Meet Jermaine Sullivan
Therapy should be more than simply talking about the same problems week after week. I believe meaningful change often comes from understanding not only what you are experiencing, but what is happening beneath the surface—and helping your mind and body develop new ways of responding.
I am a Licensed Professional Counselor whose clinical work is informed not only by professional training, but by many years of experience supporting people through difficult transitions, relationships, questions of identity and meaning, and periods of significant emotional distress. My work today is especially focused on trauma, anxiety, relationship difficulties, betrayal trauma, and compulsive sexual behaviors.
An Integrative Approach to Therapy
No single approach works for every person. I draw from a range of evidence-based and experiential approaches depending on the needs of the person sitting across from me.
My advanced training includes EMDR, clinical hypnosis, Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT) training, and Gottman Method Couples Therapy. My work is also informed by ego-state and parts-oriented approaches, attachment theory, cognitive and behavioral therapies, mindfulness, and nervous-system regulation.
What matters to me isn’t simply collecting techniques. It’s understanding how to use them thoughtfully.
Sometimes therapy involves examining beliefs and patterns. Sometimes it means helping the nervous system experience safety differently. Sometimes we need to understand the parts of ourselves that seem to be pulling in opposite directions. And sometimes the most important work happens within a relationship—learning to communicate, rebuild trust, tolerate vulnerability, or reconnect emotionally and sexually.
Going Beyond Symptom Management
Anxiety, compulsive behaviors, relationship conflict, emotional disconnection, and trauma symptoms rarely exist in isolation. They often developed for understandable reasons, even when those patterns are no longer serving us.
My approach is curious rather than judgmental.
Instead of only asking, “How do we stop this symptom?” I am often interested in another question:
“What is this response trying to accomplish, protect, or communicate?”
Understanding that can open the door to deeper and more lasting change.
Therapy That Makes Room for the Whole Person
People bring more than symptoms into therapy. They bring relationships, families, histories, cultures, values, sexuality, spirituality, questions, strengths, and contradictions.
I want therapy to provide room for all of those things.
My own background includes many years of community and faith leadership, where I had the privilege of supporting people through difficult relationships, loss, questions of identity and meaning, and significant life transitions. Those experiences preceded my clinical career and helped shape my respect for the complexity of people’s stories.
For clients for whom faith or spirituality is important, those beliefs can be incorporated into therapy when desired. For others, therapy may have little or nothing to do with spirituality. I also welcome clients whose experiences with religion have been complicated, painful, or who no longer identify with a faith tradition. My role is not to impose a particular worldview, but to understand the world as you experience it and help you move toward the life and relationships you want.
Above all, I want the people I work with to experience therapy as collaborative. You bring expertise about your own life. I bring clinical training, experience, curiosity, and a growing collection of tools for helping people change.
Together, we determine what is most useful for you.