Sara Anderson

You’ve worked hard your whole life. One foot in front of the other, you keep going, keep showing up, keep doing what is needed in the moment. Between your career, your family, your community, your friends, you’re someone who doesn’t fail. But right now, in this moment, you feel like you’re failing. You can’t sleep. You’re exhausted all the time. You’re overwhelmed. You can’t get a break. Even a weekend away is one more task on your to-do list. And somewhere along the way, this life you worked so hard to build no longer feels like you.

Maybe you’re waking up at 3am with your heart racing and a list of worries that won’t quit. Maybe you’re going through the motions, dragging yourself from one moment to the next, desperately waiting for a second to yourself. Maybe you’ve started asking if this is really what you worked so hard for. Maybe you’re wondering how much longer you can keep doing it this way. And maybe you’re secretly wondering if you’re just losing it.

Here’s the truth: You’re not losing it. But you are overwhelmed, exhausted, burned out, and anxious as all get out. And that can certainly feel like losing it — and you deserve someone who knows how to help.

That’s the work I do, and I know it deep down in my bones, from the inside out.

Overwhelmed is no way to enjoy life.

I’ve Been Where You Are

I burned out at 42.

At the time, I’d been a therapist for thirteen years. I had built a large, CARF-accredited behavioral health agency with multiple clinical sites and a substantial staff. I was also a foster parent, an active community leader, and the person everyone called when something needed to get done.

And every night, I woke up at 2am in complete panic.

 I worried about my staff and their decision-making, about money, about my health, about something going wrong that I couldn’t see or plan for or anticipate. I kept a To-Worry list on top of my To-Do list. The anxiety wasn’t about what was actually happening; it never is. It was about a nervous system that had been running at full capacity for so long it no longer knew how to stop. Add in perimenopausal hormonal shifts and I didn’t recognize myself — not as a clinician, not as a person.

 I tried to solve it the way high performers solve everything: work smarter, optimize harder, biohack my way through it. It didn’t work, because the system was built by men for men, and not for midlife women whose perimenopausal symptoms complicate everything.

 So I walked away — from the agency I’d poured everything into, from the community leadership roles, from being a foster parent. I thought that once I did, I would feel better. I didn’t.

 I walked away. The burnout remained.

Desperation is a useful teacher. I researched burnout, menopause, and anxiety in midlife. I began to approach myself and my life differently. The overwhelm lessened. The burnout healed.

Then I shared what I was doing with seasoned therapists who told me they, too, were overwhelmed and unhappy in their lives. Within days of working together, they were sleeping better, had more energy. Within weeks they were noticing moments of joy again, declaring happiness in their lives, discovering passions that had been long forgotten, making changes to how they worked and how they lived.

That became the work I do now.

How I Work

I’m in my mid-fifties now. Over twenty-five years I have worked with more than 2,300 women in midlife and 4,000 clients across the full range of human experience. The women I work with are not in crisis in any way that is easily named. They are accomplished, self-aware, and exhausted in a way that doesn’t have clean language yet. They might say they are anxious, but that doesn’t quite fit. They might say they are depressed, but that doesn’t sound quite right either. They have tried the hacks and tricks, read the books, attended retreats, participated in webinars and workshops — and still they are waking up in a cold sweat at 2am.

 My approach integrates clinical depth psychology with frameworks I developed from somatic psychology and neuroscience:

Belonging-Becoming-Being™ — a framework for understanding where a woman is in her own experiential arc, meeting her at the point of exhaustion and overwhelm, and helping her find her way forward rather than simply enduring or coping.

The SOMA Code™ — a somatic and depth-psychology approach to reading the body’s signals, so that exhaustion, anxiety, overwhelm, and sleeplessness become information rather than obstacles.

I also use a neuroscience-based interventions such as EMDR and Havening Techniques®, combined with Jungian and Humanistic psychology and expressive interventions. These work at a physiological level to calm the stress response and begin rewiring patterns that talk therapy alone often can’t reach. For women whose nervous systems have been running on high alert for years, it creates a felt shift that changes what’s possible in the work.

This is not generic therapy. It is clinical work built from the inside of the experience it addresses.

Training and Credentials

I hold a Master of Arts in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology from the University of West Georgia, with post-graduate training in addiction, play therapy, mindful self-compassion, somatic Jungian psychology, EMDR, and Havening Techniques®. I am a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) and National Certified Counselor (NCC),and a certified yoga teacher and breath work facilitator.

I have provided expert witness testimony in over 1,000 legal proceedings and founded and led a CARF-accredited behavioral health organization before transitioning to the independent practice I have now.

I offer telehealth therapy for women across Georgia.

If You’re Ready

A free consultation is the right place to start. It’s a brief conversation to find out whether we’re a good fit and what working together might look like.