Kristina Ward earned her MSW in Advanced Clinical Practice from Columbia University where she was one of 13 students invited to train intensively at the school’s Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Lab and at the Linehan Institute which certifies Comprehensive DBT therapists.
She works with families, couples, and individuals, supporting clients from diverse cultural, ethnic, and religious backgrounds and from within the LGBTQ+ community. Kristina works with clients experiencing such life transitions as divorce, family estrangement, career addiction, anxiety, depression, autism, ADHD, self-harm, suicidality, borderline personality disorder, and grief. Her work with relationship struggles is focused on high-conflict couples, discernment counseling, compassionate divorce, supervised visitation, and parent coordination, writing reports to family court and serving as a court witness as needed.
Kristina is committed to helping clients become more skillful in realizing their full potential and in claiming a vibrant life worth living. In addition to DBT, she is an experienced therapist in cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), internal family systems (IFS), trauma therapy, positive psychology, and Gottman Method.
Kristina studied philosophy and humanities at UCLA as an undergraduate, and is a member of the American Psychological Association (APA), the National Association of Divorce Professionals (NADP), Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC), and the Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies (ABCT). Kristina volunteers at the Crisis Text Line and at the National Suicide Hotline (988) where she has engaged with hundreds of teens in crisis, holding space with them as they recognize their own agency and the capacity to do hard things. For the past 15 years she has counseled adolescents, couples and families through the Relief Society, the nation’s oldest and largest women’s organization. Kristina lives with her teenage sons in Manhattan near her office at 353 Lexington Avenue.