Sarah Kwan, PhD
HOLISTIC PSYCHOLOGIST
Serving California & Virginia
You are someone who can be counted on.
You are perceptive and thoughtful, quick to notice what needs doing.
You think ahead. You figure things out.
Your mind is part of what makes this possible. It’s quick, perceptive, always looking ahead. But it can be hard to know when its work is done. Decisions linger. Conversations get revisited. Tomorrow arrives before today is over.
These are qualities you may value deeply in yourself. You don’t want to care less, expect less, or live a smaller life. You just don’t want everything to require so much of you.
Therapy can be a place to explore that tension: what deserves your attention and what has simply learned to demand it; what is responsibility and what is worry; what you want to carry—and what you might be ready to put down.
What might bring you here
Anxiety + OCD
Worry, intrusive thoughts, uncertainty,
and a mind that has trouble letting go.
Perimenopause + Menopause
Navigating changes in body, mood, identity, relationships, and sense of self.
Identity
Who you are beneath expectations, roles, and the person you learned to be.
Complex Trauma
The lasting ways you learned to adapt, protect yourself, and
stay safe.
Relationships + Family Dynamics
Patterns of attachment, conflict, boundaries, and finding yourself in relationship.
Fertility + Family Building
The uncertainty, waiting, grief, and loss of control that can come with trying to build a family.
Perinatal + Matrescence
The emotional and identity shifts of pregnancy, postpartum, and becoming a mother.
Aging
Taking stock of what has been and choosing what comes next.
Parenthood
Love, worry, guilt, responsibility—and everything raising a person brings up in you.
I’m warm, engaged, and very much myself in the therapy room.
I pay close attention to what you say, what you don’t—the feeling you keep circling, what your body knows before you have words for it, the ways you’ve learned to protect yourself, and the parts of you that may want very different things.
I’m interested in who you are underneath all the ways you’ve learned to be. I don’t see my role as fixing or curing you.
With curiosity, we will make sense of things together, what’s been necessary, what no longer fits, and what might become possible when you have more room to be yourself.
Across a Woman's Life
Identity & Relationships
How much of who we are was chosen for us, and how much is truly ours?
We carry so much into adulthood—ways of loving, protecting ourselves, belonging, becoming. Some of it is ours; some was handed to us so long ago it feels like ours. And often it is in our closest relationships that we begin to see the difference.The work is in learning to tell the difference: what asks to be changed, what can be put down, and what might simply be carried differently.
Perinatal & Matrescence
Who are you becoming when so much of you is needed?
We begin becoming mothers in the imagination. In a hope, a longing, a child not yet here; in the family we picture, the mother we think we will be. And then the imagined life becomes a lived one. So much turns toward the needs of everyone else, while somewhere in the background, your own sense of self is being profoundly rearranged. Becoming a mother is a transition that traditional healing practices recognize as a time when the mother herself needs care, rest, nourishment, and replenishment.
Mid & Later Life
Who are you when you finally belong
to yourself?
In traditional Chinese medicine, menopause is described as a second spring: a reorientation of energy once directed toward reproduction, now freeing up and turning towards the self. I’m drawn to the possibility in that idea; this powerful invitation to loosen the roles and expectations that have organized our lives and finally take back the self-determination that will light our way home.