Carly Abramovitz – Carly's Couch

Carly Abramovitz is an English-speaking clinical psychologist from South Africa. Carly offers individual psychotherapy, specialising in expat therapy and therapy for self growth. In addition, Carly offers parent support and education via individual consultation and workshops.

Carly completed her Honours in Psychology at the University of Cape Town in 2009. She graduated with a first class pass. Her research project, which included a minor dissertation, was titled “Identity negotiation in the ‘new’ South Africa: The ideological dilemmas informing discourses of whiteness”. Carly obtained her Masters in Clinical Psychology from the University of Cape Town in 2011. Her thesis was titled “Women Supporting Women: The Role of Doulas in South African Birth Stories”. She completed her Clinical Psychology Internship at Weskoppies Psychiatric Hospital in Pretoria and then went on to complete a year as a Community Service Psychologist at the Far East Rand Hospital in Springs.

During these two years working in the South African State Hospitals, Carly was involved with the treatment of both adults and children. At Weskoppies Psychiatric Hospital she conducted psychometric assessments and therapy with inpatients and outpatients suffering from severe clinical disorders including bipolar, substance related disorders, schizophrenia, intellectual disability, and personality disorders. She also worked in the children’s ward treating patients with ADHD, conduct disorder, epilepsy, autism, reactive attachment disorder, psychosis, and specific learning disorders. While working at Far East Rand Hospital, she conducted assessments and therapy on both inpatients and outpatients with a wide range of psychological and social problems including depression, domestic violence, and sexual abuse.

Carly spent two years working in private practice in Berlin and now lives in Cape Town, South Africa. In 2016 Carly launched Carly’s Couch, a psychology practice that offers sessions in person or online via Skype. In addition, Carly writes a blog which she uses to connect to people all around the world, offering advice and wisdom on just about any subject including sex, love, and relationships. As a young, vibrant person Carly is passionate about breaking down the stereotype that psychologists have to be a certain kind of person. She hopes to inspire people to be themselves and to not feel boxed in by others’ expectations.

The Circle of Security Parenting ®

Carly is a Registered Circle of Security Parenting® Facilitator. The COSP intervention is taught via a series of workshops that can be delivered to individuals, couples or groups. These workshops are aimed at parents of children aged 0-5 years.

Circle of Security Parenting® helps you to:
Make sense of what your child needs
Assist your child manage emotions
Enhance the development of your child’s self esteem

From circleofsecurity.net

“The Circle of Security is a relationship based early intervention program designed to enhance attachment security between parents and children. Decades of university-based research have confirmed that secure children exhibit increased empathy, greater self-esteem, better relationships with parents and peers, enhanced school readiness, and an increased capacity to handle emotions more effectively when compared with children who are not secure.”

Circle of Security Parenting^® Reviews

“The Circle of Security Parenting® DVD is an outstanding contribution and a “must see” for parents of young children. Focusing on how parent/child relationships can be strengthened, this unique approach teaches parents, and those helping them, new ways to understand children’s needs and behavior. It also offers effective ways to respond to these needs and behaviors. I have found it invaluable in my own work with parents of young children.”

Charles H. Zeanah, M.D.

Tulane University School of Medicine

Editor, Handbook of Infant Mental Health

“Circle of Security provides therapists with a near complete model for parent/child psychotherapy. COS is theoretically grounded, evidence-based, and uniquely understandable and appealing to parents. It is rare to find such a sophisticated clinical model with such wide applicability. I would urge all parent education programs to add the Circle DVD to their tool kit.”

Linda Gilkerson, Ph.D.
Director, Irving B. Harris Infant Studies Program
Erickson Institue, Chicago, Ill

“The clinically effective Circle of Security^® model is solidly based on the most recent advances in developmental neuroscience and attachment theory.”

Allan N. Schore, Ph.D.
Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences
University of California at Los Angeles
David Geffen School of Medicine
Author, Affect Regulation and the Repair of the Self

“The Circle of Security^® is circling the globe as an intervention to help parents raise their children with love, warmth, and emotional intelligence. The four researcher/clinicians who invented this important new and effective program are themselves filled with these positive traits and a huge dose of common sense and devotion to the well-being of others. These innovators have created a readily accessible and engaging approach to helping parents, young and old, to connect with their infants and toddlers in ways that break the old, destructive patterns of parenting that so often have been learned by difficult childhood experiences in the past. Cited from England to India, the Circle of Security™ offers new hope for making the hard earned wisdom of attachment research available to clinicians helping parents heal old wounds and building new options for the next generation.”

Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.
Faculty, Center for Culture, Brain, and Development
Associate Clinical Professor
UCLA School of Medicine
Author, The Developing Mind and Parenting from the Inside Out