Sarah Saffian

SARAH SAFFIAN, LCSW-R, MFA, is a psychotherapist, an author, and a teacher. She counsels individual clients and runs support groups in private practice in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Sarah approaches the work with empathy, clarity, and humor, maintaining a hybrid psychodynamic/ cognitive style that draws from client-centered therapy, mindfulness, and other techniques. She regards herself as another person in the room, not a blank slate, and the client and herself as a team, working collaboratively toward the client's goals. Blending her two main areas of interest and expertise, Sarah has created a model called Therapeutic Writing, using memoir prompts, when appropriate, as a tool for encouraging reflection, processing, and discovery.

Sarah's clinical experience also includes counseling undergraduate and graduate students and facilitating CBT and DBT groups, at NYU's Counseling and Wellness Services; and counseling adoptees, birth mothers, and adoptive parents and facilitating support groups for all members of the adoption constellation, at Spence-Chapin Services, where she has also served on the Board of Directors.

Sarah's memoir, Ithaka, chronicles the experience of being an adoptee who was found by her birth family. She teaches memoir at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and works independently as a writing coach. Sarah graduated with Honors in English and American Literature from Brown, received her MFA in creative writing from Columbia, where she was a Merit Scholar, and her MSW from NYU, where she was a member of the Phi Alpha honors society. http://saffian.com