Minda Sanborn, LMFT, EMDRIA Certified

Grounded, Compassionate Therapy for Teens and Adults

You may understand why you feel anxious, overwhelmed, disconnected, or stuck—and still find that insight alone has not created the change you need. Past experiences, chronic stress, health concerns, and difficult transitions can continue to affect how you feel in your body, relate to others, and move through daily life.

I work with teens and adults navigating trauma, anxiety, depression, emotional overwhelm, chronic illness, medical trauma, grief, and major life transitions. I also support clients who feel different from those around them or who are working to better understand their identity, needs, and strengths.

My approach is warm, grounded, and collaborative. I believe therapy works best when you feel genuinely understood, respected, and supported rather than judged or pressured to follow a one-size-fits-all path. Together, we can explore what is contributing to distress, build practical tools for the present, and address experiences that may still be shaping your life.

Clients often describe me as compassionate, authentic, creative, and easy to connect with. I bring curiosity and a sense of playfulness into the therapy room while honoring the seriousness of what you may be carrying.

My Approach

Healing rarely follows a straight line. You may be ready to work through one experience while needing more time and support before approaching another. Therapy should move at a pace that feels manageable and responsive to your needs.

I practice from a trauma-informed, strengths-based framework and integrate EMDR, Brainspotting, DBT-informed skills, mindfulness, and relational therapy. These approaches allow our work to include both deeper emotional processing and practical strategies for navigating everyday life.

Depending on your goals, therapy may help you:

• Understand emotional and behavioral patterns
• Reduce anxiety and emotional overwhelm
• Develop grounding and regulation skills
• Process trauma, grief, or stressful experiences
• Strengthen boundaries and communication
• Reconnect with your identity and strengths
• Increase self-trust and confidence
• Feel more present and engaged in your life

My role is not to tell you who to become. It is to help you understand yourself more fully and develop a path forward that feels authentic, sustainable, and meaningful.

Trauma, Stress, and Emotional Overwhelm

Difficult experiences can continue to affect the nervous system long after the immediate danger or stress has passed. You may feel constantly alert, emotionally numb, easily overwhelmed, disconnected from yourself, or confused by reactions that seem stronger than the present situation.

Trauma therapy does not require you to share everything at once or repeatedly describe painful experiences in detail. The work begins with creating enough safety, trust, and stability to approach difficult material at a manageable pace.

Together, we may focus on understanding trauma responses, strengthening emotional regulation, reducing shame, and helping your mind and body recognize that the present can be different from the past.

Healing does not mean forgetting what happened. It means increasing your sense of choice, connection, and control over how those experiences affect your life now.

Chronic Illness and Medical Trauma

Living with chronic illness, pain, medical uncertainty, or a difficult healthcare experience can affect nearly every part of life. You may be grieving changes in your body, abilities, independence, relationships, identity, or plans for the future.

Medical trauma may also leave you feeling anxious, powerless, dismissed, or afraid of future appointments and procedures. Even necessary medical care can become emotionally overwhelming when your body has learned to associate healthcare settings with pain, uncertainty, or a loss of control.

Therapy offers space to process these experiences without minimizing their impact. Our work may focus on grief, anxiety, self-advocacy, identity changes, emotional regulation, and finding ways to live meaningfully within circumstances you may not have chosen.

The goal is not to suggest that emotional work can remove a physical condition. It is to support your psychological and relational well-being while honoring the realities of your body and experience.

As an EMDRIA Certified EMDR therapist, I use Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing to help clients process distressing memories and experiences that continue to affect their emotions, beliefs, relationships, or nervous system. 

EMDR does not require you to describe every detail of an experience. Instead, it uses structured methods of bilateral stimulation to support the brain’s processing of memories that may feel unresolved or emotionally charged.

EMDR may be incorporated into ongoing therapy to address concerns such as:

• Trauma and distressing experiences
• Anxiety, panic, and fears
• Grief and loss
• Medical trauma and chronic pain-related stress
• Negative beliefs about yourself
• Emotional numbness or disconnection
• Performance anxiety and confidence concerns

Minda currently offers standard EMDR appointments for clients age 14 and older and extended EMDR intensives for clients age 16 and older. 

DBT-Informed Skills

At times, deeper insight is not enough. You may also need concrete tools for getting through an intense moment, communicating more clearly, or responding differently when emotions feel overwhelming.

I incorporate DBT-informed skills to help clients strengthen:

• Emotional regulation
• Distress tolerance
• Mindfulness and present-moment awareness
• Communication and relationship skills
• Boundaries and self-advocacy
• The ability to pause before reacting

This is not a comprehensive DBT program. Instead, skills are thoughtfully integrated into individual therapy according to each client’s needs and goals.

Brainspotting

Brainspotting is a focused, body-aware therapy that uses visual positioning and present-moment awareness to help clients access emotions, sensations, and experiences that may be difficult to reach through conversation alone.

This approach can be especially supportive for clients who feel stuck, become overwhelmed when trying to explain an experience, or notice that distress is held as much in the body as it is in their thoughts.

Brainspotting may be used independently or integrated with other trauma-informed approaches. The process is collaborative and does not require you to force an emotional response or move faster than feels manageable.

Therapy for Teens

Adolescence can bring enormous change. Teens are navigating identity, relationships, academic expectations, family dynamics, increasing independence, and the pressure to understand who they are, all while their emotional and developmental needs continue to evolve.

Before becoming a therapist, I worked as a special education teacher. That experience continues to shape my understanding of neurodiversity, learning differences, adolescent development, and the importance of recognizing strengths that may be overlooked in traditional environments. 

I support teens experiencing:

• Anxiety, depression, or emotional overwhelm
• Trauma, grief, or significant life changes
• Identity and self-esteem concerns
• Neurodivergence and learning differences
• Friendship or relationship difficulties
• Academic stress and pressure
• Family conflict or communication challenges
• Difficulty regulating intense emotions

Therapy gives teens a space where they can speak honestly without feeling judged, lectured, or treated like a problem that needs to be fixed. Together, we work to build emotional awareness, coping skills, confidence, and a stronger understanding of what they need.

When appropriate, caregiver collaboration may also be included to strengthen communication and help the adults in a teen’s life provide meaningful support while respecting the teen’s growing independence.