About Me

Sara Hurlburt, LCSW. Hello and welcome; so glad you are here. It is no surprise to me that I became a therapist, knowing what I know now. Much like you reading my page I found myself burned out, overwhelmed, and over functioning (helping too much). I often felt that in order for me to feel calm everything had to be optimal. I wasn’t ok unless I was always doing the most, and functioning at the highest level. Therapy has been an excellent tool in my life to help me learn how to find joy, fulfillment, and living a life with purpose and rest. My experiences as a client have helped me learn to be a truly supportive and embodied presence in someones life as they face their most challenging moments and learn how to create more balance and harmony.

After graduating with my Masters degree in Social Work from NYU, I have spent the last decade working in various community mental health agencies, and inpatient psychiatry. I have worked with adults and children, couples and individuals, inpatient and outpatient, worked in schools, and I spent a brief period as a hospice social worker. After working for a few years post graduation I noticed that what I learned in school was not nearly enough to allow me to support the people who were showing up in my office. It was at that time that I began to learn more about different types of modalities for working with people who have experienced trauma. Enter EMDR. EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, it is said that the founder Francine Shapiro would have called it desensitization therapy were she able to do it over again. EMDR allows people to process and desensitize themselves to traumatic memories allowing for a decrease in emotions when things in their present day life remind them of those experiences; thus decreasing flooding, decreasing feeling triggered, and increasing the ability to respond to adaptively. Again, I noticed that even working within the EMDR framework that something was missing in my toolbox to support the clients I was seeing. Not only did they experience instances of trauma, but they also experienced something much more pervasive (CPTSD) which EMDR could not fully treat. Enter IFS. IFS stands for internal family systems which focuses on viewing each human being as a system with protective parts, allowing people to view themselves in a non-pathologizing way and increase access to their individual self-energy.