About Sarah Gordis
Sarah Gordis is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in Colorado and California and a DBT-Linehan Board of Certification, Certified DBT Clinician™. She earned her MSW from Columbia University, where she trained in the school's intensive Dialectical Behavior Therapy program, and her BA in psychology and linguistics, summa cum laude, from Emory University.
DBT-Linehan Board of Certification is an independent credential. Certified clinicians have passed a written exam on the principles, structure, and treatment priorities of DBT and have submitted recorded sessions for review against the standards of the Linehan model.
Before joining FRTC, Sarah was a staff therapist at a comprehensive DBT program in Los Angeles, providing individual DBT and Prolonged Exposure therapy to adults, teens, couples, and families, teaching adult and teen skills groups, and providing phone coaching. Earlier, she delivered DBT in a residential program for adults with co-occurring mental health and substance use disorders, where she also trained the clinical staff in DBT skills and coaching.
Her training goes well beyond the standard DBT curriculum: the 10-day DBT Intensive through Behavioral Tech, DBT Prolonged Exposure (DBT-PE) for trauma, DBT with parents, couples, and families, DBT for eating disorders, Exposure and Response Prevention for OCD, and certification as a Radically Open DBT (RO DBT) Level 1 clinician.
Sarah works with clients coping with emotion dysregulation, self-harm, suicidal behaviors, post-traumatic stress, eating disorders, and substance use. For clients struggling with self-harm or suicidal behavior, DBT gives therapy a clear structure: safety comes first, and clients build skills for tolerating distress and regulating emotions that they can use between sessions, not only in the therapy room.
At FRTC, Sarah provides individual therapy for teens and adults, as well as couples and family therapy. She takes a collaborative and nonjudgmental approach, working with each client to understand what is happening, set goals that matter to them, and make steady progress toward them.