About Sara
Sara Tinker is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over 26 years of experience. She focuses on helping people manage stress, anxiety, depression, relationship and intimacy concerns, grief, addiction, and trauma. Sara aims to create a calm, respectful space where clients can talk through what matters to them and find clearer ways forward.
Sara blends practical talk with attention to emotions and relationships. She uses approaches that help people understand how early attachments shape current reactions.
Background and approach
She also draws on client-centered work to follow each person’s pace and DBT skills to teach emotional regulation and better coping tools. Her background includes extensive clinical work across community mental health, adolescent programs, and independent practice in Tennessee. She holds a Master of Social Work and carries the Tennessee LCSW license TN LCSW 1046.
Over the years she has worked with people facing chronic illness, addiction, caregiving stress, blended family issues, and identity or intimacy-related struggles. Sara’s style is warm and interactive. Sessions tend to focus on building trust, naming patterns, and practicing new ways of responding.
She pays attention to the body-mind connection and uses somatic ideas alongside talk work when useful. Clients often come for help with communication problems, commitment or attachment worries, sleep or anger issues, and life transitions. Sara helps people identify practical next steps, manage overwhelming feelings, and reconnect with values and strengths.
Approach-driven online therapy that fits your life
Sara often uses Attachment-Based Therapy to help people understand how early relationships shape current patterns. This work focuses on emotions and connection and can help with trust, commitment worries, and closeness issues.She also uses Client-Centered Therapy, which emphasizes listening and following the client’s pace. That approach helps people feel heard while they sort values, identity, or decisions. Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, appears in sessions as concrete skill teaching for emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and clearer communication when feelings run high.
Picking the right approach is a shared process. The therapist will talk with each person about goals, past experiences, and preferences, then try methods that make the most sense. Plans can be adjusted as progress is made so the work stays practical and relevant.
Online work is offered through video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to match different needs. Video lets people work face-to-face from wherever they are. Phone sessions can be shorter check-ins or an option when bandwidth is limited. Chat and messaging support quick reflections, homework, or ongoing check-ins between sessions. These options make scheduling easier and help therapy fit into busy lives.
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Specialties and expertise
Top specialties
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Trauma and abuse
Also works with
- Abandonment
- Addictions
- Anger management
- Attachment issues
- Avoidant personality
- BDSM, kink, and alternative sex culture
- Bipolar disorder
- Blended family issues
- Body image
- Caregiver issues and stress
- Chronic pain, illness, and disability
- Co-morbidity
- Codependency
- Commitment issues
- Communication problems
- Compassion fatigue
- Control issues
- Coping with life changes
- Coping with natural or human-caused disaster
- Dependent personality
- Depression
- Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder (DMDD)
- Dissociation
- Divorce and separation
- Domestic violence
- Drug and alcohol addiction
- Eating and food-related issues
- Emptiness
- Family conflicts
- Family of origin issues
- Family problems
- First responder issues
- Forgiveness
- Gender dysphoria
- Grief
- Guilt and shame
- Impulsivity
- Infidelity
- Intimacy-related issues
- Isolation / loneliness
- Jealousy
- LGBT
- Life purpose
- Midlife crisis
- Mood disorders
- Narcissism
- Obsessions, compulsions, and OCD
- Panic disorder and panic attacks
- Paranoia
- Parenting issues
- Personality disorders
- Phobias
- Post-traumatic stress
- Postpartum depression
- Pregnancy and childbirth
- Prejudice and discrimination
- Process addiction (porn, exercise, gambling)
- Self esteem
- Self-harm
- Self-love
- Sex addiction
- Sexual assault and abuse
- Sexuality
- Sleeping disorders
- Social anxiety and phobia
- Somatization
- Trichotillomania
- Veteran and Armed Forces Issues
- Women's issues
- Workplace issues
- Young adult issues
Therapeutic approaches
- Attachment-Based Therapy
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)
- Existential Therapy
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Mindfulness Therapy
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Psychodynamic Therapy
- Solution-Focused Therapy
- Somatic Therapy
- Trauma-Focused Therapy
- Experience
- 26 years
- Licensed
- Tennessee
- Languages
- English