Sarah Long, PsyD, LCP

Dr. Sarah Long is a licensed clinical psychologist in Denver, Colorado with more than 18 years of experience treating some of the most complex presentations she encounters — with particular focus on trauma, eating disorders, and psychedelic-assisted therapy. Her work is intensive by design — she is not a weekly check-in therapist. She is the clinician for people who are ready — not just for support, but for real change. The ones who have done the foundational work, know themselves reasonably well, and are wondering why they’re still stuck.

Sarah is also the team lead for the Assessment, Eating Disorders, and KAP teams at The Catalyst Center, where she specializes in therapy intensives, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, and collaborative psychological assessment. She works from a bio-psycho-social-spiritual framework, which means your history, your inner life, your nervous system and unique physiology, your relationships, and your sense of meaning are all held in the work we do together.

Who Sarah Is In The Room

Before she was a psychologist, Sarah was a competitive big mountain snowboarder, a downhill mountain biker, and a wildland firefighter on a helicopter rappel crew in Jackson, Wyoming. That background is not incidental. It shaped a nervous system that does not rattle easily — and a core, bone-deep belief that people can come through extraordinarily hard things.

In the therapy room, that translates to a calm, unhurried presence. Sarah does not have an agenda for how your healing should look or how fast it should move. She trusts the process — the medicine, the relationship, the timing — and she brings what she calls “clean presence”: no fear of what might come up, no need to steer you away from the hard parts.

She is also, in her own words, genuinely herself in the room. Warm and deeply compassionate — and grounded enough to sit with you in the unknown without needing to rush you out of it. She will not tell you what to do. She will be honest with you. She believes wholeheartedly in your capacity to heal.

Who I Work With

While Sarah works with a wide range of clients in assessment and KAP, she brings particular depth to communities she knows from the inside — populations often underserved by traditional mental health approaches. These are people whose lives involve high stakes, high intensity, and a particular kind of hardship that requires a clinician who actually gets it.

Extreme and Mountain Athletes

Sarah’s own background as a competitive big mountain snowboarder, snowboard coach, and wildland firefighter on a helicopter rappel crew in Jackson, Wyoming means she understands this culture from the inside — the intensity, the risk, the identity that gets built around doing challenging, and at times risky, things in big terrain.

She works with climbers, skiers, snowboarders, mountain bikers, and water sports athletes navigating trauma, catastrophic injury, and the particular grief that lives in this community — whether that’s the aftermath of an accident, the emotional weight of performance pressure, or the devastating loss that follows when the mountains take someone you love.

She also works with family members navigating grief and the aftermath of fatal accidents or career-ending injuries. Sarah has her own relationship with this kind of loss — which is part of why she shows up the way she does for this community.

Her approach integrates EMDR, IFS, and when appropriate, psychedelic-assisted therapy — tailored to where you are and what the situation actually calls for.

Veterans, First Responders, and the Families Who Carry the Trauma Too

Sarah grew up in a military family, and her father’s PTSD shaped her understanding of what the aftermath of war and military culture does to families — not just to the service member. She knows firsthand how trauma moves through a household, how children absorb what parents can’t say out loud, and how spouses and families are often holding just as much as the person who deployed or ran toward the fire.

She works with veterans, active duty service members, first responders, search and rescue personnel, and firefighters navigating trauma, moral injury, and the particular challenge of asking for help when your whole identity is built around not needing it. And she works with their families — spouses, partners, and adult children — who are often carrying a weight that nobody thinks to name.

Trauma and PTSD

Trauma is the thread that runs through most of Sarah’s work. Whether it shows up as PTSD, the aftermath of a single catastrophic event, or the slow accumulation of experiences that reshape how a person moves through the world, trauma lives in the nervous system long after the mind has tried to move on.

Sarah works from the understanding that trauma is not a character flaw or a story to be talked out of — it is a physiological imprint, and it responds to approaches that reach the body, not just the thinking mind. She draws on EMDR, Internal Family Systems (IFS), and when appropriate, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy to help clients access and process material that talk therapy alone often can’t reach.

She is especially drawn to people who have already done a lot of work and still feel stuck — who understand their history intellectually but can’t seem to get free of it. That stuck place is exactly where she does some of her best work.

Eating Disorders

Sarah has spent over 18 years working with adults navigating eating disorders and the trauma that almost always underlies them. She is not interested in symptom management for its own sake — she wants to understand what the eating disorder is doing, what it’s protecting, and what becomes possible when those roots are addressed directly.

Her approach is collaborative by nature. She will walk alongside you in this — not ahead of you, not behind you — which means the goals, the pace, and the treatment approach are built around you specifically, not a protocol. She draws from EMDR, IFS, mindful self-compassion, ACT, psychedelic-assisted therapy, and spiritual exploration when it fits. Sustainable recovery, in her experience, requires all of you — which is why the biopsychosocial-spiritual framework isn’t just a philosophy here. It’s practical.