“I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.”
— Carl Jung

Sarah Smith (she, her)
Co-Founder & Executive Director

Sarah completed a dual graduate degree program in Child Development from Erikson Institute and Social Work from Loyola University Chicago. She has almost a decade of clinical training and experience working in group therapy practices including Child Therapy Chicago, Live Oak, and The Center for Contextual Change. Sarah has additional training in Theraplay, Somatic Experiencing, and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). 

Sarah specializes in exploring gender and sexuality as well as helping family systems and couples navigate how identity and trauma can impact the system.

Sarah provides individual, couples, and family therapy, and somatic experiencing - a trauma informed practice that incorporates the body into therapy. In couples and family therapy, Sarah helps her clients learn how to effectively and compassionately interact with, support, and challenge one another.

Sarah approaches her clinical work through a developmental, multi-systemic and multi-cultural lens. Her work focuses on exploring how patterns of thinking, behaving, and expressing ourselves have developed over time and creating a safe, trusting, and collaborative context in therapy to begin noticing, acknowledging, and shifting these patterns. Sarah emphasizes learning more about the context in which her clients live because it is essential to better understand them and how context may influence their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Sarah also takes into account the varying roles and identities her clients have within their lives and the intersectional relationship of such identities (familial, racial, cultural, religious, gender, sexuality, etc).