Approach

Sara is passionately committed to honoring your personal story, and completely friendly towards the variables through which you express yourself, such as sexual preference, gender, political and spiritual persuasion, to name a few.  She enthusiastically supports you to locate and live from your own deepest values. Because everyone learns and transforms in their own unique way, Sara offers a number of approaches attuned to your personal needs and designed to birth what you are longing for.

Integrative depth Psychotherapy affirms the inherent value of each individual and considers the person’s affective, behavioral, cognitive, and physiological levels of functioning, as well the transpersonal or spiritual dimension of life. The focus is on integration and involves taking disowned, unaware, or unresolved aspects of the self and making them part of a cohesive personality, reducing the use of defense mechanisms that inhibit spontaneity and limit flexibility in problem solving, and health maintenance. Depth psychology facilitates wholeness in order to enhance relating to the world with full intrapsychic, interpersonal and sociopolitical capacity. Through integration, the affective, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological systems within a person are linked and brought into cohesive function.

Interpersonal Neurobiology holds that we are ultimately who we are because of our relationships. The mind is defined as a relational process that regulates energy flow, and our brains are constantly rewiring themselves in response to connection (resulting in complexity and integration) and rupture (resulting in the formation of defenses). Sara engages you in an emotionally corrective experience as she offers you attunement, empathy, and positive regard necessary to earn the secure attachment which may not have been available in childhood.

Trauma and/or PTSD respond well to Psychoeducation and Somatic Therapies.  These include visualization, breath-work, energy balancing, and many forms of anchoring and grounding, such as developing a special place where one is safe, at peace, and in control. Sara is also an advanced clinician for EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), an empirically validated method of working with trauma. What is the actual EMDR session like?. Sara also works with OEI (One Eye Integration). Click For more on Complex Trauma

Using a Solution-Focused strength-based model, we will uncover and galvanize existing resources and resiliencies and bring these to bear on current challenges.  Creating new, more empowering narratives about the self and employing techniques such as externalizing allows one to gain emotional freedom from past traumas.

With Cognitive Therapy we will reveal the relationship between certain thinking patterns and adverse symptoms or experience.  By identifying the distortion, minimization, catastrophizing and other common errors in thinking, you will more accurately see and respond to your dilemmas.  It is useful in altering patterns of negative self talk, for stopping intrusive thoughts, for reducing panic, anxiety and depression.

How can you make the most of your therapy? Practice makes Progress!

Beliefs underlying Sara’s work

  • Healing is an innate drive and will occur when the client’s intention to heal is met by the necessary conditions of safety, support, resources, information and opportunities to practice new behavior are available.  It is the role of a counsellor to provide as many of these conditions of healing as possible in the therapeutic setting.
  • The human change process is an act of courage and is simultaneously energizing and anxiety-provoking.  It is a privilege to witness and support the transformations which occur, and holding the space for exploration and renewal is a commitment Sara makes with each and every client.
  • At each given moment, human beings respond as best they can with their current understanding and resources.  As these factors change, so too can behaviour. Therapy is therefore not a process of shaming or blaming for past behaviour, but a process of acceptance of the old and a curiosity about the new potentials.

Sara offers you these inspiring gifts:

  • Unbreakable Belief in the human capacity to transform, able to hold this vision when clients have lost touch with hope.
  • Inspired guidance to locate those deep internal bearings in times of disorientation.
  • Advocacy, referrals, comprehensive knowledge lifespan development, and fullsome attention: expect to feel “felt” in her heartening engagement.
  • Capacity to simultaneously engage in the apparent and symbolic realities inherent in life circumstances
  • Sensitively explore your inclinations with regard to faith or spirituality and include this in your work