Rui Lin, CAT-LP, ATR-P
She / They
Tier II Therapist
Life is not always going the way we planned. When things drift away from what we expected, it is natural to feel lost, unsettled, or unsure of how to move forward. You might remember this feeling from childhood. A sudden storm cancels a long-anticipated trip to the sea. An afternoon once filled with excitement stretches into disappointment. In moments like these, we learn how to wait, how to comfort the disappointed child within us, and how to sit with things turning out differently than we hoped.
There are also seasons in life when carrying things alone becomes too heavy, and we need someone to walk alongside us. Finding the right therapist is not easy. It takes time, emotional energy, and financial commitment to step into therapy, and that decision deserves care. If you are reading this now, I want to acknowledge that you are standing at the beginning of an exploration, making a meaningful choice for yourself. Therapy can be challenging, yes, but it can also become one of the safest, lightest moments in your week. It is a long-term practice of vulnerability.
As Brené Brown writes, “Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage.” Here, you are allowed to cry without apologizing. You are welcome to move at your own pace. Together, we work toward expressing yourself with more clarity, confidence, and self-trust. It is a long-term practice of vulnerability. I offer therapy in English, Mandarin Chinese, and Fuzhou dialect. 한국어 상담도 가능합니다.
Therapy is a courageous practice of vulnerability, where you are seen, supported, and allowed to move at your own pace toward clarity, confidence, and self-trust.
My Story
I am an Asian, queer, trilingual art therapist and a neurodivergent, first-generation immigrant.
My path into this work began in South Korea through museum-based workshops supporting autistic children. That experience profoundly shifted my career direction. After living in South Korea for eight years, I moved to New York and started from the ground up. I completed my master’s training in art therapy at the School of Visual Arts and worked across clinical and community settings, supporting individuals navigating trauma, addiction, and major life transitions. My experience spans trauma-focused programs, outpatient recovery settings (including OASAS-regulated services), schools, domestic violence service agencies, and community organizations, working with people from childhood through older adulthood.
I believe that psychological experience is always shaped by life stage, social context, and the systems people move within. I also write mental health columns focused on public education in neuroscience and art therapy, and facilitate workshops aimed at creating affirming, culturally responsive spaces for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities.
I later moved to South Korea, where I completed my undergraduate degree in photography and graduated as valedictorian from one of the country’s leading art schools. After graduation, I worked in the studio of a highly accomplished contemporary artist, and later at a top-tier gallery in Korea, where I was fortunate to receive a work visa and build a promising professional path.
Therapeutic Approaches
Personalized Coping Toolkit
Reconnecting With Yourself: Your Own Transitional Objects
There is no single strategy that works for all. Together, we develop a personalized coping toolkit that grows out of your real-life challenges. This work may support experiences such as sleep difficulties, disrupted eating patterns, sudden anxiety or panic, racing thoughts, irritability, low motivation, or withdrawal from others. The tools we develop are practical, embodied, and adaptable.
Your toolkit may include body-based regulation practices to calm the nervous system, emotional awareness and expression exercises to better understand what you are feeling, and urge management strategies to help you navigate impulses or triggers. We may also create a transitional object during our sessions, such as a wearable bracelet or meaningful handmade item, that you can carry with you as a grounding resource. These tools are meant to be accessible, flexible, and supportive both inside and outside of therapy.
Art as Therapy, Therapy as Art
Internal Family Systems (IFS), Therapeutic Presence, and Relational Work
From a neurobiological perspective, regulation and healing occur through right-brain-to-right-brain communication, the nonverbal ways we sense safety and connection with another person. Long before words, the nervous system responds to tone of voice, rhythm, facial expression, and timing, and through attunement the body begins to register safety. Because of this, I place great value on how we are together in therapy, paying close attention to pacing, presence, and emotional resonance (as it is my responsibility to ensure you feel safe and comfortable). For people with relational or developmental trauma, this kind of consistent and responsive connection can offer a new experience of closeness without the need for self-protection or performing to be understood.
Art-making supports this work through the body. Simple actions such as shaping clay, slowing down a movement, or staying with texture and pressure help the nervous system stay engaged and grounded. My work is strongly influenced by Internal Family Systems (IFS). By integrating IFS with art therapy, creative processes become a way for parts to be expressed and seen. There is no right outcome to reach, only space to notice, explore, and stay with what emerges.
Brainspotting
“Where you look affects how you feel”
Brainspotting is a neuroscience-informed therapeutic approach derived from EMDR(Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing), developed by David Grand. I often describe it as a form of internal editing. Some experiences have already been “cut, arranged, and exported” into our life story, while others remain unedited, stored as raw footage in the nervous system. These unprocessed experiences may show up as sudden anxiety, physical tension, recurring dreams, or a sense of being flooded or stuck.
If I invite you to recall what you had for dinner yesterday, you may notice your eyes naturally move to different spots in the space around you as your brain searches for that memory. Brainspotting works with these natural gaze positions, called brainspots, which exist in your visual field outside the body. These spots are connected to deeper, subcortical areas of the brain where unprocessed experiences are held, including stress and survival responses such as fight, flight, or freeze. Brainspotting is used with a wide range of concerns, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, addiction, dissociation, chronic pain, and performance work with athletes.
Specialties
Addiction & Compulsive Behavior
“I know it’s hurting me, but I still can’t stop doing it.”
Whether involving shopping, gambling, gaming, emotional eating, sexual, or substance dependencies, the core issue is seldom the lack of willpower. Rather, it is frequently linked to coping mechanisms formed by the nervous system through prolonged repetition, relief-seeking, or avoidance. These patterns often take root amidst chronic stress, emotional overload, relational trauma, or unprocessed traumatic experiences. In therapy, we will explore together how these behaviours interact across emotional, relational, and physical dimensions, creating safer avenues for self-regulation, autonomous choice, and self-trust.
Early Developmental & Intergenerational Trauma
“It feels inherited, even if I can’t name it.”
Some emotional patterns do not begin in conscious memory. They may be rooted in early developmental or preverbal experiences, intrauterine experience, birth-related stress, or generational and cultural histories carried through family systems, migration, and collective trauma. In this work, we gently explore these layers through somatic awareness, relational attunement, and brain-based processing, focusing on how nervous system imprints and inherited patterns shape present-day attachment, regulation, and identity. We attend to what emerges in the body and in relationship, supporting integration, grounding, and a deeper sense of wholeness.
Dream Work & Inner Imagery
“My dreams feel meaningful, but I don’t know how to interpret them.”
Dreams contain lived experiences that are difficult to articulate or remain unnoticed when one is awake. Inspired by Gestalt therapy, I view dreams as a lived experiential space. Through dialogue with imagery, role-play, and creative expression, dreams can become a gateway to the inner world, helping one reconnect with their repressed self and unresolved emotional processes (unfinished business). This process supports emotional integration, increased self-awareness, and the restoration of internal coherence.
Head Trauma, Memory Loss & Integration Work
“I remember before… and then it’s just blank.”
For clients experiencing memory gaps following a head injury, accident, medical event, substance-related blackout, extreme stress, or other periods of lost or fragmented recall, I may use a double pointer Brainspotting approach. This method identifies two visual focus points, one connected to what is accessible before the memory gap and another connected to what is accessible after, while we track body-based activation and interoceptive cues. The goal is not to force memory retrieval, but to support nervous system processing, integration, and stabilization around what feels overwhelming, disconnected, or incomplete.
LGBTQIA+ Identity & Sex Positive Affirming Therapy
“I can finally face myself with honesty, but forming relationships feels harder than ever.”
Embracing your sexual or gender identity can bring clarity and relief, yet it may also surface vulnerability, especially in dating and intimate relationships. Experiences of internalized shame, cultural or familial expectations, societal scrutiny, or past relational wounds can shape how you show up in connection. In my practice, I offer an affirming, sex-positive, and nonjudgmental space where LGBTQIA+ identities and diverse relationship structures. Together, we explore how identity, culture, and attachment history intersect, supporting you in building relationships rooted in authenticity, safety, and choice as you move through life transitions.
Personal Growth, Burnout & Meaning
“I survived another day, but I feel exhausted.”
Burnout is not a personal failure. It is often a sign of living in survival mode for too long. Many reach a point where the coping mechanisms that used to sustain them no longer suffice. Let’s slow things down and reconnect with your inner experience. We will focus on reconnecting with your inner awareness, establishing boundaries, reigniting creativity, and exploring what truly matters to you. This will help you cultivate a sustainable, holistic, and self-directed way of life that you no longer pursue for mere efficiency or external validation.
Relational & Attachment Trauma
“I always end up giving too much or leave before others get too close.”
Relational trauma often develops through prolonged emotional inconsistency, unstable bonds, or conditional attachment rather than a single event. In adulthood, it may appear as people-pleasing, emotional withdrawal, fear of conflict, difficulty trusting, excessive independence, or losing oneself in relationships. In fast-paced dating cultures like New York, these patterns can also show up as dating fatigue, repeated “situationships,” ghosting dynamics, or anxiety around commitment and vulnerability. In therapy, these patterns are understood not as personal flaws but as adaptive strategies shaped by early attachment experiences. Through a consistent and emotionally attuned therapeutic relationship, you can begin to develop a more secure, reciprocal way of relating.
Credentials
-
License: New York State ｜ Creative Arts Therapist Limited Permit (CAT-LP) #P141086 Provisional Registered Art Therapist (ATR-P), Art Therapy Credentials Board (ATCB)
-
Supervisor: YuehChun Chao (Avery), LCAT #002513
-
Degree: School of Visual Arts, New York, USA | Master of Professional Studies (MPS) in Art Therapy
-
Degree:Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea | Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Photography & Minor in Psychology
-
Advanced training: Brainspotting Phase 1
-
Advanced training: Brainspotting Phase 2
-
Advanced training: Brainspotting Phase 5
-
Advanced training: Treating Complex Trauma with Internal Family Systems
More About Me
Here are 3 quick Q&As about me, designed to help answer common questions and give you a sense of who I am and what working together might look like. You are always welcome to reach out :)
Q1: Who are you outside the therapy room?
A1: I enjoy life and always stay curious about everything. I love crocheting and handcrafting, including jewelry, bags, and pieces I design and style myself. Photography is a big part of how I perceive the world. I also enjoy taking care of plants, reading, watching movies, and checking out art shows. The best thing about New York City is that there are always new art shows and cultural events happening all the time.
Q2: Do you also experience stress or low moods?
A2: Yes, of course. I am also human, after all! In addition to regular clinical supervision, I also have my own therapist to support me in this workfield. I would also take care of myself by doing Pilates, and the most important thing is to get plenty of rest! I also have two adorable puppies - a Pomeranian boy, Paopao, and a Bichon girl, Nuonuo. Having them by my side and witnessing their growth makes me happy every single day.
Q3: Is there anything else you would like to share with us?
A3: I used to work in galleries and artist studios in the contemporary art world in South Korea before eventually choosing a different professional path. Changing careers and moving across countries meant rebuilding from the ground up. It was not easy. But those transitions taught me that starting over is not the same as starting from nothing. Every step carries forward. The years I spent in art continue to inform how I see, listen, and hold space today. If I could share one thing, it would be this: trust your capacity to begin again.