About
How We Work
Every client begins with a conversation with our Founder and Clinical Director, Dr. Harounzadeh. For clinical care, that first conversation is a psychiatric evaluation. For performance coaching, it’s an initial consultation. It is where the central questions are identified and the direction of care is established.
From there, you’re matched deliberately: that may mean continued work with Dr. Harounzadeh or with one of Attune’s clinicians or coaches, selected for their expertise and fit.
The practice offers three things: performance coaching, psychotherapy, and psychiatric care. What connects them is a shared language. Across all three, we work with the same core ideas: the stories you tell about yourself, the parts of you that compete under pressure, and the patterns that show up across your training, your relationships, and your work. In coaching, that language helps you organize yourself and perform. In therapy and psychiatric care, we follow the same threads further, into where they came from and what they’re protecting. So a frame you pick up in coaching becomes a doorway into deeper work later, if you want it. Nothing gets rebuilt from scratch.
Expect warmth, and expect humor, but also expect honesty. We will tell you what we actually see, including the things that are harder to hear, because that is usually where the real work is.
When medication is part of the picture, it is offered thoughtfully and conservatively: with attention not only to symptoms, but to what medication means to you, how it fits in your life, and what it is and isn’t being asked to do. Many people won’t need it. Many will. Either way, the decision is made carefully, and in the context of everything else.
Performance coaching is non-clinical. It does not diagnose or treat mental illness and does not constitute psychotherapy.
Dr. Nargus Harounzadeh, DNP, MPH
Performance Psychiatry • Identity • Adaptation
Dr. Harounzadeh built Attune from two forms of knowledge: rigorous clinical training and a lived understanding of performance across athletic and professional life. Her work draws equally from the study of how people function under pressure and from firsthand experience of ambition and adaptation.
For more than a decade, she has worked and led in some of New York City’s most demanding psychiatric settings, including forensic psychiatry, violence prevention, and crisis response, while maintaining a private practice for athletes, adolescents, and high-achieving adults.
Her understanding of performance extends beyond her clinical work. After competing as a Division I swimmer and runner, Dr. Harounzadeh began approaching performance differently: less as a pursuit of perfection and more as an exploration of curiosity, range, and adaptation. That shift expanded what was possible. She became a world-level competitor, completed multiple ultradistance events in running and swimming, and became the first person to complete a 100K double circumnavigation of Manhattan—once by water and once by land—setting the fastest known time for the route. She continues to pursue record attempts, trail expeditions, and open-water challenges as ways of testing capacity while remaining flexible, engaged, and connected to the process.
That perspective informs how she works: performance is not treated as separate from identity, history, or the rest of a person’s life. Attune is designed to help people pursue meaningful goals without reducing themselves to achievement—and to adapt when the structures that once sustained them begin to change.
Her training anchors the work. She earned her DNP in Psychiatry from Columbia University and completed her residency at NYU/Bellevue Hospital Center. She holds an MPH from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where she was a Bloomberg Fellow, and a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
The Team
Every clinician and coach at Attune is an athlete first. It’s not a credential we look for — it’s a prerequisite.
Sirae Sprecher, LCSW
Athletic Identity • Life Transitions • Anxiety
Sirae Sprecher, LCSW, is a psychotherapist who works with teens, young adults, and adults navigating anxiety, performance pressure, injury, and periods of significant change. She has a particular interest in working with athletes and former athletes as they manage the emotional demands of competition, recovery, and transitions both within and beyond sport.
Sirae earned her Master of Social Work from Temple University and has spent more than 20 years working across social services and behavioral health. Over the course of her career, she has supported individuals through a wide range of emotional and life challenges, giving her a broad clinical foundation and a practical understanding of how people respond when familiar roles, relationships, or expectations begin to shift.
Athletics have also been an important part of Sirae’s own life. She competed as a Division I swimmer at Saint Francis University, where she earned First Team All-American honors. Her experience in competitive swimming gave her firsthand familiarity with the routines, sacrifices, expectations, and sense of belonging that can come with being an athlete—as well as the difficulty of adjusting when injury, changing goals, or the end of competition alters that structure.
In therapy, Sirae brings that perspective together with decades of clinical experience to meet clients where they are. She understands that qualities developed through sport—discipline, persistence, focus, and resilience—can remain valuable long after competition ends, even as a person’s goals and circumstances change. Her work helps clients better understand themselves, navigate transitions with greater flexibility, and carry forward the parts of their athletic experience that continue to serve them while making room for what comes next.
Gabi Dunkley, LMHC, R-DMT
Body Image • Embodiment • Mind–Body Integration
Gabi Dunkley, LMHC, R-DMT, is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor and Registered Dance/Movement Therapist who works with adolescents and adults navigating eating disorders, body image concerns, anxiety, depression, and major life transitions. Her approach pays close attention to the relationship between emotional experience and the body, particularly when thoughts, feelings, and physical experience begin to feel disconnected from one another.
Gabi’s clinical training grew out of years of working with people through movement. From 2014 to 2021, she worked in the New York City fitness industry, where she became increasingly interested in the ways movement could influence confidence, emotional regulation, connection, and a person’s relationship with their body. That curiosity ultimately led her to pursue Dance/Movement Therapy alongside traditional talk therapy, allowing her to work with both verbal and embodied aspects of psychological experience.
Movement has been part of Gabi’s life since childhood. She began dancing at age three, later ran cross country and competed on a swim team, and went on to complete more than 20 Spartan races, eventually qualifying to compete at the elite level. She continues to train for HYROX, run, and dance, maintaining an active relationship with movement not only as exercise, but as a way of understanding herself and engaging with the world.
That background shapes the way Gabi works with clients. She recognizes that our relationship with the body can hold information that is difficult to access through words alone, particularly around identity, self-image, stress, and control. Her work helps clients become more attuned to their internal experience, develop a more flexible and compassionate relationship with their bodies, and build greater connection between how they think, feel, and move through their lives.