Sally Novak

Dr. Sally Novak is an integrative psychotherapist, licensed clinical social worker, and doctor of Chinese Medicine — and the range of experience she brings to her work is genuinely rare. Over more than 20 years in mental health care, she has worked within the Department of Defense specializing in trauma and addiction, alongside children and families, and in private practice with adults and adolescents. Whatever the setting, her approach has always been the same: meet people with curiosity, compassion, and a deep belief in their ability to heal.

One thing Sally has come to understand clearly over the course of her career is how inseparable the physical, emotional, and spiritual sides of pain really are. She doesn't believe in one-size-fits-all care — and her training reflects that. She draws fluidly from somatic and narrative therapies, Chinese medicine, and integrative psychiatry, weaving together whatever combination of approaches will best serve the person sitting across from her.

At the heart of everything Sally does is a strengths-based philosophy. She's not looking for what's wrong with you — she's looking for what's already right, and building from there. She helps patients tap into their own resilience and inner resources as they find their footing through life's harder seasons. As she often puts it: "I'm not here to fix you — because you are not broken. I'm just here to help you turn the light on so you can more clearly see the way forward."

One thing Sally has learned over years of clinical work is that physical, emotional, and spiritual pain rarely travel alone — they tend to show up together. That's why she doesn't rely on any single approach. She draws from a wide range of evidence-based and integrative tools — including somatic and narrative techniques, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and clinical hypnosis — and brings in whatever combination will actually serve the person in front of her.

What makes Sally's practice especially distinctive is that her toolkit doesn't stop at psychotherapy. She is also a licensed acupuncturist, Chinese herbal medicine practitioner, and certified 200-hour yoga teacher. That depth of training across Eastern and Western healing traditions means she can support patients in a genuinely whole-person way — and in her experience, the patients who need that kind of integrated care? That's most of us.

At GWCIM, Sally works with a diverse range of adult patients, with a particular focus on trauma, life transitions, and the emotional weight that often comes with chronic illness and cognitive decline — areas where mental health support is deeply needed but too often overlooked.

She is a key provider in GWCIM's ReCODE Program, a comprehensive integrative protocol for patients navigating mild cognitive impairment and early Alzheimer's risk. Within this program, Sally offers individual psychotherapy and leads two weekly online support groups — one for patients themselves, and one for their family members and caregivers. Because she knows firsthand that cognitive decline doesn't just affect the person with the diagnosis. It ripples through the whole family.

Sally also provides Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) at GWCIM, working as part of a carefully coordinated team to support patients with treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, and other conditions that haven't fully responded to conventional treatment. And across all of her work at GWCIM, she collaborates closely with Dr. Mikhail Kogan, Ajowa Infateyo, Dr. Marianna Ledenac, Hannah Fine, and the broader integrative medicine team — because in her view, truly good care is always a team effort.