Sage Insight Therapy

Home
United States
Salt Lake City, UT
Sage Insight Therapy

Website

Sage Insight Therapy is a private practice based in Salt Lake City, UT, providing personalized mental health care for adult individuals and couples.

The practice is led by licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Margaret Bryden, MBA, CMHC.

11/02/2026

Some thoughts arrive beautifully organized. Others arrive as a tangled mess of half-sentences, contradictions, questions, and feelings we haven’t figured out yet.

I actually think those messy thoughts are worth listening to. They can contain the beginning of something important. Writing them down gives us a place to notice patterns, follow a feeling, or discover a thought we didn’t know we were carrying.

This is one reason I love poetry. It gives us permission to explore before we understand. How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health & Resilience grew out of that same belief: sometimes the messy version is where the most honest work begins.

You can explore more of the book and my approach to mental health at www.sageinsighttherapy.com.

10/30/2026

Grief can hold a surprising amount of emotion.

You might feel:

• Angry about what happened
• Relieved that something has ended
• Joyful when a good memory comes back
• Sad about what you’re leaving behind
• Hopeful about what comes next

There is room for all of it.

One of the things I find meaningful about grief work is learning to stay curious about what each feeling carries. Sometimes an emotion is connected to a memory. Sometimes it points toward love, change, freedom, longing, or something we deeply valued.

Poetry can give those complicated feelings somewhere to go. That’s one of the reasons How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health & Resilience means so much to me.

If you’re moving through a season of grief or transition, I hope these pages give you a place to pause, reflect, and find your own words for what you’re carrying.

10/27/2026

There are some words about your work that stay with you. This is one of those moments.

Thank you, Dr. Nile Stanley, for taking the time to read How I Understand It and for understanding what I hoped to create with it. Writing a book that brings together memoir, poetry, mental health, and therapeutic reflection has been a deeply personal experience, and it means so much to have that intention recognized.

If you’ve been curious about How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health & Resilience, I hope this review gives you a little sense of what you’ll find inside.

Learn more about the book and my work at www.sageinsighttherapy.com.

10/24/2026

Here’s a small practice I use when I want to slow down and check in with myself.

Take three minutes. Name three feelings. Notice where each one shows up in your body. Then ask yourself what might be underneath them. You don’t need to solve anything. You’re simply giving yourself a few uninterrupted minutes to listen.

I think we underestimate what can happen when we pause long enough to notice our internal experience. A feeling can become a clue. A physical sensation can become information. A few quiet minutes can create enough space for something important to surface.

This kind of curiosity is central to the work I write about in How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health & Resilience.

If you find yourself wanting to explore those feelings a little further, "How I Understand It" offers more prompts and reflections to help you slow down and listen inward.

10/21/2026

Sometimes a client has plenty to say and still can’t find the words for what is happening underneath it all.

That’s one place where poetry can become surprisingly useful in therapy. A metaphor, an image, a single line, even a strange combination of words can give us something to explore together. Instead of asking the client to explain everything perfectly, we can become curious about what they chose to put on the page.

I wrote How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health & Resilience partly with therapists in mind because I believe creative expression can open meaningful doors into emotional experience. The goal isn’t to interpret someone’s poem for them. It’s to help them discover what the words mean in their own world.

If you’re a therapist or mental health professional, I hope How I Understand It becomes a useful resource for your practice, and a starting point for some meaningful conversations.

10/20/2026

Shame wants you to hide. Writing is one way to refuse.

Margaret Bryden joins me on Stories and Stanza to talk about what shame really is, why it thrives in silence, and how putting your experience on the page can start to loosen its grip.

You don't have to write well. You just have to write it down.

Full conversation on YouTube and any podcast app. Search Stories and Stanza.

Thank you PodMatch

10/18/2026

One of the things I find most interesting about emotions is how comfortable they are with contradiction.

You can be genuinely happy for someone and still wish you had what they have. You can miss a chapter of your life and feel grateful that it ended. You can feel excited about something new while also feeling completely terrified. These feelings can sit beside each other without one needing to cancel the other.

I think there is something valuable in giving ourselves permission to hold the “and.” It creates room for curiosity, and curiosity often leads us closer to understanding what our emotions are trying to tell us. That is a big part of the work explored in How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health & Resilience. 💛

For more reflections on mental health, resilience, and the ideas behind the book, visit www.sageinsighttherapy.com.

10/15/2026

I think there’s an important difference between expressing a feeling and understanding it.

Writing, talking, crying, creating, or simply saying “I’m fine” can help us give shape to what is happening inside. But sometimes the more interesting question comes after the expression: What is this feeling trying to tell me? What does it reveal about what I need, value, fear, or hope for? That curiosity is where deeper self-understanding can begin.

That idea is at the heart of How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health & Resilience. Poetry gives us room to slow down, listen to ourselves, and explore the meaning underneath the words.

You can learn more about the book and Sage Insight Therapy at www.sageinsighttherapy.com.

10/13/2026

Have you ever replayed a conversation in your head, searching for the moment you could have said something differently?

Reflection can help us understand an experience, recognize a pattern, and decide what we want to do next. Rumination tends to keep us circling the same thoughts, often leaving us feeling more stuck or distressed.

One helpful clue is to notice what happens as you think. Are you gaining a new perspective, or are you repeating the same questions without getting closer to an answer? If you find yourself going in circles, try writing down what happened, what you learned, and one small step you can take now. You can acknowledge the experience while giving your mind somewhere new to go.

For more reflections on emotional awareness and resilience, explore my book, How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health & Resilience. Visit sageinsighttherapy.com to learn more about the book and my therapy practice.

09/30/2026

No special talent required. No perfect words. No clever metaphors. Just honesty.

I love poetry for that reason. It gives us permission to put something real on the page without worrying about whether it sounds impressive. Sometimes a few honest lines can help us notice a feeling, understand an experience, or finally give words to something we've been carrying for a while.

That spirit is at the heart of How I Understand It: A Bad Poet’s Guide to Mental Health & Resilience. I wrote it for anyone curious about themselves and willing to explore their inner world with a little more honesty and curiosity. The book launches September 1. Visit Sage Insight Therapy to learn more.

Address

Salt Lake City, UT

Website

http://www.SageInsightTherapy.com/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Sage Insight Therapy posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.