Meet your therapist
Therapy is not about fixing you because you aren’t broken.
Its about helping you create a relationship with yourself that is healing and sustaining, for today and for tomorrow.
Sara Walter Shihdanian, she/they LMHC in Washington, LPC in Oregon
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I’ve always been passionate about personal empowerment and autonomy.
As a non-directive therapist, I trust my clients to bring to session what they are ready to address. We explore together to make change but I generally see my role as the navigator on our therapy road trip and you as the person in the drivers seat.
You’re the one who knows you best and you are the only expert on you, regardless of my expertise in mental health.
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Over the years, I've been entrusted with incredible triumphs of bravery, growth, and transformation. I've been gifted the chance to bare witness to incredible resilience and strength of spirit while working in several different settings including an inpatient facility for under-served youth, a women’s long term in-patient substance use center, and while helping launch the behavioral health department at an out-patient clinic for the greater community of those impacted by HIV.
Admittedly, gender identity is a topic that is close to my heart. That out-patient position gave me the opportunity to work for three years under a supervisor who is a gender therapist with lived experience, which not only allowed me to hone my passions like I’d always dreamed and to seriously level up the quality of my training, but to also learn just how powerful and transformative it is to work and serve within my own community.
Additionally, I have extensive experience working with people with complex and relational trauma, depression, anxiety, women's issues, life changes, relationship challenges, infectious disease, grief, and those facing systemic oppression. I’m also a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional and a Washington State Telemedicine Training Certified therapist.
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My specialties are trauma and sexual + gender diversity.
In order to do this work effectively, an intersectional praxis is needed: many of our social institutions are rooted (and unfortunately invested) in our marginalization and research has shown time and time again that the psychological impact of that, for individuals and for the culture at large, is inherently traumatic.
A cornerstone of my therapist praxis involves disrupting the power dynamics of therapy when possible by using a collaborative, trauma-informed approach with all clients. This means that I'm generally non-directive and that although I'm an expert on mental health, I'm not the expert on you, your experiences, or what’s best for you. I'm simply here to join you on the journey.
I strive to be consistently inclusive, intentional, teachable, and accountable in and outside of my work role. Yet this can only be done as often as I am willing to consistently do my own work to decenter myself and my experiences.
My hopes are that you find our sessions to be a space of affirmation and resonance, where you can stop carrying the weight of all that the world is putting on you, where you don't have to keep teaching or care taking, where you can just let all of this out if even just for an hour at a time.
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Therapy can be tough!
Opening up about deeply personal things is often uncomfortable, even if we are driven to let it out and get relief, driven to heal and feel better, even if we generally feel safe with the person we are sharing these thoughts and feelings with.
So I always seek to provide you with a reliable and safe environment, no matter what we’re discussing; and to always be non-judgmental, authentic, compassionate, inclusive, and kind.
I know what’s like to take those first, scary, unpredictable steps. I also know what it takes to keep showing up and doing the work, especially on days when it feels like there’s nothing left in the tank.
While our experiences are different of course, my history with relational trauma, dysfunctional relationships, self doubt, and being a part of the LGBTQ+ community give me personal insight into what some of this might be like for you. This has also given me the chance to know what it’s like to be a client struggling with those things.
Therapy has given me the opportunity to have more support during those times, to see myself in a new way, to let go of wanting permission to do what ‘s best for me in order to take care of myself. I’ve also has some experiences with therapy that weren’t very helpful unfortunately. But both sides of this help to inform how I approach my work and my clients.
Most importantly, this helps me to remain open to your feedback throughout our time together. That way our sessions can maintain that uniquely tailored approach that you need and it protects and provides a structure for the high level of quality and effectiveness that we both want you to experience in session.
Everyone has a story.
The challenge is knowing yours and then figuring out how to write or rewrite it in a way that helps you get to where you want to go, instead of reliving a story that keeps causing you pain. Sometimes even the smallest of changes in how we see things can have the power to dissolve really heavy things.
Other times it can be just letting ourselves stay present with those stories until the intensity of the emotions gets a chance to burn up and burn out, letting the emotions take their natural course of peaking and then passing on.
My perspective as your therapist, is that the important piece is figuring out what personal empowerment means to you, learning what stories, relationships, and things help keep you within arms reach of it, and then learning how to let go of the stories and things that keep you from it.
