Dr. Sera Lavelle is the Founder of NY Health Hypnosis & Integrative Therapy, Soho Integrative EMDR, and the former Founder and CEO of Bea Better Eating. Trained as a Clinical Psychologist, she is known for her work at the intersection of psychology, technology and habit change, particularly where high-functioning individuals experience breakdowns in emotional regulation and self-trust. Her work focuses on translating deep psychological insight into practical, ethical, and sustainable change across both clinical and modern care settings.
Dr. Sera Lavelle serves as the guiding force behind NY Health Hypnosis & Integrative Therapy, stewarding its clinical vision and systems of care while no longer accepting new patients.
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Dr. Lavelle began building the foundation for NY Health Hypnosis & Integrative Therapy while completing her doctoral training in clinical psychology. During this period, she offered short-term, non-clinical hypnosis-based services focused on stress management, performance, and habit change—work that was carefully aligned with her scope of training at the time. This early phase allowed her to closely observe how unconscious patterns shape behavior, particularly among high-functioning professionals who appeared successful externally yet struggled privately with consistency, balance, and self-regulation.
Working closely with executives, entrepreneurs, and other high-achieving professionals, Dr. Lavelle became increasingly interested in where habits break down despite intelligence, motivation, and access to resources. She observed that many challenges were not driven by a lack of insight or discipline, but by chronic stress, perfectionism, identity pressure, and unconscious coping strategies. These observations became foundational to her clinical orientation and later informed the systems she would go on to build within her practices.
In 2015, following the completion of her advanced clinical training and licensure pathway, Dr. Lavelle formally expanded this early work into NY Health Hypnosis & Integrative Therapy, a fully clinical practice offering comprehensive psychological services. Under her leadership, the practice grew into an interdisciplinary team providing integrative, evidence-based care for emotional eating, eating disorders, anxiety, ADHD, infertility, and relationship challenges.
Dr. Lavelle no longer accepts new patients but remains actively involved as Founder—guiding the clinical vision, mentoring therapists, and shaping the ethical and operational foundations of the practice. Her work has been featured in Elle and Allure, where she has been recognized for her expertise in habit change and the psychological drivers of lasting transformation.
Dr. Lavelle’s approach to behavior change and hypnotherapy is grounded in a long-standing interest in how meaningful psychological transformation actually occurs. During her graduate training, she participated in research demonstrating that unconscious exposure to feared stimuli could be as effective as real-world exposure in treating phobias—challenging the assumption that insight or conscious effort alone is sufficient for lasting change. This research shaped her belief that effective care must address both conscious understanding and unconscious processes.
Her perspective deepened through mindfulness and contemplative practices, including formative experiences abroad that introduced her to meditation and holistic healing traditions. These influences led her to pursue advanced training in hypnosis, equipping her with tools to work directly with unconscious dynamics that drive habits, emotional responses, and self-sabotaging patterns.
This integration of evidence-based psychology with experiential methods became a hallmark of her clinical approach. Dr. Lavelle does not view emotional eating and disordered eating as categorically separate from everyday struggles with food, but rather as existing along a continuum of stress, coping, and self-regulation. From her experience, many food-related challenges stem from internalized expectations, attachment dynamics, and identity-based pressure—particularly among high-achieving individuals. Her work focuses on addressing these underlying emotional drivers to support sustainable, compassionate change.
Beyond clinical practice, Dr. Lavelle is deeply engaged in conversations about how behavior change principles translate into modern systems of care. As a founder working at the intersection of mental health, technology, and clinical ethics, she is a frequent speaker on the ethical use of AI in psychological care, the limits of purely digital solutions, and the responsibility of modern care models to support human complexity rather than override it. Her work emphasizes designing clinical and technological systems that are psychologically sound, ethically grounded, and responsive to the realities of contemporary life.
