OCD & Exposure Response Prevention (ERP)
OCD is not about being organized or careful. It is about being trapped in a loop — one where the mind has learned that certainty is safety, and the only relief comes from checking, avoiding, or performing rituals that provide momentary quiet before the cycle starts again. ERP is the treatment that actually breaks that loop — not by eliminating doubt, but by teaching the nervous system that uncertainty is survivable. Will specializes in this work across the full range of OCD presentations: contamination, intrusive thoughts, checking, pure-O, scrupulosity, and relationship OCD. For clients who have been misdiagnosed, undertreated, or told their experience wasn’t serious enough for specialized care, Will’s precision often represents the first time the treatment has actually matched the problem.
Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy for Anxiety, OCD & Existential Work
Will offers KAP for clients whose anxiety, OCD, or existential distress hasn’t responded to conventional approaches — or where the rigidity of thought patterns has made it difficult for other treatments to gain traction. Ketamine creates a temporary softening of the mental loops that keep people stuck, opening a window for insight and integration that the ordinary thinking mind works hard to prevent. Will’s preparation and integration work draws on his depth psychology training, helping clients make meaning of what arises and carry it forward into lasting change. This is precision work for the overthinking, over-managing mind that needs a different way in.
Anxiety Disorders & Panic
Anxiety disorders are among the most successfully treated conditions in mental health — and among the most undertreated, because most clinicians address the symptoms rather than the mechanisms driving them. Will uses evidence-based approaches including CBT, ACT, and graduated exposure to help clients understand what is actually generating their anxiety, not just manage it when it spikes. Whether it’s panic disorder, social anxiety, generalized worry, or the quiet avoidance that has contracted someone’s life without them quite noticing, the goal is the same: building genuine tolerance for discomfort rather than an increasingly elaborate system for avoiding it.
Men’s Therapy & Emotional Expression
Will works with men who have spent years succeeding at everything except feeling like it means something. High-functioning, often emotionally sealed, increasingly disconnected from their relationships and their own interior life. His men’s work doesn’t ask clients to open up on command — it starts from where they actually are, understands the architecture of how they got there, and builds something more sustainable from the inside out. Clients describe the work as honest, challenging, and quietly relieving — the first room where they’ve said what’s actually happening.
Spiritual & Existential Issues
Some of what brings people to therapy isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a question — about meaning, identity, purpose, what happens when the life you worked for turns out to be less than you expected. Will holds genuine depth in Jungian psychology, contemplative practice, and existential therapy, and works with clients navigating spiritual emergence, psychedelic integration, and the archetypal dimensions of experience. For clients who have found conventional therapy too narrow, or who need a clinician who can hold both the clinical and the philosophical without collapsing one into the other, Will’s range is rare and worth knowing about.
The goal isn't to give you a belief system, it's to help you discover what feels true and meaningful for you.
Depression & Treatment Resistant Mood
Depression often presents as numbness, disconnection, and going through the motions rather than sadness — which makes it harder to name and harder to treat. Will works with major depression, persistent low mood, and treatment-resistant presentations using an integrative approach that combines CBT, behavioral activation, psychodynamic exploration, and KAP when indicated. The work addresses what’s beneath the depression, including grief, disconnection, identity or meaning, not just the symptoms on the surface.
Director of Client Experience
Nicole Santulli-Rivera
Your experience matters.
Nikki is often a client's first point of contact in our practice.
Nicole is a steady resource throughout each client's journey. She makes sure care at Higher Ground feels considered from the very first call, and that nothing about beginning therapy is left for a client to figure out alone.
She knows every therapist, service, and location well enough to help each person find the right fit quickly. Starting therapy can feel confusing, from what intake involves to what happens first, and Nicole makes sure none of it stays a mystery. She is also behind the small, deliberate touches, from practice events to the feel of each space, that make Higher Ground a place people are glad to return to.
At Higher Ground, Nicole brings that instinct to the client experience from start to finish. She is often a client's first point of contact with the practice and remains a steady one throughout, guiding initial inquiries and staying reachable by phone, text, or email. For people whose lives are already full, reaching the practice should be the easy part.
People are usually exhausted by the time they call us. My job is to make that first conversation feel like someone already thought it through, so they don't have to.
Nicole Santulli-Rivera
Professional Experience
Nicole spent five years as Operations Manager for a large adolescent residential treatment program in Woodbury. Her role was making sure every department, from clinical and nursing to support staff, added up to one seamless experience for the young people living there. She built the systems behind it: staffing, training, and the hundred small details that decide whether a place feels safe. The program grew substantially during her tenure, and its standard of care rose with it.
Her distinction was always in the details. She paid attention to the things that make a place feel like home: marking milestones, noticing what a hard day needed, making sure the people doing the caring were cared for too. She trained her teams to hold that same standard in practice as much as in policy.
