ABOUT SAHAR
I'm interested in what happens underneath the lives we're building.
I’m Dr. Sahar Martinez—a therapist, professor, founder, speaker, and mental-health advocate.
My work is rooted in a simple curiosity: why we become who we become, what happens when the old ways stop working, and how we make room for whoever we’re becoming next.
WHERE IT STARTED
I started in the therapy room.
For nearly two decades, my work has centered on understanding people: how we attach, protect ourselves, survive difficult experiences, navigate relationships, carry our families with us, and slowly become more fully ourselves.
As a therapist, my work is attachment-focused, trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and deeply influenced by Internal Family Systems.
But somewhere along the way, the questions I was asking started getting bigger. I became interested not only in how individuals heal, but in the environments and systems we ask them to heal within.
Workplaces. Families. Healthcare systems. The internet. Entrepreneurship. Motherhood. Mental-health systems themselves.
And that curiosity began taking my work outside the therapy room.
Psychology belongs everywhere humans do.
Today, my work spans therapy, teaching, speaking, entrepreneurship, and mental-health advocacy.
BUILDING THE PROCESS
Eventually, the questions got bigger than one therapy room.
I founded The Process Wellness Collective because I wanted to create a different kind of space for therapy—one grounded in culturally responsive care, relationship, community, and the belief that both clients and clinicians deserve environments where they can thrive.
But building a therapy practice exposed another problem.
Making therapy affordable too often means asking therapists to absorb the cost through lower wages, larger caseloads, unpaid labor, and burnout dressed up as service. I couldn't reconcile a model of mental-health accessibility that required exploiting the people providing the care. So I founded The Process Wellness Foundation around a different question:
What if we could make therapy more accessible without making therapists disposable?
That question continues to shape how I think about mental health, leadership, work, care, and the systems we build around people.
BEYOND THE BIO
There isn't one version of me doing this work.
I'm the therapist sitting across from someone telling me the thing they've never said out loud.
I'm the professor asking future clinicians to question what they've been taught.
I'm the founder looking at a spreadsheet trying to figure out how to make the numbers work without compromising the values.
I'm the speaker translating psychology into something people can take back into their actual lives.
I'm a first-generation daughter shaped by the courage, expectations, contradictions, and stories that travel through families.
I'm a mother continually discovering that raising children introduces you to parts of yourself no graduate program adequately prepares you for.
And I'm still figuring things out, too. That matters to me.
Because I don't believe expertise requires pretending you've arrived.
A few places you can find me
Psychology, identity, leadership, motherhood, ambition, belonging, and the nervous system.
For Therapists
Supervision, consultation, education, and spaces for clinicians to grow.
Essays and conversations about psychology, relationships, motherhood, identity, and becoming.
Speaking
Psychology, identity, leadership, motherhood, ambition, belonging, and the nervous system.
THE OFFICIAL VERSION
Credentials, training & the things that fit neatly in a bio.
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist #111456
Doctor of Psychology
Certified Perinatal Mental Health Professional (PMH-C)
AAMFT Approved Clinical Supervisor
AAMFT Minority Fellow
Advanced Trainings
Internal Family Systems (Levels 1 & 2)
Emotionally Focused Therapy w. Dr. Susan Johnson
Intimacy From the Inside Out w. Toni Herbine Blank
Somatic Attachment
Ketamine-Assisted Therapy
Brainspotting (Level 1)
Adjunct faculty at Alliant University and Chapman University