DR. SARAH KAMDAR

Hello! My name is Dr. Sarah Kamdar and I am a licensed clinical psychologist in private practice in Santa Monica, CA. I work with adolescents, adults and couples. I provide both traditional in-office therapy as well as tele-health, which is online talk therapy with the help of Doxy, a HIPAA compliant video chat that mimics a real life session, complete with a waiting room and personalized URL that is easy, reliable and convenient. My goal is to provide support, comfort and direction in our ever-changing, fast paced world where flexibility and thinking outside the box is necessary.

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I am a general practitioner who has experience working with all age groups and presenting symptoms. I conceptualize our work together from a psychodynamic, object-relations perspective, which is a fancy way to say that I believe patterns of behavior are created as a way to guard ourselves from the things that hurt us, both currently and in our past. Object relations theory is a branch of psychodynamic thought that focuses on relationships being more crucial to personality development than temperament or instinct. Over time, the same patterns that protected us when we were young, begin to no longer work in our favor. For example, if you felt that you were consistently misunderstood or overlooked as a child, you may have protected yourself by not wanting communicate your needs. The feeling of being overlooked may have caused hurt and vulnerability that your younger self did not know how to deal with, and therefore left you feeling like you were unimportant. But as we get older and we have relationships where we are not clearly expressing our needs, and in turn, frustrated by not having our needs met, we need to start to focus on breaking down those guards, also known as defenses. The therapy process includes using our time together to discuss why those defenses were created by our younger selves, why we needed them at that time, and how they succeeded in protecting us. Our journey would take a natural path into how those same defenses that once protected us, are no longer doing their job, and in fact, may be hurting our current relationships because they keep us from communicating effectively and being understood and visible in a way that we have always longed for. Our work thus becomes about trusting those we have chosen to have in our lives, why they deserve to be given the opportunity to be trusted, and how we can work on lowering those defenses that are no longer working in our favor. I hope that this small example helps explain how I operate as a therapist and also how therapy can help you grow on an individual level and in broader terms.