The Basic Stuff

I’m Sarah. I work as a pre-licensed therapist in California. I will receive my M.A. in Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies in August of 2025. I’ve completed my training at the Church Street Integral Counseling Center, a sliding scale clinic rooted in Gestalt and Existential therapy in the Mission/Noe District of San Francisco.

I’m a white, cis-ish, able-bodied, queer lesbian from a working-class background. I grew up in Southern California and feel most at home near the ocean. Outside of this space, I’m a longboard surfer, an amateur chef, a record collector, a reader, a runner, and a reality TV binge-watcher.

The Ooey Gooey Stuff

This work is personal for me. Being a therapist asks me to stay in deep contact with my own experience—to keep noticing where systems like patriarchy, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression have shaped how I see and move through the world. It asks me to return, again and again, to the boundaries of where I end and my clients begin. To take responsibility for what’s mine, and to stay curious as I sit with you in what’s yours.

I came to this work through my own healing as a queer person raised in the Evangelical church. It was in sitting with a Gestalt therapist that I first felt the agency to choose my life. That experience was transformative, and still is. It’s what gives me the capacity and the lens to hold space for others walking their own versions of that path. I deeply love this work. To be witness to such courage and vulnerability is an incredible gift and an honor.

Some of the core themes I’ve grappled with in my own life include: loneliness, grief, depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia and distressing eating patterns, codependency and attachment wounds, sexuality and identity, shame, religious trauma, and a pervasive sense of not being enough.