Sydney Smith LCSW

Sydney is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW) who works with adults facing life transitions, personal challenges, and questions around identity, values, and meaning. She earned her Master of Social Work from the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College and holds a Bachelor of Arts and Science from McGill University. Sydney brings a breadth of clinical experience working with children, adolescents, adults, and families across diverse educational and therapeutic settings. She currently practices as a social worker in the psychiatric emergency department at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, where she cares for individuals during moments of acute distress. In her private therapy practice, Sydney enjoys working with individuals who are grappling with difficult questions, navigating inflection points or periods of heightened stress, and seeking a deeper understanding of themselves. She supports clients in examining unhelpful patterns of thought, belief, and behavior, and in developing more adaptive and compassionate ways of engaging with themselves and others. Her therapeutic approach is relational, collaborative, and strengths-based. Sydney's practice is inspired by the oyster: a quiet, resilient organism that creates a protected space in which something meaningful can form. Like an oyster, therapy offers steady boundaries where difficult experiences can be held and explored with curiosity and care, without pressure to resolve them too quickly. A pearl forms as irritation inside the oyster is slowly, gently tended to over time, which mirrors the therapeutic process in which painful experiences are approached with patience and compassion. The pearl’s iridescence reflects how growth unfolds differently for each person. Therapy is not about becoming someone else, but about creating the conditions in which insight, meaning, and change can develop naturally, from the inside out.