Dr. Sarah Jane
PhD, MEd, MA, MSW Candidate
Dr. Sarah Jane, PhD, MEd, MA, SSW, is the founder of Collective Healing, a human-centered, safety-centered practice working across people, professional practice, organizations, and systems.
Her work brings together more than a decade of experience in education, mental health, disability, research, community care, and systems change. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies, with scholarship in Madness Studies, Disability Studies, trauma, affect, critical love, and the ways institutions shape how human distress is understood. She also holds an MEd in Education, Culture and Society and is completing an MSW in Clinical Social Work at Syracuse University.
Dr. Jane’s work is grounded in a simple question: What changes when we stop seeing people primarily through the lens of deficit, pathology, or institutional expectations and instead begin with context, strengths, safety, and the full human experience?
Through Collective Healing, she develops family support programs, professional training, organizational assessments, quality improvement initiatives, research, and policy-focused projects. Her work is particularly concerned with protective responses that are often labeled resistance, the role of bias in professional interpretation, disability and neurodivergence, family systems, grief and trauma, institutional harm, and the design of safer and more responsive systems of care.
Dr. Jane has worked across community mental health, substance-use treatment, higher education, disability advocacy, family support, curriculum development, and organizational training. She has presented nationally and internationally on madness, disability, love, education, and inclusion, and has provided workplace disability training through Disability:IN Utah.
What distinguishes her approach is the ability to move among multiple levels of a system: the person receiving care, the professional providing it, the organization structuring it, and the broader policies and institutions that shape what is possible.
At Collective Healing, Dr. Jane brings those perspectives together to help build safer systems, stronger families, and better tomorrows.
Let’s work together.
I know this can feel overwhelming.
If you’re comfortable, share a little about what you’re facing below, and I’ll reach out soon to see how I can support you.
-
“It was kind of a nightmare,” says Phinney of Miami.
To say Christina Phinney felt overwhelmed when she was facing a divorce after 18 years of marriage would be an understatement.
Phinney was asking her attorney for therapeutic advice, organizational advice, and relationship advice—at hundreds of dollars per hour.
And that’s when she learned about divorce coaches, a relatively new concept designed for people just like Phinney.
-
Divorce Coaching is a supplement to legal support
Divorce coaches don’t replace divorce attorneys, but they are designed to help clients handle everything surrounding the divorce, including offering emotional support and relationship advice, paperwork assistance, and financial guidance.
-
Empowerment Coaching
As your Divorce Doula, we empower you to embrace this transition as an opportunity for personal growth. Through coaching sessions, we work together to set goals, rediscover your strengths, and build a foundation for a fulfilling post-divorce life.
-
New Field and Growing!
It’s a relatively new concept that’s grown steadily in the last decade, according to the divorce coaches interviewed by the ABA Journal, adding to a cadre of growing grassroots support systems ranging from retreats to organizational services to meditative workshops for those contemplating and going through divorces.
-
A few hundred dollars per hour, is it worth it?
“Divorce has many pinnacles,” Medwin explains. “It’s like having another job, especially if you have young children. Everyone could benefit from a divorce coach, whether from an emotional or organizational standpoint.”
-
The case for a divorce coach
Medwin says adding a divorce coach to the team often lowers the total cost of the divorce because they will work with the client on how to efficiently communicate with their co-parent and attorney.
“We help them focus on the business side of the divorce: ‘How do you get across what you want to say ” Medwin says.
-
I don’t have anyone else to talk to about it,
Divorce coaches, Newman says, are able to speak with people going through the process with empathy and compassion, and they can help them stay focused on the tasks at hand.
“Plus,” she says, “It is much less expensive to have someone call a divorce coach to complain about the other spouse’s behavior than to call the divorce attorney.”
‘I know you’re not a therapist, and that this isn’t the best use of your time,’ or ‘I know that you’re too expensive for me to be discussing this with, it’s not a legal issue, but I don’t have anyone else to talk to about it,’” Kahn says.
-
only regret that she has about hiring a divorce attorney is that she didn’t do it sooner.
For those clients, who want someone to help them with the big picture involving personal, emotional and practical plans, discussions and strategies, a divorce coach may be a helpful hire and could perhaps avoid the smattering of personal anecdotes and potentially unhelpful or even harmful advice that comes from surveying family, friends and acquaintances about their own divorce experiences,” she adds.
-
Save money and time
Fees for divorce coaches range from $50 to $300 per hour depending on location and experience, but the divorce coaches say they can actually save their clients money because they tend to charge significantly less than attorneys.
When they do, he says, they can be a cost-effective, helpful, and supporting resource—especially for those navigating the financial and technical complexities of the process.