Sara Dupont

You're the one people call when things fall apart. You're good at it — steady, competent, the person who knows what to do. And somewhere along the way you stopped having anywhere to put your own stuff.

So you can run the meeting, hold the crisis, answer the phone at 2 a.m. — and still not be able to make yourself open the mail. Competence and collapse live together far more often than anyone admits out loud.

I work with adults carrying that particular load: substance use and recovery, emotions that arrive at full volume with no dimmer switch, thoughts of self-harm or not wanting to be here, and the specific erosion that comes from caring for other people for a living. Helpers, clinicians, parents, first responders — people whose exhaustion doesn't have an obvious place to go. I work with teenagers too, often the ones in families like these.

My style is direct, warm, and collaborative. I'm not going to nod quietly for fifty minutes. We'll find what's actually driving things, build skills you can use on a Tuesday afternoon when it counts, and I'll tell you honestly what I'm seeing. You set the pace. I'll bring the structure.

I'm trained in EMDR, DBT, CBT, and trauma-focused work, and I don't pick one and make you fit inside it. Modalities are tools, not identities. The structure should bend to you.

In practice that means I'm paying attention to what you actually need in front of me. If the problem is that emotions arrive at full volume with no dimmer switch, we build DBT skills — riding out distress without making it worse, regulating, asking for what you need. If something happened to you that your brain never finished processing, EMDR can get at it without requiring you to narrate the whole thing out loud. If the trouble is a thought pattern that keeps running you into the same wall, we'll take it apart directly. Often it's more than one of those, and the mix shifts as we go.

I work from a trauma-informed and harm-reduction stance, particularly around substance use. You don't have to be sober, certain, or done deciding in order to start. You just have to be curious about what's underneath it.

I've spent my career in behavioral health, treating, supervising, teaching, and researching why the people who hold others up so often fall apart quietly. If that's you, you don't need to explain the background. I already know the terrain.

The same principle holds with younger clients, the approach bends to the kid, not the reverse. With teenagers I often bring art into the room. Not because it's a craft hour, but because a lot of them can draw something true before they can say it, and that's a legitimate way in.

If you're a parent reading this: I'll be straight with you about what I'm seeing and what I need from you, and I'll also protect your kid's sense that this room is theirs. Those two things aren't in conflict, but they do take some negotiating, and we'll do that out loud in the first session rather than letting it become a problem later.

Mostly a conversation. I'll ask what brought you here and what you want to be different six months from now. You can tell me as much or as little as you want, nothing has to come out in the first hour. By the end we'll have a working sense of goals and whether I'm the right fit. If I'm not, I'll say so and help you find someone who is.