| Sharon Starobin | Vivian Blanc |
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| Associates Susan A. Kurtz, LSW |
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Sharon Starobin
For Sharon Starobin, the experience of marriage and family therapy has always been active and dynamic. The opportunity to work with an infinitely diverse population one person at a time enables the pursuit of a closely held belief in each person, where the value of the entire world may be contained.
A member of the prestigious AAMFT since 1987, Sharon’s reputation as an expert therapist proceeds from her fundamental philosophy that all people are products of family systems, no matter how large, small, healthy or troubled. To do family therapy does not mean that families need to be physically in the office with a therapist. It is more a frame of reference for the counselor, an architecture of the exploration of whatever issues a client may present.
Sharon is the former Clinical Director of Tressler Lutheran Services (now Diakon). She worked for Tressler for 23 years. Her career spans more than 30 years culminating in the private practice she now maintains with her business partner, Vivian Blanc. Sharon has extensive post graduate training in areas relating to marriage, sexuality, depression, anxiety, adolescence, and chemical dependency.
A mother and grandmother, Sharon grew up in Newark, New Jersey. She has
been a resident of Central Pennsylvania since 1970.
Vivian Blanc
Human lifetimes are accumulations of experience—some individual, some collective. Often there is a tension between those experiences we can control and those we can not. For Vivian Blanc, it is the sensitive and thoughtful interweaving of those experiences that shape the value and purpose of a meaningful life.
A member of the National Board of Certified Counselors for more that ten years, Vivian fuels her professional efforts with a belief in the capacity of human resilience. Over many years doing challenging work with groups of international refugees, her core beliefs about experiential commonality as a tool to build human relationships continues to grow.
Vivian invests her work with the power and importance of families. Everyone comes from a family of some sort, and it is this central truth that helps shape the structure of her work. While present or past family life may define a source of consternation and dysfunction for many clients, Vivian believes that healthy families also hold the promise for profound and fundamental change; that they can support individuals, and by extension, collectively under-gird society.
Vivian works with individual adults and adolescents, couples, and families. She has extensive training in issues pertaining to compulsive gambling, refugee mental health, marriage and family counseling, and more. She is sensitive to the intense stresses that press and constrain many people in the modern world. Her work often helps clients tease apart the knots of tangled, intractable “to-do” pressures from lives of meaning based in human interaction and personal growth.
Vivian and her own family have been residents of Central Pennsylvania for
twenty-six years.
