About Sara
Sara Tinker, LCSW, offers steady support for people facing anxiety, stress, relationship strain, grief, addiction, and phobias. She writes in a direct, person-focused way and aims to help clients find practical steps forward. Her style is warm and interactive, and she emphasizes building trust in the therapy relationship before diving into deeper work.
With 26 years of practice, she draws on long experience with trauma, mood concerns, and ongoing life challenges.
Background and approach
She blends talk-based care with approaches that attend to emotions and attachment patterns. Sessions aim to help people manage symptoms, improve communication, and make clearer decisions about relationships and health. Sara's background includes social work training and a broad clinical history across community mental health, adolescent psychiatric care, and independent practice.
That history informs how she helps people cope with chronic pain, caregiver stress, blended family issues, and the aftermath of abuse or loss. Her prior work also included programs focused on people recovering from addiction and those affected by trafficking and homelessness. She uses a mix of Attachment-Based, client-centered, emotionally focused, existential, and skills-oriented approaches in session.
This allows her to tailor the work depending on whether someone needs emotional processing, behavior skills, or a space to make meaning of hard experiences. Sara offers sessions in English and sees clients who live in Tennessee. Her longtime practice emphasizes respect, dignity, and collaboration as she helps people reconnect with strengths and hope.
Approaches that translate to online therapy
Attachment-Based Therapy focuses on how early and current relationships shape feelings and behavior; it helps people who struggle with trust, intimacy, or fear of abandonment by exploring patterns and building safer ways to connect. Client-Centered Therapy centers the person's own goals and experience, giving space for someone to be heard and to find their own solutions; it suits people needing empathy, validation, and clearer self-direction. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) teaches practical skills for managing intense emotions, improving relationships, and tolerating distress, which can be useful for mood swings, anger, and overwhelming anxiety.Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will collaborate with each person to pick techniques that match their goals, needs, and comfort level. Sessions may blend emotional processing, attachment work, and skills practice depending on what helps in the moment.
Online therapy offers flexible ways to meet. Video calls let people talk face-to-face and use visual cues, phone sessions require less bandwidth and can be easier during a busy day, live chat enables shorter check-ins, and text-based messaging supports ongoing reflection between sessions. These options make it simpler to fit therapy into work, caregiving, or health challenges while still focusing on emotional healing and practical coping skills.
Questions people ask
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What this therapist works with
Most often
- Stress, Anxiety
- Relationship issues
- Trauma and abuse
Also listed
- 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
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