MEET SERA:

Relationships shape so much of how people experience themselves, others, and the world around them—and therapy can be a place to understand those connections more deeply. Sera Sezgin warmly welcomes individuals, couples, and families into a collaborative, compassionate, and culturally responsive space where they can feel heard, respected, and comfortable exploring what matters most. As a Master's Candidate Therapist in Clinical Psychology at Penn State Harrisburg, Sera has a particular passion for couples and family therapy. Having been raised between Türkiye and the United States, she brings a meaningful cross-cultural perspective to her work and understands that relationships, family experiences, identity, and culture can all influence the way people understand themselves and one another. Sera is also able to provide therapy in Turkish.

Sera's developing clinical approach is grounded in curiosity and collaboration, with particular interests in Cognitive Behavioral Family Therapy and Systemic Family Therapy. She helps clients explore how thoughts, emotions, behaviors, relationships, and family patterns can become interconnected—and how understanding those patterns can open the door to meaningful change. She is also interested in thoughtfully incorporating elements of solution-focused, psychodynamic, and Gestalt approaches based on each client's needs. Sera believes therapy works best as a partnership, with therapist and client working together rather than the therapist simply telling someone what to do. Her goal is to help clients gain insight while also identifying practical and meaningful ways to strengthen their lives and relationships.

Sera is particularly interested in working with individuals, couples, and families navigating relationship concerns, communication difficulties, recurring conflict, life transitions, stress, and challenges involving thoughts and emotions. Her background in cognitive psychology gives her a distinctive interest in how people remember, interpret, and make meaning of their experiences—especially within close relationships. Her current research explores how emotions can influence memories of the past and expectations for the future, and she is particularly fascinated by how cognitive biases and differences in memory may influence the way partners remember and interpret moments of conflict. For couples and families who feel caught in the same patterns, Sera hopes to help create greater understanding of what is happening beneath the conflict and support healthier ways of connecting.

Her passion for relational therapy began during her undergraduate studies, when a Clinical Psychology course with Dr. Selenga Gurmen introduced her to relational approaches to treatment. Sera later completed a six-month internship in a couples and family therapy clinic, where she observed therapy sessions and systemic interventions, and served as a research assistant on the Efficacy and Effectiveness of Couple's Therapy in Türkiye project. Her additional experiences with the Liman Psychiatry & Psychotherapy Center and the Women, Family, and Psychological Counseling Center exposed her to mental health care across different clinical, cultural, and socioeconomic contexts. At Penn State, her research experience has included work with the Human Memory Lab, Personality Lab, and Awareness & Community Engagement Lab. Together, these experiences have strengthened Sera's commitment to understanding each client within the context of their relationships, culture, experiences, and individual story.

As she continues developing as a clinician, Sera approaches her work with humility, openness, and a genuine desire to continue learning from her clients, supervisors, and colleagues. She recognizes that people are far more than the difficulties that bring them into therapy and believes that even longstanding patterns can become opportunities for greater awareness and connection. Whether someone comes to therapy individually, alongside a partner, or together as a family, Sera hopes to provide a space where clients can better understand themselves and one another, strengthen the relationships that matter most, and discover meaningful ways to move forward together.