I’m Sarah, a therapist who helps creative over-achievers heal from anxiety, low self-esteem, and codependency.
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
One of the most exciting parts of doing this work is the opportunity to keep learning and growing. I dedicate, on average, over 200 hours per year to professional development through ongoing training, consultation, and therapy. My commitment to ongoing growth benefits you directly as a client because it helps me continue to bring more of my whole self as a human to my work as therapist. It also means I know first-hand how much courage it takes to show up for the deep exploration that 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. My clients are my greatest source of ongoing education. I learn from every person I work with, and am honored to be able to collaborate with my clients on their own growth and healing. As Ram Dass put it, “We’re all just walking each other home.”
That said, I do think formal education has value, 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 to others the opportunity to have their own transformative experience of reconnecting with their inner wisdom with the help of a trusted guide. So, I went back to school. I earned my MSW at Boston College School of Social Work, graduating with Honors, and enjoyed the opportunity to expand and refine my skills by working with children, teens, and adults seeking help for a wide range of issues in both group and individual therapy at The Brookline Center, an innovative community mental health center, before opening my own practice.
Along the way, I found Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy. I continue to be astonished at how deeply and fully IFS helps people heal parts of themselves that have been holding pain for years, pain that other forms of therapy has haven’t been able to touch. I love how IFS helps us appreciate even the parts of us that can seem hard to love—parts that drink too much, endlessly replay mistakes we’ve made, eat the whole box of cookies, make our heart pound and mind go blank—you know the ones. As we come to know these aspects of ourselves, we come to understand that they are actually deeply committed to helping us in the best way they know how. Over time, these hard-to-love parts of ourselves can become allies in our healing as we listen to what they’re saying and help them learn there’s another way, and they don’t have to keep doing what they’ve been doing. In my experience, IFS is the most powerful and effective way to heal from the issues I most enjoy helping people with: anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, self-doubt, and fierce inner-critics. People I work with often report they have more awareness of their feelings and needs, more self-compassion, and less anxiety as a result of our work together. This helps them to take healthy new risks in their work and personal relationships, yielding increased life satisfaction.
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 on shame, anxiety, and depression. I and am currently working as a program assistant at a Level 1 training, deepening my knowledge as I help other therapists learn IFS.