Hi, I'm Sarah.

I'm a trauma therapist, relationship therapist, and fellow human who believes understanding where a pattern came from can help us decide what we want to do with it next.

I'm Sarah Benitez-Zandi, MSW, LCSW, founder of Trauma Wise Healing.

I've spent more than a decade working in mental health, and over the years my work has increasingly centered around people trying to do something different with what they inherited.

Sometimes that's healing from trauma. Sometimes it's recognizing patterns that keep showing up in relationships. Sometimes it's becoming a parent and suddenly seeing your own childhood differently. And sometimes it's reaching a point in a family relationship where everyone knows something needs to change, but no one quite knows how to get there.

Those are the complicated spaces I'm drawn to.

The Person Behind the Therapist

I'm a therapist, but that's only one of the roles I occupy in my own life.

I’m also a mom of three, which means I know that relationships, families, and breaking patterns look considerably messier in real life than they do in a therapy textbook.

I don't believe cycle breaking means becoming a perfect parent, partner, or adult child. It means becoming more aware of what we inherited, taking responsibility for what belongs to us, and making different choices where we can.

That perspective shapes how I work with clients. I’m interested in accountability without shame, compassion without avoiding hard conversations, and helping people understand where their patterns came from without assuming the only way forward is to cut people out of their lives.

I'm naturally curious and probably a little obsessed with learning. If there's a training that helps me understand trauma, relationships, families, or the nervous system more deeply, there's a decent chance I've considered taking it. My continuing education list has a habit of becoming longer rather than shorter.

I don't expect the people I work with to show up as perfectly organized versions of themselves.

I certainly don't.

You're curious about yourself.

You want an engaged therapist.

You already understand a lot...but you're still stuck.

You're willing to hold complexity.

You want change, not perfection.

Why Cycle Breakers?

I've always been interested in what happens when people begin looking at their lives with enough distance to ask:

“Do I actually want to keep doing it this way?”

We inherit more than memories from the people who came before us. We inherit ideas about relationships, conflict, caregiving, success, emotions, boundaries, responsibility, and what we're supposed to do to belong.

Some of those things serve us beautifully.

Others may have helped us survive one chapter of our lives but don't fit the life we're trying to build now.

To me, cycle breaking isn't about blaming our families, rejecting everything we learned, or becoming perfectly healed people who never repeat a pattern again.

It's about becoming more intentional.

Understanding what you inherited. Deciding what still belongs to you. And giving yourself permission to do some things differently.

That's the work I'm most passionate about.

We May Work Well Together If...

You don't have to understand everything that's happening, but you're willing to look beneath the surface and get curious about patterns that keep showing up.

You're looking for someone who will participate in the conversation, ask questions, offer observations, and gently challenge you when it may be helpful.

You've read the books. You've thought about your childhood. You may even have done therapy before. You understand why something happens, but understanding it hasn't necessarily changed what happens inside you.

You don't need every story to have a villain. You're open to the possibility that multiple things can be true at once, especially when we're talking about families and relationships.

Cycle breaking isn't about never getting triggered, never arguing with your partner, or becoming the perfectly healed member of your family.

We're looking for something more realistic:

More awareness. More choice. More capacity to respond differently.