Dedicated to serving the transgender community…

Sara Fackelman, a licensed mental health therapist practicing in the Tampa Bay area for more than twenty years, is extending her practice to the transgender community. The daughter of a retried naval officer and native New Yorker, Sara was often the “new kid” in the class.  Her need to continually make new friends and to meet new people led her to reach out to others for relationship.  She has turned this wonderful experience into an ability to direct her life into a profession where she can continue to reach out and help people move towards their goals and a new future.

Sara has spent much of her life in Florida.  She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Religious Studies at the University of South Florida and completed a Master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling at Springfield College.  She has also pursued doctoral work in Theocentric Counseling and Higher Education. Sara Fackelman is a licensed Mental Health Therapist, a Certified Addictions Professional in the State of Florida and is currently ABD (all but dissertation) for a doctorate in Clinical Sexology.  Recently, she received her board certification in Gender Therapy from ITCA (International Transgender Counseling Association) as well as a board certification in sex therapy.  Sara also holds certifications in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitation & Reprocessing) and REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy), practices DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy) and Hypnotherapy.   She warmly  invites the community to support her efforts and welcomes interactions and questions regarding her continuing awareness platform, A Trans Life Matters.

More about Sara…

Already successfully counseling individuals and couples in her practice, A Life Matters, her areas of expertise include grief and loss and addictions counseling.  She is a professional counselor experienced in helping people who have self-esteem and relationship issues, are dealing with the loss of a loved one, living with depression, enduring feelings of loneliness, and even experiencing guilt over the need to place a family member into a nursing home.  Sara emphasizes, “I work with a wide range of emotional and behavioral issues, providing services that span these issues and more in a comfortable and supportive atmosphere.  I offer a higher personalized approach tailored to each of my clients’ individual needs to help attain the personal growth they’re striving for.”

With the Gulfport, FL and surrounding Tampa Bay area already having a significant transgender population, Sara has recently opened a second counseling practice in the Gulfport in Pinellas County further reaching out to the entire Bay area with her additional platform, A Trans Life Matters.  Although she has compassionately addressed the gambit of counseling issues with her clients in the past, her goal is to extend her services to the area’s transgender community.  She aims to offer the transgender population specialized support through individual therapy, lectures, seminars and social media.  Sara Fackelman currently holds membership affiliations locally with Transaction Florida, Equality Florida, GayBor and the Tampa Bay Business Guild.  Nationally, she is affiliated with WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgendered Health) and GLMA (Gay and Lesbian Medical Association).

With Sara Fackelman’s platform, A Trans Life Matters, she feels transgender individuals deserve this much needed support. “Having been strongly involved in supporting the LGBT community for more than twenty-five years, I would like to see the rights of transgender individuals become more equally inclusive with the further expanding rights of gays, lesbians and bisexuals.  The “T”in “LGBT” should be equally capitalized in context verses being attached as a small “t”in many circumstances, both literally and figuratively thus promoting more cohesion in the LGBT movement as a whole.  After witnessing the inequality geared toward African-Americans in the 1960’s, today I see many similarities in the unjust treatment of people who identify as LGBT and especially as transgender.  Fighting for the rights of transgender individuals is America’s present-day civil rights movement.  When we champion for the rights of transgender people to receive equality, fairness and compassion, we fight for the humane rights of all people in our society.”