About Sara
Sara Tinker is a licensed clinical social worker with 26 years of experience. She helps people who are stressed, anxious, grieving, or navigating relationship and intimacy concerns. Her approach is direct and practical, aimed at making daily life more manageable for worried parents and individuals under strain.
Sara uses a blend of approaches that focus on relationships, emotions, and coping skills. Sessions are interactive and grounded in real-life problems like sleep trouble, parenting strain, chronic pain, or workplace stress.
How Sara works
She pays attention to attachment patterns and communication habits to improve connection and reduce conflict. Her background includes graduate social work training and long clinical experience in community mental health and adolescent services. That history informs how she supports people dealing with trauma, addiction, mood disorders, and long-term health conditions.
Sara draws on decades of practice to tailor her work to each person’s needs. Therapy with her emphasizes building stronger boundaries, clearer communication, and emotional regulation skills. She mixes emotion-focused work with skills from dialectical behavior approaches and client-centered conversations.
The result is practical guidance paired with time to process painful events and losses. Sara describes her style as warm and engaging. She treats people with respect and looks beyond labels to their strengths and hopes.
Her goal is to help clients find more joy and stability while managing life’s hard changes.
Sara lists 13 ways of working on the entry:
- 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
What Sara works with
The areas below are the ones Sara selected when setting up a profile. The first few are listed as the main focus; the rest are also named.
- 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
Training and background
| Register | LCSW |
|---|---|
| Years in practice | 26 |
| Languages | English |
| Session format | Online: video, phone, live chat or messaging |
| Country | Tennessee |
Memberships and registers are shown as supplied; they are not licences, and this directory does not verify them.
Online support options
How attachment and emotion work translate to online therapy
The therapist uses attachment-based approaches that look at how past and current relationships shape how someone connects and reacts. This approach helps people improve communication, build trust, and address patterns that fuel conflict or loneliness. Client-centered therapy emphasizes the person’s experience and choices, giving space for the client to lead while the therapist listens and reflects. This supports people processing grief, identity questions, or life transitions. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) offers concrete skills for managing strong emotions, improving distress tolerance, and regulating behavior; it is useful for mood swings, anger, and overwhelming stress.Finding the right approach is part of the work. The therapist will collaborate with each person to choose techniques that match their goals, needs, and comfort level. That may mean combining emotion-focused conversation with practical DBT skills, or shifting focus as challenges change over time.
Online sessions are offered by video calls, phone sessions, live chat, or text-based messaging to make therapy flexible. Video works well for longer sessions that resemble in-person meetings. Phone sessions can fit a break at work or when bandwidth is limited. Live chat and text-based messaging are helpful for shorter check-ins, quick skill coaching, or when writing feels easier. These options make it simpler to keep therapy consistent around busy family and work schedules.
Start online instead of waiting
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Common questions
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A practical next step
Write down two things you would want to be different in six months. That is the most useful thing to bring to a first session, whoever it is with. If you would rather start now than keep reading, online sessions are the quickest route.
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