I’m Sarah. I use Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy to help high-achieving women and creative professionals struggling with anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, and self-doubt.
Despite a challenging childhood, you’ve built things you're proud of in your life. Yet you can’t stop your thoughts from spinning and you’re exhausted from trying so hard to be perfect. You spend so much energy worrying about what other people need that you find yourself irritated and resentful more often than you care to admit. You long for someone to take care of you, or at least for a break. Something has to change. Maybe you’ve tried therapy before and it helped, some. Maybe you even know a lot about what’s keeping you stuck, but somehow nothing changes. You’re tired of feeling this way and you’re ready to roll up your sleeves and find the root of all this. You’re in the right place!
The good news is you already have what you need inside you to heal.
It’s my job to help you access it. We all need help to slow down and understand how we learned the patterns that are no longer serving us before we can set them free and make room for a new way of being.
I’m trained in IFS, a gentle, non-pathologizing approach that helps you reconnect to the wisdom and compassion you were born with. In IFS, we respect that we are all made up of many parts—one part of you says, “I want to go to that party, maybe I’ll meet someone” (or, I want to finally write that novel, or start looking for a better job) and another says, “Nah, I’m staying in bed to binge Netflix and relax.”
It’s normal to have these parts of ourselves that have different—and sometimes conflicting—thoughts and feelings. Our work will start with the assumption that all parts of you have positive intentions for you. So, instead of trying to get rid of any thought, feeling, or sensation (say, by calling that Netflix-watching part “lazy” and while you get dressed for the party, all the while feeling a little sick to your stomach), I’ll help you learn to extend curiosity and compassion to whatever is hard to be with inside yourself.
As you build a relationship with the feelings, memories, and beliefs that are troubling you, you’ll have the opportunity to let go of what is not serving you and make room for the qualities you want more of in your life: confidence, joy, creativity, playfulness, connection. Transformation is waiting for you, and I’ll be there with you all along the way.
My Guiding Principles
Compassion
Imagine if you could treat yourself with the same kindness you would offer a good friend. I believe compassion—both between us and within you—is powerful medicine. I’ll offer you my own empathy and understanding, and equally important, I’ll help you grow your ability to extend compassion toward yourself.
Collaboration
Your experience matters to me, and I will check in with you throughout our work together about what is going well and what could work better between us. For many of my clients, knowing and voicing what they need and desire is a growth edge, and this aspect of our work together can be surprisingly powerful and transformative.
Connectedness
When we are hurt in relationship to others, we also need to heal in connection. I believe people need to feel safe enough, seen, and understood for therapy to get off the ground. As we work together to strengthen your connection to your inner world, the warmth and safety of our therapeutic relationship remains my highest priority.
Training & Education
“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn to change.” – Carl Rogers
A Commitment to Continued Growth
An important part of what I offer you as a therapist is my own commitment to keep learning and growing. Each year, I dedicate more than 250 hours to deepening my work through professional training, consultation, and my own ongoing therapeutic growth. All of this helps me bring greater presence, attunement, flexibility, and humility to our work together. My own therapeutic work also means that I know firsthand how much courage it takes to show up for the deep exploration therapy asks of us—and how truly life-changing it can be.
I’ve always loved reading and studying, but one thing being a therapist has taught me is how much school can’t teach us. I continue to learn from every person I work with and am honored to collaborate with my clients in their growth and healing. I agree with Ram Dass, who said, “We’re all just walking each other home.”
The Path That Brought Me Here
Formal education has also shaped the therapist—and the person—I am today, and you might like to know a little about mine. I graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in Rhetoric, with Highest Honors. I earned an MFA in Literary Arts (Poetry) at Brown University and then began a doctoral program in English Language and Literature at Yale University, where I completed all but the dissertation.
I left before earning my PhD because therapy helped me learn to tune my ear to my own inner knowing, which told me that my original goal of becoming an English professor was not the right path for me. What emerged in its place was the desire to offer others the kind of transformative experience I now knew was possible. So I went back to school and earned my MSW at the Boston College School of Social Work, graduating with Honors. Before opening my own practice, I expanded and refined my skills at The Brookline Center, an innovative community mental health center, where I worked with children, teens, and adults seeking help with a wide range of concerns in both individual and group therapy.
Why I Practice IFS
Along the way, I found Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy. I continue to be moved by the healing I see people experience as they befriend parts of themselves they may have experienced as shameful, hopeless, angry, out of control, or anxious—you name it. I have seen IFS help people reach pain they have carried for years, including pain that previous therapy had not fully reached.
I love how IFS helps us appreciate even the parts of ourselves that can seem hard to love—parts that drink too much, endlessly replay mistakes we’ve made, eat the whole box of cookies, or make our hearts pound and our minds go blank. You know the ones. As we come to know these aspects of ourselves, we begin to understand that they are deeply committed to helping us in the best way they know how. By listening to what they are trying to tell us, we can help them discover that there may be another way—and that they no longer have to keep doing what they’ve been doing.
In my experience, IFS can be a powerful and effective way to address many of the concerns I feel especially drawn to helping people with: anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, self-doubt, and fierce inner critics. People I work with often report greater awareness of their feelings and needs, more self-compassion, and less anxiety as a result of our work together. This can help them recognize and value their own needs and desires, take healthy new risks in their work and personal relationships, and more generally suffer less and enjoy life more.
I continue to deepen my training in IFS through advanced training, study, and consultation. I have completed the official IFS Institute Level 1 training, as well as a Level 2 training focused on shame, anxiety, and depression. I have also served as a program assistant for a Level 1 training, deepening my own knowledge by helping other therapists learn IFS.
Working With Trauma Through SE and DBR
More recently, I discovered Somatic Experiencing (SE) and Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR). I have completed Level 1 training in DBR and will complete Level 2 in October 2026. I am also working toward certification as a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, which I expect to receive in November 2027. I have completed the first two years of the three-year Somatic Experiencing training program—Beginning and Intermediate—studying with Lael Keen and Russell Jones.
These approaches have expanded my ability to work with embodied aspects of traumatic experience, including experiences that may emerge more readily through the body than through conversation alone. By paying close attention to sensations and other subtle responses in the body, we can slow down and attend to what happened in the earliest moments of an overwhelming experience—often before the thinking brain had time to understand it. This may include shock, emotion, and impulses to fight, flee, freeze, collapse, or withdraw. In different but complementary ways, SE and DBR offer us additional paths for processing experiences that were once too fast or overwhelming to fully take in, so that they can begin to feel more fully in the past.