Dr. Niloo Dardashti
Licensed Psychologist, Workplace Consultant, Author, Documentary Producer
Growing up in a Jewish Iranian household sets the stage for being able to manage multiple personalities and temperaments at the same time. Dr. Niloo Dardashti, a first generation American Iranian woman started her career at roughly the age of 12, when she started questioning the meaning of life and reading books about Buddhism and Jungian psychology. At 17, she was taking dream interpretation courses at the Jungian Institute in NYC, while her friends were playing soccer after school in a suburb right outside of manhattan.
Drawn to philosophy, metaphysics, and psychology from an early age she explored abundant ideas and paths toward attaining enlightenment and balance. Training in meditation/mindfulness, yoga retreats, astrology, and Reiki took up her time in between going out with her friends after getting her bachelors in psychology at NYU. Simultaneously, she was working as a media strategist at an advertising agency that was located within a bigger ad agency, Doremus.
Finally, she entered the doctoral program at LIU where her prior trainings in eastern modalities further contributed to her western psychology education in CBT, psychodynamic, DBT, and family therapy orientations, and where she ultimately wrote her dissertation on the combination of spirituality and psychotherapy.
After graduating with her doctorate, Dr. D studied a wide variety of mental health wellness treatments including nutrition, herbology, targeted amino acid therapy, biochemistry testing, anti aging strategies, and the use of various nutriceuticals for mental wellness. Simultaneously, She started her practice in nyc where she still sees adults, couples and families, integrating all of her studies and usually helping people in an accelerated solution-oriented approach. With her training in depth psychology, and motivation to help people make changes, Dr. D is able to provide focused coaching and awareness-based interventions to her clients to meet their goals in months rather than years.
In 2010 Dr. Dardashti thought it would be fun to make a documentary about the pop-culture phenomena of the Twilight books and movies, called Into the Twilight Haze. After she made her film, she authored a coffee table book called Fifty Shades of Women’s Desires, which addresses many relationship issues touched upon in the documentary.
Lastly, as a teacher Dr. D ran workshops for other clinicians on holistic mental health principles regarding sleep, anxiety, and mood, which she turned into a manual that is available online.
Her best and worst trait is her unfiltered approach to people and situations. Most people know her for telling things how they are. She feels, in her gut, a need to help empower others to speak their truths, and help relationships thrive – both at home and at work.
She continues to be interviewed by the media about relationships, pop-culture issues, work/life balance, stress management, and how to maintain harmony in the workplace.
Mission & Vision
My overall mission is to not only to help people thrive as individuals, but within all of their relationships: at home and at work. It is my intention to help the integrity of these relationships in order to minimize conflict and empower people to be assertive and effective in their communication with others. Likewise, I love to help people feel more alive and present with both their family at home and their family at work. The purpose of life, of all of this, in my humble opinion, is to connect with our true selves, and that of the people around us – our coworkers, our communities, and our loved ones.
My long term vision is to convey the importance and impact of integrating psychology across settings. For example, having psychologist on staff within a corporation can be incredibly beneficial on several levels. The workplace psychologist can be of assistance as needed for an healthy leadership methods, individual employee issues, empathy training, stress management through mind/body strategies, and most importantly as a mediation expert for issues that often arise between “work family” members. The ultimate goal is enhancement of workplace flow, to persevere and flourish in the face of daily obstacles. I see this as an integral conduit to an extraordinary company culture.
Correspondingly, my love for helping relationships to flourish lends itself to my interest in pop-culture phenomena, current relationship experiences/trends, and shedding light on misperceptions that create distance between people. For example, while my documentary looked at the phenomenon of the Twilight Saga, the deeper examination turned into why long-term relationships tend to lose the sense of aliveness that we all continue to long for in them. Whatever the nature of the relationship at hand, or the obstacles we face in life, we can transcend mediocrity through the passion that we bring to, and the joy that we feel through connections. Psychologists get just about 8 years of training between all the requirements; but we are not typically an industry that force our way into the public eye. For better or worse, most of us are terrible sales people. But we have so much to offer other than psychotherapy (which can be life changing for sure). My vision includes bringing Psychology increasingly into the public eye in different ways that can benefit our people, couples, communities and our world at large.