Sarah Hammack

Like many therapists, I came to this calling after many years of doing other things. Professionally, this meant translation (Russian to English), which taught me how to pop in and out of vastly different ways of looking at the world. There was also raising children, tending to a marriage and friendships, and falling in love with an artistic hobby, I have been a therapist for 20 years now. For most of those years, I worked at a community mental health clinic, where I worked with people from a huge variety of backgrounds and ways of experiencing the world. Many were very poor. Many were very sick, sometimes psychotic. I learned how to see reality through many different lenses and to join forces with my clients to make life better. After these decades, I think I have developed a fairly clear approach to helping others, which I will try to explain below. Life can be very confusing. When a person walks into a therapy room for the first time, they are often emotionally bruised and looking for some clarity about their world and their own responses to events and circumstances. It is a privilege for me as a therapist to help the people I work with to make sense of it all. I help my clients learn to listen to themselves with respect, compassion, and curiosity. People can develop this courageous curiosity when they learn to have faith that whatever they find out about themselves makes sense and is coming from a decent place. It is often difficult to cultivate the habit of validating one’s own thoughts and feelings (especially if one has long experience of doing the opposite), but it is extremely rewarding as the changes begin to be noticeable.