Hi, I'm Sara
I’m probably not what comes to mind when you picture a therapist.
Good.
I care a lot less about performing the role of therapist than I do about being fully present with the woman sitting across from me.
I’m warm, curious, direct, and very human. I’ll laugh with you. I’ll probably notice the thing you almost slipped past. I’ll ask questions I genuinely don’t know the answer to. And when something important is happening in session, I’m not going to hide behind therapeutic neutrality.
I take this work incredibly seriously.
But we also don't have to take everything so seriously, either!
Also, yes. I’m bald.
I lost my hair in my late thirties (I'm now super proud to be in my 50's). These days, sometimes I wear wigs and sometimes I don't. If we work together long enough, you may meet several versions of my head, LOL.
Losing my hair changed my relationship with beauty, identity, femininity, social conditioning, and being seen in ways I never could have anticipated. And losing it taught me something I now care deeply about in my work with women: how much freedom there is in coming home to yourself instead of continually trying to become someone you're supposed to be.
How I Got Here
I was a coach before I was a therapist.
And I still am.
I began working with people in 2006, long before I entered the therapy world. My early training was in Co-Active Coaching, and it fundamentally shaped the way I understand people, change, agency, and the relationship between two people doing meaningful work together. Coaching taught me to listen differently. To get curious instead of assuming I know. To ask the question underneath the question. To challenge without taking over. And to trust that the person sitting across from me has wisdom of her own—that my job isn't to become the authority on her life.
I brought all of that with me when I became a therapist.
Clinical training gave me more ways to go deeper—into trauma, attachment, the nervous system, protective patterns, the body, and the places where insight and intention alone aren't enough.
I don't experience coaching and therapy as competing with each other. They make each other better. The coach in me is interested in possibility, agency, choice, and movement. The therapist in me understands what can make those things difficult—or sometimes feel impossible.
I want to be able to work with both.
That's why I continue to train across approaches including EMDR, parts work, somatic therapy, and trauma processing. I'm genuinely fascinated by this work, but I'm not interested in collecting modalities for the sake of collecting modalities. I want range—the ability to recognize what might help this woman, in this moment, rather than asking her to fit into the limits of the approaches I happen to know.
The more ways I know how to work, the less you have to fit into any one of them.
Education + Professional Training
Coaching + Transformational Work
Co-Active Coaching — Coaches Training Institute
Professional coaching training, 2006–2007
Certified Source Leader — Sourced Experience
Yearlong transformational coaching certification program, 2024
Parts Work + Relational Approaches
Internal Family Systems Coaching Training — Institute for Self Leadership
In-depth training in the IFS model and parts work
Certified in Inner Relational Focusing — Embody Lab
Six-month intensive training in parts-oriented, experiential work
Trauma + Somatic Approaches
EMDR Training — EMDR Center of the Rockies
Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT)
FLASH Technique for Traumatic Memory Reconsolidation — Thomas Zimmerman
Somatic Attachment Certificate — Embody Lab
Formal Education
Masters in Marriage & Family Therapy
B.A., Psychology
Licenses
Mental Health Counselor in Washington state
Professional Counselor in Colorado
Beyond The Therapy Room
Warm, engaging, feisty, courageous, random, and curious...that might be me in a nutshell. Well, sort of. I've also been described as an eclectic mix of emotion, logic, spirituality, energy, and passion.
I believe deeply in the work I do. And I also believe there is a whole lot more to being human than working on ourselves all the damn time.
Outside the therapy room, I'm happiest somewhere in the mountains—preferably on my mountain bike, though I've learned that occasionally the mountain wins. I love yoga, being immersed deep in the wilderness with my dog, dancing, drumming, meaningful conversations, creating beautiful spaces, saying “I can't right now” without apology, and people who are willing to be real.
I have tattoos that bookmark various lessons and eras of my life, with my most recent being a Wolf who reminds me never to abandon myself. My next one is in the design stage.
I'm a Mama, Momma, Mom, and Stepmom. I've loved deeply, lost things I thought I'd keep, started over more than once, and had life break and rearrange me in ways I never could have anticipated. I don't believe any of that makes me an expert on someone else's life, but it has made me profoundly respectful of just how complicated it is to be a human.
Somewhere along the way, I've also become increasingly passionate about what opens up when women stop hustling, perfecting, performing, and pleasing their way through life—and begin finding their way back to themselves.
Maybe that's what it means to Rise Again.
Not to become some better, shinier, “next-level” version of yourself, but to come closer to the woman who has been there all along.
I think a life is made up of a million little deposits—into ourselves, our relationships, and our communities. I try to make mine intentional and show up with what I've got and put something meaningful into the places and people I care about.
Sometimes that's a lot. Other times, it's hardly anything, and I'm alright with that.
If something here feels familiar...
You don't need to know exactly what kind of therapy you need or have the perfect words for what isn't working.
We can start with a conversation.