Hi, I'm Carolyn
Therapist, author, TEDx speaker, and someone who has sat on both sides of this work. Thirty years in the room, and still finding it the most interesting place to be.
Finding the funny in hard conversations is second nature to me, and it's one of the things my clients tend to find most surprising. They expect the couch, the nodding, the careful neutrality. What they get is direct, warm, occasionally irreverent, and deeply grounded in thirty years of clinical training and the hard-won wisdom of my own life.
I'm a licensed therapist, award winning author of Fire It Up, and TEDx speaker based in West Newbury on the North Shore of Massachusetts. I work with couples who want to stop having the same fight and start building something better, and with women in midlife who are done living for everyone else and ready to find their way back to themselves. In both cases the work is the same at its core: understanding what's actually driving your patterns, and building the skills and the courage to change them.
I use a PACT-informed approach (Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy), which draws on neuroscience, attachment theory, and arousal regulation to get underneath the dynamics that feel most stuck. It works, and it tends to work faster than people expect.
The road here wasn't straight.
I've been in this work since the early 1990s, and what brought me here is personal as much as professional. My career began in some of the most challenging corners of the field, working with children and families navigating severe trauma and attachment disorders, which gave me an early and lasting respect for how much the relationships we grow up in shape every relationship that follows. That's as true for the couples I work with as it is for the women who come to me carrying decades of putting everyone else first.
I came to couples work through training with Stan Tatkin, PsyD, the founder of PACT, and was immediately hooked. The approach creates real-time change in the room rather than just talking about what happened at home, and I've been building on it ever since.
In my own life I know the pain of a failed marriage and the joy of building something extraordinary the second time around. My husband and I recently moved from the West Coast to the North Shore of Massachusetts, where we are thoroughly enjoying an empty house, a lot of dogs, and a part of the world that keeps surprising us.
On connection...and why it matters more than we think
In 2025 I spoke at TEDxHartford about something I've watched play out in my office for three decades: what happens to us when we stop being curious about each other, and what becomes possible when we start again.
If you want to get a feel for how I think before we ever meet, this is a good place to start.
What my clients have said
"Carolyn, you were amazing. Present, solid, unbiased, intelligent, engaged. So, so helpful for both of us and that's a f***ing miracle." — J & M
"Carolyn Sharp is an incredible coach and therapist, candid, honest, and remarkably knowledgeable about humans and relationships. I've never met anyone who understands people as well as she does." — Parker A.
