I’m Sarah, and I am a community therapist offering relationally-focused mental health counseling in West Asheville or virtually in North Carolina.
My clients are often justice-oriented helpers and caregivers: educators, healthcare workers and parents, who are trying to show up in their work and in their relationships in solidarity with those most impacted by the dehumanizing systems that shape all of our lives. I also see clients who have been directly targeted by these systems: formerly or currently homeless folks, people who use drugs, and folks who’ve been incarcerated.
Why Lichen?
Lichen looks like one organism, but is at least two, and often three or four. Lichens live on all kinds of things—bark, rocks, the ground—but only thrive where the air is fresh. Very slowly, using their bodies, lichens break down rocks into soil.
Lichen exemplifies some understandings on which I base my practice:
We are made of relationships
The external conditions of our lives shape us
We can shape them back
I work with folks looking to reckon with and heal from toll this world has taken, whether that shows up as grief, anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, or quickly activated trauma responses. We walk alongside one another to reclaim feeling, to resist pathologization of suffering and survival, and to show up in daily life and relationships guided by chosen values.
