Hello, newsletter people!

Thanks for subscribing to this! I’m still figuring out exactly what this is.

I’m taking some months off from clinical work right now. I became a fully licensed therapist in May, and I’m planning to open my private practice in January. I’ve been calling this stretch a sabbatical; a colleague called it a “gap year for grownups,” which may be more accurate.

I expect I’ll write more eventually about why I decided to do this, what has arisen when I suddenly had all this room, and what I’m learning from it.

In the meantime, I keep finding myself drawn toward writing. Knew that English degree would eventually be practical.

Over the past month or so, I’ve started publishing on my blog roughly weekly. And since blogs don’t quite work the way they did in the olden days, when humans actually returned to them voluntarily, I decided to make a newsletter for anyone who wants to know when I’ve written something new.

Here’s some of what I’ve been writing about lately:

Gifted-informed therapy

One of my clinical niches is working with gifted folks. Sometimes people look at me quizzically when I tell them this: Why would gifted people need a therapist who specializes in giftedness?

That’s the question I started with. I’ve also been writing about some of the particular things that can come along with a fast, intense brain—including perfectionism and the enormous relief of relationships where you feel deeply understood.

Read the gifted-informed therapy posts →

What Accelerated Resolution Therapy actually feels like

I’d been dying to write this one since January, when I saw a wonderful movie at Sundance that depicted EMDR. I teared up in the theater because I wished more people could see what an effective trauma therapy can actually feel like.

So I wrote about Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) from the client seat: what happens in a session, some of the strange things the brain does on its own while processing a memory, and the powerful results I’ve seen that have left me with a certain amount of missionary zeal about the whole thing.

Read about Accelerated Resolution Therapy →

Autism and learning to drive

I’ve taught two autistic children to drive, and I wanted to share what we learned along the way.

It may take a much longer runway. Progress may be slower. Skills that become automatic fairly quickly for a neurotypical driver can require much more deliberate practice, and driving itself may continue to take more energy.

But slower does not mean impossible.

I wrote a road map for autistic teens, parents, and clinicians about what the process can look like—and how learning to drive can ultimately bring a remarkable amount of independence and confidence.

Read about autism and driving →

Trauma? Neurodivergence? Why not both?

CPTSD, autism, ADHD, and other forms of neurodivergence can have a surprising amount of overlap. So when someone has traits that could plausibly come from trauma or neurodivergence, how much does it matter which one caused what?

I dig into why I think the answer is often “both,” why we may never be able to untangle the origins perfectly, and why trauma treatment can still be useful even when someone’s underlying neurodivergence is not something that needs to be (or can be) “cured.”

Read Trauma? Neurodivergence? Why you may not need to know→

I’m planning to keep publishing on the blog roughly weekly, at least during the sabbatical, and to send one of these newsletters about once a month.

I make no promises about staying on any particular topic.

Things currently rattling around in my brain include dating, financial therapy, breast cancer advocacy, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy—as well as more about giftedness, neurodivergence, and trauma.

And in November, I’ll be speaking at Salt Lake Oasis on “How to Care About Everything Without Carrying Everything”—about living through times that can feel unprecedented, and some of the perspectives and tools that help me stay engaged with the world without collapsing into a puddle. More on that later.

Talk to you next month—

Sara