About Sarah Stone, LICSW
I believe that in order for something to change, we often need to go beyond understanding why it is happening. Insight matters: having an explanation can bring clarity, reduce overwhelm, and help the parts of us that need to understand feel oriented enough to make room for another kind of knowing—the kind that comes through experience. Experiential therapy asks us to do something more. It helps us pay attention to what is happening as it unfolds—in your emotions, thoughts, body, impulses, and relationships. When we can slow an experience down and be with it in real time, we have the opportunity not just to understand an old pattern differently, but to experience something genuinely new within it. That kind of experience can change something in a way that explanation alone often cannot.
My style is warm and engaged. I’ll pay close attention to what is happening both inside you and between us, and I’ll invite you to do the same. I’ll be curious with you about what’s happening, without assuming I already know what it means.
I’m Sarah. I work with thoughtful, creative, high-achieving adults who are used to holding a lot together—and who may still find themselves caught in anxiety, perfectionism, people-pleasing, self-doubt, or old patterns that no longer fit.
Some of the people who come to see me have spent a great deal of time trying to understand themselves. Others know mainly that something keeps happening—anxiety takes over, the same relationship pattern repeats, they can’t stop worrying about disappointing people—and they aren’t yet sure why.
You may understand some of your patterns very well and still feel unable to change them. Other parts of your experience may remain confusing or mysterious. You don’t have to understand everything about why a pattern is there before we can begin working with it.
What Matters to Me in Therapy
Compassion
I don’t believe meaningful change comes from becoming better at criticizing ourselves.
Instead, therapy can offer a different way of relating to the parts of us we find difficult, embarrassing, needy, angry, anxious, avoidant, or out of control. When we understand what those responses are trying to accomplish—and what they may have learned from earlier experience—there is often more room for choice.
Compassion does not mean pretending that everything we do is helpful. It means being able to look directly at what is happening without having to attack ourselves for it. When we’re consumed by shame, curiosity narrows and it becomes hard to take in anything new. We need enough safety to stay curious if we’re going to learn a different way of responding.
Collaboration
I want to know what therapy is like for you.
I’ll check in with you about what is helping, what isn’t, and what we might do differently. For people who are accustomed to adapting themselves to other people, noticing and expressing a preference, disagreement, need, or limit in therapy can become an important part of the work.
I want our work to be something we are doing together, not something I am doing to you. If I offer an idea or interpretation that doesn’t fit, I want to know. We can get curious about the mismatch rather than assume that either of us has the whole picture.
Connectedness
The relationship we build together matters to me. I want therapy to be a place where you can feel understood and taken seriously, while also having room to disagree with me, feel uncertain, be awkward, laugh, or tell me when something doesn’t feel right.
I want to know if I misunderstand you, or if something happens between us that leaves you feeling hurt, frustrated, or disconnected. Those moments don’t mean therapy has gone wrong. Working through them together can be a powerful opportunity to experience that connection can survive discomfort or difference.
Training & Education
Continuing to Learn
Each year, I devote more than 250 hours to professional training, consultation, and ongoing personal work. Therapy asks a great deal of the person doing it, and I believe therapists have a responsibility to keep developing our skills, examining our blind spots, and taking responsibility for our own growth. I know from the inside something about the courage and willingness it can take to turn toward what is difficult.
I continue to learn from everyone I work with, and I don’t take lightly the trust involved in being invited to witness, accompany, and guide your work.
The Path That Brought Me Here
Long before I became a therapist, I was a poet and a student of language.
I graduated from UC Berkeley with a BA in Rhetoric, with Highest Honors, and earned an MFA in Literary Arts (Poetry) at Brown University. I 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 listen more closely to what I already knew: becoming an English professor was not the right path for me. I wanted instead to offer other people something of what I had found in therapy—a place to become more fully known to themselves and more able to live from what they know.
I returned to school and earned my MSW at the Boston College School of Social Work, graduating with Honors.
Before opening my private practice, I worked at The Brookline Center, a community mental health center, where I provided individual and group therapy to children, adolescents, and adults with a wide range of concerns.
My background in poetry and rhetoric shapes the way I listen. I pay attention not only to what words mean, but to how they sound and move—their rhythm and texture, the places where language falters, and what becomes possible or difficult to say in a particular moment. I’m also interested in what words do between people: how the same words can mean something quite different depending on who is speaking, to whom, and in what emotional and relational context.
That attention to both the possibilities and the limits of language has made me equally interested in what happens without words—in sensation, movement, emotion, attention, and the nervous system. It is part of what drew me toward forms of therapy that let us work with experience on all of those levels.
My Approach to Therapy
Internal Family Systems
Internal Family Systems (IFS) was the first approach that substantially changed the way I practiced therapy.
IFS begins from the idea that it is normal to contain different “parts” of ourselves, with different feelings, beliefs, impulses, and agendas. One part of you may desperately want something while another is frightened of it. One may demand perfection while another wants to give up. One may long for closeness while another keeps people at a distance.
Rather than treating these reactions as evidence that something is wrong with you, IFS invites us to become curious about what each part is trying to do for you.
I continue to value IFS because it offers a humane and non-pathologizing way of understanding experiences that people often feel ashamed of. Again and again, I have seen that reactions that initially seem irrational or self-defeating make much more sense once we understand what they learned and what they are trying to prevent.
I have completed the IFS Institute’s Level 1 training and Level 2 training focused on shame, anxiety, and depression, and I have assisted with an IFS Institute Level 1 training. I continue to deepen my work through advanced study and consultation.
Somatic Experiencing and Deep Brain Reorienting
As my work has developed, I have become increasingly interested in aspects of experience that unfold before or outside conscious thought.
The effects of traumatic and overwhelming experiences can show up not only in what we think, remember, or believe, but also in patterns of sensation, attention, movement, emotion, and automatic nervous-system responses that happen before we have time to think about them.
That interest led me to Somatic Experiencing (SE) and Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR).
SE and DBR are very different from each other. Both give me ways to work with experiences that talking and insight may not reach. Sometimes that means slowing down enough to notice a subtle sensation, impulse, or shift in attention. Sometimes it means working carefully with the earliest moments of an overwhelming experience, including shock and the body’s automatic protective responses.
I have completed the first two years—Beginning and Intermediate—of the three-year SE training program and am working toward certification, which I expect to complete by the end of 2027. I have completed Level 2 training in DBR.
An Integrative Approach
IFS has taught me to listen closely to the different intentions and perspectives within a person. Somatic Experiencing has deepened my attention to sensation, movement, nervous-system organization, and the ways experience unfolds moment by moment. DBR has added another way of working carefully with the very early orienting and shock responses that can accompany overwhelming experience.
Depending on what you bring to therapy, I may draw more from one approach or another. Sometimes we will talk. Sometimes we may slow down and notice what happens in your body. Sometimes the most important thing will be what is happening between us in the room.
Interested in working together?
If what you’ve read here gives you a sense that we might work well together, we can talk about what’s bringing you to therapy and whether I might be a good fit for you.