Sabrina Lepine, M.S.W., R.S.W.

Registered Social Worker

Sabrina Lepine is a registered social worker with a special interest in providing psychotherapy for individuals struggling with eating disorders, posttraumatic stress, and/or emotional difficulties. Within this scope, Sabrina frequently supports clients with problems related to body image, exercise, impulse control, unrelenting standards, rigidity, transitions, low self-worth, avoidance, identity, relationships, anger, panic, fear, self-harm, suicidal thinking, anxiety, depression, emotional numbness, understanding emotions, and feeling overwhelmed by emotions. Regarding trauma-focused therapy, Sabrina has found her niche in working with police officers.

Sabrina’s personal and professional backgrounds have contributed to the values, frameworks, and interpersonal style that shape her practice. Her therapeutic approach is founded on these pillars: conceptualization, education, and reinforcement.

Conceptualization involves collaboratively developing a clear understanding of each client and making sense of how they got to where they are. Education enhances conceptualization by highlighting the role of biology and learning processes that may have contributed to mental health struggles. Reinforcement becomes part of the discussion when client and therapist examine the factors that strengthen unwanted patterns of thinking and behaving, and then determine how to create new patterns. Sabrina’s goal is to empower clients to understand how problems develop and how change can occur – to help them “make sense” of themselves. Of course, logic and understanding doesn’t make change easy, so Sabrina offers needed encouragement and validation to clients while they do really hard stuff.

Empathy, compassion, and openness are qualities that Sabrina aims to bring to her work. Some directness, bad humour, and tastefully placed swear words are also to be expected.

Sabrina has worked in outpatient and inpatient mental healthcare settings. She has experience in program development, supervision, group facilitation, and individual psychotherapy. Sabrina has training in standard dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), DBT for eating disorders (DBT-ED), cognitive processing therapy (CPT), and the unified protocol (UP; a transdiagnostic cognitive behavioural therapy protocol). The approach(es) Sabrina uses is determined by the outcome of case conceptualization and client preference.

Outside of work, Sabrina can typically be found doing crafty things and soaking up warm weather. She loves listening to music and podcasts, playing Jeopardy, and watching hockey with her husband and cat.