About Liz
ELIZABETH HANIFIN, LCSW
Therapist in Westfield and Nutley, NJ
Welcome. I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who has worked in the human services field since 1993. After graduating from Hamilton College in 1993, I began a year of volunteer service at Turning Point Youth Services in Visalia, California, serving chemically dependent teens and their families.
EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE
Upon returning to the east coast, my work expanded to school based youth services and crisis intervention counseling at Hackensack High School. In 1998, I graduated from Hunter College School of Social Work with a specialization in Group work. While at Hunter, I interned at Project Renewal, a men’s substance abuse outpatient program in Manhattan’s Bowery, and later at Cancer care Inc., where I facilitated a bereavement group for bereaved partners and led a women’s breast and gynecological cancer support group.
Since graduation, I gained further mental health and addiction experience at the MICA program at Princeton House, in Princeton, NJ, and as Clinical supervisor at the Passaic Beth Israel partial day hospital program, in Passaic N.J. I also furthered my work in oncology at Gilda’s Club of North Jersey, where I conducted bereavement and cancer support groups. Currently, I work in private practice in Scotch Plains and Nutley, NJ.
In my personal life, I am a lover of hot yoga, meditation, chakra and sound healing, 12 step philosophy, and enjoying a good laugh with those closest to me. My greatest joy and learning experience is being a mother and stepmother to four remarkable children who make the world a better place.
Lastly, I am deeply committed to my own ongoing personal therapeutical work and professional training; in fact I feel it is part of my responsibility to those I serve. Furthermore, It is my steadfast intention to come from a place of open heartedness, centeredness, and self energy.