Sarah Burke, MS, LCPC
Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor working with couples, postpartum clients, adolescents, women across life-stage, and grief
Sarah is one of two main couples therapists at Gryzbek Therapy in Naperville. She works integratively across postpartum mental health, marriage and family dynamics, adolescent therapy, women’s identity work, and grief — drawing on CBT, ACT, the Gottman Method, and attachment-based practice. Her clinical priority is a safe, non-judgmental room where the work can be honest without becoming heavy-handed.
- Couples + marriage work using the Gottman Method and attachment-based practice
- Postpartum mood, anxiety, and adjustment work in the perinatal period
- In-network with BCBS PPO, Aetna PPO, UHC PPO, Medicare
Matched to Sarah within 1 business day if she’s the right fit. No waitlist, no triage queue.
Education, license, and clinical training
- Display Name
- Sarah Burke, MS, LCPC — practices professionally as Sarah Burke
- Legal / Registry Name
- Sarah Elizabeth Petzold — license and NPI registered under legal name
- License Type
- LCPC — Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (Illinois)
- License Number
- 180.014573 (IL LCPC — registered under legal name Sarah Elizabeth Petzold)
- License State
- Illinois
- Year Licensed
- Graduate Degree
- MS in Mental Health Counseling — State University of New York at Albany
- Undergraduate
- State University of New York at Albany — Division I softball
- Secondary Affiliation
- DuPage County Board of Health — Emergency Services Counselor (since 2022-04-04)
- Languages
- English
- NPI Number
- 1477183739 (registered under Sarah Elizabeth Petzold)
- PSYPACT
- No — Sarah practices under Illinois licensure; PSYPACT telehealth scope is doctoral-only on our team (Joe-only)
- Specialty Training
- Gottman Method couples work · postpartum-aware perinatal practice · CBT · ACT · SFBT · attachment-based · Christian counselling
Independently licensed in Illinois. Every clinician on the Gryzbek team is licensed — not interns, not associates supervised by an off-site licensee.
What Sarah works on
Sarah’s caseload concentrates around couples and marriage work, postpartum mental health, women’s identity and life-stage transitions, adolescent therapy, and grief. Click any focus area below to read the full clinical page.
Communication, conflict, repair Marriage Counseling →
Gottman-Method-informed work Family Therapy →
System-level relational work Postpartum Therapy →
Mood, anxiety, adjustment, identity Adolescent Therapy →
Teen + emerging-adult work Grief & Bereavement →
Loss, anticipatory grief, complicated grief Women’s Issues Therapy →
Identity, life-stage transitions, role strain, perfectionism, body image
How Sarah works in the room
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT is one of Sarah’s primary structured approaches — for anxiety, low mood, and the cognitive patterns that show up in postpartum adjustment and adolescent work. The work focuses on identifying the thought-feeling-behavior loops driving distress and testing them against actual experience, rather than fighting them harder.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT lives alongside CBT in Sarah’s work, especially with clients carrying chronic worry, perfectionism, or the kind of identity-strain that shows up around postpartum transitions and life-stage shifts. The frame is values-first: what kind of life do you want to be building, and what would it look like to keep moving toward that even when the difficult thoughts and feelings come along.
Gottman Method for couples and marriage work
For couples and marriage work, Sarah draws on the Gottman Method — a research-based approach built around mapping relational conflict patterns, repairing rupture, and rebuilding the friendship and shared-meaning layers underneath the day-to-day strain. She is one of two main couples therapists on the Gryzbek team.
Attachment-based + Solution-Focused frame
Across relational work — couples, family, postpartum, adolescent — an attachment lens stays in the background: how the bond is currently functioning, where the rupture lives, what a secure version of the relationship would look like. For shorter-arc problem-focused work, Sarah also uses Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) — less archaeology, more building forward.
Behavioral activation & exposure-based work
For depression and the withdrawal-shutdown patterns that show up in postpartum and grief work, Sarah uses behavioral activation — re-introducing values-aligned activity gradually, in a way that respects what the nervous system can actually take on. Exposure-based work supports the anxiety side of the caseload where avoidance has narrowed daily life.
Populations & relational configurations
How sessions with Sarah work
In-network insurance
Sarah is paneled with the same in-network plans the rest of the team holds — BCBS PPO, Aetna PPO, United Healthcare PPO, and Medicare. For out-of-network plans, the practice bills the client’s OON benefits on their behalf — clients don’t submit superbills themselves.
In-person & Illinois telehealth
Sarah sees clients in-person at the N Mill Street office in Naperville and via secure Illinois telehealth across DuPage County and statewide. Couples work, postpartum work, and adolescent work are all available in either format — the choice is the client’s. Sarah practices under Illinois licensure, so telehealth clients need to be physically located in Illinois at the time of session.
Session length & treatment frame
Individual and couples sessions run 55 minutes in-office; telehealth sessions run 60 minutes. Most clients work in a 6-to-9-month frame, weekly to start, then spaced out as the work consolidates. The standard frame is honest about what therapy takes — not a six-session promise of resolution, not an open-ended commitment.
Background, approach, and what to expect in the room
Sarah Burke is a licensed therapist at Gryzbek Therapy in Naperville. Her caseload concentrates around couples and marriage work, postpartum mental health, women’s identity and life-stage transitions, adolescent therapy, and grief — with individual adult work across anxiety, depression, and adjustment alongside.
Her clinical approach is integrative and client-centered, drawing on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT), and the Gottman Method, with an attachment-based lens running underneath the relational work. Sarah tailors treatment to the person and the presentation — not the other way around — and prioritizes a safe, non-judgmental environment built on empathy, warmth, and unconditional support.
“The clinical priority is creating a safe, non-judgmental environment through empathy, warmth, and unconditional support.”
For couples and marriage work, Sarah is one of two main couples therapists on the Gryzbek team. The Gottman-Method-informed frame she uses maps the recurring conflict patterns inside a relationship, names the moments where rupture happens, and rebuilds the underlying friendship, fondness, and shared-meaning layers that hold a partnership together. The point isn’t to make conflict disappear — it’s to get better at the conflict you’re already in.
On the postpartum side, Sarah works across mood, anxiety, and adjustment in the perinatal period. The framing she brings is postpartum-aware rather than postpartum-only: an understanding that mood and anxiety symptoms in the perinatal period interact with sleep deprivation, identity transition, relational role-shift, and the practical logistics of new-parent life — and that treating any one of those in isolation usually misses the actual problem.
Sarah’s adolescent work overlaps with both her women’s-issues caseload and her adult-individual work — particularly with older teens and emerging adults where the themes (identity, perfectionism, body image, relational strain, life-stage anxiety) carry forward across the developmental line. Her grief and bereavement work covers acute loss, anticipatory grief alongside a serious diagnosis in the family, and complicated or prolonged grief that hasn’t resolved on the timeline outsiders often expect.
Outside the therapy room, Sarah’s background runs through competitive athletics — multiple sports growing up (dance, gymnastics, volleyball, basketball, softball) and Division I softball at the University at Albany in New York. She still plays recreational softball, supports the Chicago Cubs, and brings a writer’s discipline to the work as well: she has authored six full-length young-adult contemporary novels exploring athletics and adolescent mental health, with traditional publication as a working goal. The athletic-identity and writing-identity threads inform how she sits with clients working on perfectionism, performance, transition out of competitive sport, and the long arc of building an identity that holds up after a defining role ends.
Sarah lives in the western suburbs with her partner. Outside of clinical work, her leisure runs through reading, crime-drama television, running, baking, time with friends, travel, church, and outdoor recreation when the season cooperates — especially anything that gets her back on a softball field.
Find Sarah’s professional profiles
If Sarah sounds like the right fit, the next step is a conversation
Intake takes 5 to 10 minutes — we listen for what you’re working on, whether Sarah’s training and style fit, and what your schedule and insurance look like. If she’s the right match, you start with her. If another clinician on the team is a better fit, we’ll say so honestly. Matched within 1 business day either way.
In-network with BCBS, Aetna, UHC, Medicare · In-person on N Mill Street, Naperville · Statewide Illinois telehealth · consistently strong patient feedback