Sarah Finch, M.A. LMFT

“The desire to create Nido Individual & Family Therapy has flourished over the past decade since walking my own path towards healing and becoming a healer myself. But it has also been generations in the making.

I am a daughter of a second generation Colombian woman and a granddaughter of immigrants from Colombia, South America. My grandparents were both raised by single mothers living in poverty. My grandmother was used as a criada (a house servant) from a very young age. She only attended school until 5th grade, and could barely afford one meal a day.

My grandparents immigrated to the U.S. as young adults and soon after had four children. It is known (but not talked about) that my grandparents experienced trauma after trauma throughout their lives in Colombia and in the process of moving to the U.S. However, because they were ostracized for their unfamiliar language and dark faces, they were neglected by the dominant culture in the United States.

My grandparents never considered therapy, as it was believed to solely be for those who had the resources: the white and the wealthy. Compounded by this belief, therapy was stigmatized — admitting that something might have been wrong or that help was needed would have induced shame.

The many barriers to their own healing, like their lack of education regarding mental health, willingness, financial means, and available resources, further perpetuated harm and caused severe trauma for their own four children. Physical beatings, sibling sexual abuse, and religious control poisoned their home. Their children developed C-PTSD, anxiety, depression, drug addictions, and eating disorders. In desperation for help, my own mother attempted suicide at age 15. Her need for psychological help, despite her insistence and willingness, was not met, which perpetuated harm again for the next generation of children.

My mother, having survived the trauma she had endured, suffered a great deal into her adulthood. Those years consisted of an unplanned pregnancy at age 23 and more abusive partnerships.

Inevitably, these circumstances exposed me to an array of traumatic and abusive environments. At the hands of one of my mother’s partners, I became a victim of child torture and faced many years of aggravated abuse and inhumane disciplinary punishments. These experiences deeply impacted my development and the ways I interacted with myself and the world around me, creating survival strategies and coping mechanisms I eventually had to find the courage to process in my own therapy years later.

Simultaneously, my father’s family was marked by generations of alcoholism and numerous forms of emotional and physical abuse. My alcoholic grandfather did not get the support he needed, which resulted in him abusing his children, including his oldest son, my father. Therapy wasn’t utilized for my father to recover from his childhood and he, too, learned unhealthy ways of relating to others in his early adult years.

When we don’t heal from our traumatic experiences, we are more vulnerable to perpetuate harm in the similar ways that we were victims to it.

I share parts of my own personal story and the generations before me to show: if my grandparents would have received the mental health support they needed, their lives, my parents lives, and my own would be astronomically different.

This is one example of why psychotherapy needs to be more accessible to all — to get the care and support we need to heal from our trauma and to end patterns of abuse and harm.

At age 15, I initiated therapy for myself without the consent of my parents and began my healing journey. Since then, I have continued therapy, healing from my past and breaking generational patterns for my future.

Now, as a therapist, myself, I work with countless clients whose grandparents and parents could not afford support or were misinformed about psychotherapy and unintentionally hurt their children in the same ways that they were hurt. 

Creating Nido is my ancestral cry — it is a living, breathing response to the silence and neglect that haunted my family for generations, and it exists to breaks the cycle not just for me but for all of us. Every person who comes to Nido has the capacity to create new cycles of care, and that care extends to everyone in their lives.

My clients are cycle breakers.

This is why Nido Individual & Family Therapy is so important to me.”