Over 30 years of clinical experience, focused on anxiety and the treatments that reliably change it.
Nicole: your full license credential needs to appear directly after your name here and in this page’s title, e.g. “Nicole Sylvia, LICSW” or “Nicole Sylvia, LMHC”. Google applies stricter quality standards to health content, and a visible credential is one of the signals it looks for.
I am a psychotherapist in private practice, licensed in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, working with adults and particularly with women who are living with anxiety.
Over more than 30 years of clinical work I have sat with people through a very wide range of life challenges. What I have consistently found is that anxiety is rarely the whole story, and that people improve fastest when the treatment is specific, structured, and built around what is actually keeping the problem in place.
My clinical training included the Dual Diagnosis Program at Massachusetts General Hospital’s Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, where I worked with clients whose presentations rarely fit a single category. That experience shaped how I practise: I look at the whole picture before deciding where treatment should start.
This section should carry your degrees, the institutions you trained at, the year you were licensed, your license numbers for MA and RI, and any post-graduate CBT or anxiety-specific training. Specific, verifiable detail here is one of the strongest trust signals a therapy website can carry, and it is also what people search for when someone refers them to you by name.
My practice is built around anxiety and anxiety-related disorders:
Anxiety frequently arrives attached to something else: family conflict, fertility treatment, grief, career pressure, health worries, or a relationship that is not working. Those contexts are part of the work, not a distraction from it.
My primary approach is cognitive behavioral therapy, because it has the strongest evidence base for anxiety and because it gives people something they can use after treatment ends. Where another method serves the client better, I use it.
My goal within the very first session is for you to leave feeling better and more optimistic about what is to come. I am direct about what I think is happening and what I think will help. I would rather tell you early that this practice is not the right fit than have you spend months finding that out.
Sessions are held in person at the Newton, MA office or online throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. This is a private-pay practice; fees and the out-of-network reimbursement process are published on the fees page.
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