Therapy works best when you feel genuinely heard, respected, and understood by the person sitting with you
What we build together starts with curiosity, not conclusions
Before insight or change, there has to be trust
That trust gives our deeper work a place to take root.
Sara Nevius, M.S., LMFT
I didn’t come to this work in a straight line.
My path has been shaped by grief and loss, curiosity and questioning, and a willingness to look more deeply at the things that don’t always make sense on the surface.
I know what it is to follow a path that looks right from the outside while sensing that something deeper feels off. My own path took me to the Peace Corps, where I lived and worked in another culture and encountered ways of seeing, relating, and being that were very different from my own. That experience taught me to become more curious about what I assume is normal, to listen for what lies beneath the obvious, and to recognize that there is often more than one way of understanding a person or a situation. It also brought me into a deeper relationship with myself and with what felt true.
That perspective continues to shape how I work with clients. I try not to assume that I already know what something means or what should change. Instead, I’m interested in understanding your experience in its larger context—your relationships, history, environment, beliefs, and the ways you learned to navigate the world.
I see therapy not simply as a way to feel better or solve a problem, but as an opportunity to develop a deeper relationship with yourself—to become curious about the patterns, beliefs, and coping strategies that have shaped you, and to discover what may be asking to change.
My approach looks beneath the surface of symptoms to understand what they may be trying to tell you. Rather than seeing ‘symptoms’ or other struggles as problems to eliminate, I’m interested in understanding the larger context in which they developed and what they may be communicating about your inner and outer life.
No single framework holds the whole picture of a person. My work is grounded in a holistic, humanistic, trauma-informed, and psychodynamic approach, drawing from relational, client-centered, somatic, mindfulness, narrative, and cognitive approaches when they are useful. I also incorporate Jungian concepts such as dreams, symbolism, shadow, and complexes, as well as the process of becoming more fully yourself.
Developmental, Relational and Psychodynamic Orientation
My training has deeply shaped how I understand people and the process of becoming. I tend to look beyond the individual to understand the relationships, environments, and systems a person lives in—and how those contexts shape how we experience ourselves and one another.
During my graduate training and early clinical work, I worked within school settings supporting adolescents from diverse and historically underrepresented communities, including students at KIPP and teens in San Francisco high schools. I worked directly with students and alongside parents, teachers, and school staff to support students’ mental health and educational needs, including students with IEPs.
Working within the school system gave me a close view of adolescence as it actually unfolds—not in isolation, but within a web of relationships and systems. A young person’s experience is shaped by family, peers, school, culture, identity, developmental stage, and the expectations these systems place on them.
I’m particularly attentive to relational dynamics—the patterns that develop between people, what gets expressed and what remains unspoken, where connection is lost, and how people adapt to stay connected or feel they belong.
What brings someone to therapy rarely exists in isolation. Anxiety, depression, substance use, relationship patterns, or a sense of being stuck may be connected to the relationships, roles, and environments in which those struggles developed.
I am interested in the developmental tasks beneath the struggle: the movement toward identity, autonomy, belonging, competence, and a sense of self that feels genuinely one’s own. This is where the humanistic and psychodynamic threads of my work meet: valuing your innate capacity for growth, while staying attuned to the unconscious patterns that shape it.
Professional Training
My path into psychotherapy began with an undergraduate degree in Communications, where I explored my early interest in how people make meaning, relate to one another, and understand themselves through the stories they tell themselves.
I went on to earn my master’s degree in Clinical Psychology, deepening that curiosity through clinical training and work with adolescents, adults, couples, and families.
I am currently a candidate in training at the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association (JPA) of New York, where I am deepening my study of Jungian psychology, including the unconscious, dreams, symbolism, shadow, and the process of becoming more fully who we are.
Why Marriage and Family (MFT)?
My training as a Marriage and Family Therapist further developed this way of seeing people.
Although I work with individuals, I don’t understand an individual as separate from their relational world. Relationships and environments shape us, and we carry those experiences with us.
When I work with an individual, I’m often listening for the relational patterns beneath the presenting concern: the roles you learned to play, the expectations you absorbed, the ways you learned to connect or protect yourself, and the relationships in which certain parts of you became more or less possible.
This doesn’t mean that therapy always involves family members. It means that I hold the larger context in mind while staying deeply attuned to the individual experience.
This systemic and relational perspective is especially important when working with adolescents and families, but it also matters in adult therapy. The patterns we developed in our earliest relationships can continue to shape how we experience ourselves, intimacy, conflict, belonging, and change long after we have left our original family systems.
