strong fit for people whose relationship difficulties tangle with people pleasing, anxiety, or earlier family wounds, because those threads are addressed together rather than in isolation. It is individual therapy, so if you and a partner want to work jointly on the relationship with both people in the room, couples therapy with a couples specialist is the better vehicle, and working individually with Maria alongside or instead of couples work is a choice you can make with her guidance. Struggling in relationships is one of the most human reasons to seek therapy, and it does not require a rock-bottom moment to justify. If your relational life keeps hurting in familiar ways, that pattern is information, and it is workable.
Relationship Therapy That Fits Your Life in New York and Massachusetts
Dating and relationships today carry their own intensity, endless options that somehow make commitment harder, social circles that overlap with exes, careers that compete with intimacy for your remaining energy. Clients across New York and Massachusetts, from big cities to smaller towns, bring the same core patterns in different packaging. Virtual sessions Monday through Thursday, 9 AM to 7 PM Eastern, make consistent weekly work sustainable. Maria is an out-of-network (OON) provider who confirms coverage details with each client first, provides monthly invoices for out-of-network reimbursement, and offers a free 25-minute consultation so you can gauge the fit before committing to anything.
Common Questions, Answered Directly
Why do I keep dating the same kind of person?
Because attraction is patterned. We are drawn to what feels familiar, and familiar was defined by our earliest relationships, including their painful parts. Repeating the pattern is often an unconscious attempt to finally get a different ending. Therapy makes the pattern visible, which is the first step to actually choosing differently.
Should I do individual therapy or couples therapy for relationship problems?
It depends on the situation, and a consultation can clarify it quickly. If both partners want to work on the relationship together, couples therapy fits. If your side of the pattern follows you across relationships, or you want a private space to think clearly about a partnership, individual therapy is often the more powerful lever.
How long does it take to get over a breakup?
There is no standard timeline, and anyone who gives you one is guessing. Acute grief typically softens over weeks to months, but a breakup that destabilizes your identity or reopens older wounds deserves real attention. Therapy speeds nothing artificially; it makes the grief coherent and turns the ending into usable self-knowledge.