Living Sanctuary Counseling Center - Sarasota, Florida

Amariah D.

I strongly encourage anyone looking into counseling here to go elsewhere. I came here for couples counseling in 2018 and it was such a strange and unprofessional experience.

To start with the simple things, if you need to use the restroom while you're on site, the only one available is inside the preschool that also operates at this same church and the door doesn't really close properly because the bathroom is meant for toddlers who would need assistance in the bathroom.

On the more serious stuff, in our first session the counselor was recommending "holistic" herbs and supplements that we should go out and purchase to numb our emotions to be able to talk about them if we started getting overwhelmed through the counseling process. At the time this rubbed me the wrong way, but now having seen a professional and ethical counselor I realize how much of a red flag this is.

On another occasion, we were trying to get help dealing with the emotional challenges of dealing with infertility and instead of helping us with the emotional or relational aspects of this as is a counselors job, he started making medical recommendations without knowing any of our medical history, and of course without having an credentials to be doing so, as he is not a medical doctor.

There were so many other small things peppered throughout our short time there, that now with some distance from the experience and having worked with a real counselor I see how problematic it all was. There are lots of great Christian counselors in the Sarasota/Bradenton area. Skip this one and keep looking.