I’m Crystal Tholany, MD

I remember feeling like I had found my place when I started my psychiatry rotation in medical school almost twenty years ago. Getting to learn about people’s thoughts, feelings, and life stories came naturally to me. Connecting to people, learning about their inner experience, and trying to understand what made them the way they were moved me in a way that no other medical rotation had. This way of thinking felt natural because it was how I always thought, even stretching back to my earliest years. (I found journal entries dating back to age 7 in which I was mulling over why my mind worked the way it did.)

Even before I had discovered my love for psychiatry, I had accidentally begun learning therapeutic techniques. During a period of high stress in medical school, I chanced upon autogenic progressive muscle relaxation when searching for something to help me feel calmer. It became a daily practice. I was amazed by how effective it was for helping me with sleep and stress reduction. A deep dive into different mindfulness techniques followed on the heels of autogenics during the early part of my psychiatry residency. Again I was amazed by the impact.

During the second half of residency I loved outpatient therapy and eagerly signed up for every therapy elective I could take. This included group and family therapy, DBT, CBT, psychodynamic psychotherapy and transference focused psychotherapy. I was passionate about learning therapy and particularly about learning to understand what made people the way they were. I learned so much from having taken these electives. But my best training by far came from the experiential learning that came with starting my own therapy with a psychoanalyst. It was life changing.

After residency, during my addiction psychiatry fellowship, I began my training in psychoanalysis at what was then NYU Psychoanalytic and is now the Psychoanalytic Association of New York. My training and my own personal analysis have been and continue to be transformative and inspiring. Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically-informed psychodynamic psychotherapy are the mainstays of how I work.

However, during my training I continued to seek out other therapeutic modalities whenever I hit roadblocks. This was how I stumbled across Internal Family Systems Therapy which offered a model of the mind that is extremely relevant and useful. (Later in my training I learned other psychoanalytic models that seemed to incorporate IFS type concepts).

Currently my psychoanalytic style lines up most closely with post-Bionian Field Theory. However, I continue to draw from elements of everything I have learned before. People are dynamic and our minds shift from moment to moment. Having this wide range allows me to tailor my approach to fit these shifting needs at any given moment.