Meet our team
Owner/Founder
Carly Sundel, LCSW
You deserve support that meets you with compassion, clarity, and respect for your lived experience. Therapy offers a space where you can navigate life’s complexities with greater resilience—whether you’re facing relationship challenges, anxiety, depression, trauma, stress, women’s issues, or major life transitions across adolescence or adulthood.
Your strengths are central to the work. You’re supported in developing greater self-awareness and presence, while learning practical, sustainable tools to help you manage challenges and feel more grounded in daily life. A holistic approach is used to support your emotional and overall well-being, allowing you to explore your inner experiences in a safe, nurturing environment.
If you’re a clinician seeking supervision or consultation, you’ll receive thoughtful, supportive guidance rooted in evidence-based therapy models and group private practice experience. Whether you’re working toward supervision hours or looking for case consultation, you’ll be supported in strengthening your skills, confidence, and clinical growth.
Above all, you’re offered a space where you can feel seen, heard, and valued. You don’t have to navigate this journey alone—support is here as you move toward greater balance, healing, and fulfillment.
Zuleyka Shaw, LMFTA
You’ll work with a warm, collaborative therapist who supports you—individually or as a couple—as you navigate life transitions, relationship challenges, recovery from substance use, and strengthening executive functioning skills. Therapy is tailored to meet you where you are, honoring both your current struggles and your capacity for growth.
Your care integrates narrative and solution-focused approaches with trauma-informed therapy, helping you uncover your strengths, shift unhelpful patterns, and rewrite stories that may no longer serve you. Together, you’ll focus on creating meaningful, sustainable change while building practical skills that support emotional regulation, clarity, and follow-through in everyday life.
Sessions offer a balance of compassion and direction. You’ll find space to feel seen and understood, while also gaining concrete tools to improve communication, strengthen relationships, and move toward goals that matter to you. Therapy invites reflection on what feels most important, helping you align your choices with your values and long-term vision.
You’re welcomed into a down-to-earth, supportive environment where growth feels possible and manageable. The goal is not perfection, but progress—supporting you in building a life and relationships that feel more grounded, connected, and fulfilling.
Insurance accepted: Anthem, Husky/Medicaid, Cigna, and Aetna.
Emmanuella Olatinwo, LMSW
When you’re navigating life’s challenges, you deserve support that truly sees you. With over 18 years of experience, you’ll work with a Licensed Master Social Worker who has supported children, adolescents, adults, and families across Connecticut—including within complex systems such as the prison diversion program.
You’ll benefit from a strength-based approach that focuses on your abilities, resilience, and potential rather than deficits. Whether you’re a child, teen, parent, or adult, therapy is centered on helping you clarify goals, build skills, and move toward meaningful change.
You can receive specialized support for trauma, anxiety, depression, ADHD, mood disorders, self-esteem, relationship challenges, work-related stress, and major life transitions. Evidence-based approaches, including Trauma-Focused CBT and CBT, are used to help you feel more regulated, empowered, and confident in daily life.
If you’re a parent, you’ll gain tools and resources to strengthen your relationship with your child and support healthier family dynamics. Children and teens are supported in finding effective ways to communicate their needs, emotions, and challenges, fostering understanding and connection within the family.
Therapy focuses on the whole person—how emotional challenges impact your mind and body, not just the presenting problem. Together, you’ll work to deepen awareness, identify what may be holding you back, and create a path toward greater peace, balance, and fulfillment.
Healing often begins with reaching out. You don’t have to navigate life’s stressors alone—you’ll be supported, guided, and empowered every step of the way.
Insurance accepted: Anthem, Cigna, Aetna, and Husky/Medicaid.
Patrick Ciardullo, LPCA
As both a therapist and a first responder, Patrick knows what it means to sit beside people in life’s most intense moments whether during a crisis or within the quieter, deeply personal battles they carry inside. His work on the front lines, along with navigating his own life challenges, has deepened his empathy and strengthened his understanding of how vulnerable it can feel to face experiences that are triggering or overwhelming. He holds great respect for the courage it takes to show up, speak honestly, and begin the process of healing.
Patrick values authenticity above all else. He offers a steady, grounded space where clients can gently explore traumatic experiences, intrusive thoughts, painful memories, and emotions shaped by shame, guilt, or fear. He meets the hard moments with calm presence and compassion without judgment, without pressure, and without rushing what needs time. Patrick understands that strength does not mean going it alone, and that even the most resilient people deserve a safe place to heal.
His approach blends honesty with compassion, and pairs thoughtful insight with meaningful action. Patrick believes that when people feel safe enough to gently face what feels hard, real growth becomes possible. He sees each client as far more than a diagnosis or a set of struggles. Through a collaborative and supportive process, he helps individuals draw strength from their challenges, build resilience, and reconnect with the strengths they already carry in ways that feel authentic, empowering, and truly their own.
Patrick works with adults who are navigating anxiety, trauma, occupational stress, life transitions, or simply feeling stretched beyond their limits. He thoughtfully blends practical tools with meaningful emotional exploration, supporting clients as they move from merely getting through the day toward living with greater clarity, confidence, and connection to who they truly are.
His integrative approach is grounded in a deeply client-centered philosophy. Drawing from CBT, DBT, solution-focused strategies, strengths-based work, trauma-informed care, and psychoanalytic perspectives, he tailors therapy to each individual’s needs. Above all, his intention is to create a safe, steady, and judgment-free space where clients feel genuinely seen, understood, and supported and where they can begin to trust in their own resilience and capacity for growth.
If you're considering therapy, it's important to take the time to find a therapist who you feel comfortable with and who has experience working with the issues you want to address. Therapy is a collaborative process, and having a trusting relationship with your therapist is key to its success. I provide a free 15 minute consultation call to see if I could be a good fit for your needs.