Online counseling in north carolina
Counseling for Professional Moms in charlotte, north carolina
Therapy For overwhelmed working Moms
It’s a Sunday afternoon and you’re at the kitchen table with your laptop open to the work that’s due Tuesday morning. Your daughter has been asking for the past hour if you can go to the pool. The third time she asks, you snap at her about needing to finish this and how she should be able to entertain herself for another hour. Her face crumples. You watch her walk out of the kitchen, and you hate yourself a little.
You’re going to be at the office until 9pm on Monday. You’re flying out Wednesday for the conference or the off-site or the client trip. You’re back Friday morning in time for an early meeting that matters. The work has to be done tonight. The pool was never realistic, and you should have just said no the first time instead of stringing her along by saying maybe.
You did this because you wanted the career, and you still want the career. You worked your way up. The residency or the MBA or the bar. The years of long hours, the senior role you fought for, the title that took fifteen years to earn. You learned to be three steps ahead, to handle whatever showed up in the inbox before lunchtime. That was the skill, and it still is.
The same drive that’s making you good at your job is making you short with the people you love. You snap at your kid over the pool, you answer your partner’s question about Saturday with a tone that makes him stop asking, you watch yourself be impatient with everyone, you feel terrible, and you overcorrect at bedtime by reading three books instead of one and reading them as warmly as you can manage. You wake up the next morning more wiped than if you’d just held the line at one book, and the whole thing starts again before you’ve poured coffee.
Your body’s sending signals you don’t want to read. The headaches arrive on Sundays. You catch yourself unclenching your jaw during a conference call. You wake up at 3am with your chest tight enough that the first time it happened, you sat on the bathroom floor convinced you were having a heart attack. Your bloodwork came back fine. Your 3am wake-ups kept happening anyway.
The dread shows up Sunday afternoon. The week ahead is a stack of overlapping deliverables: the work you have to finish Tuesday, the project or case or launch that has to close Thursday, the year-end review you’re already rehearsing in your head, your kid’s school project that needs poster board, the school conference Thursday afternoon you might have to do from your car. You’ve been keeping all of it in your head because the second you try to put it on a calendar you see there isn’t enough time for any of it. You move the pieces around until midnight, and you wake at 3am to keep moving them.
What you haven’t admitted yet, even to yourself, is how scared you are. You’re scared you’re going to burn through the career you spent fifteen years building. You’re scared your kids are going to remember the impatient version of you. You’re scared you’re going to keep doing this until your body forces you to stop.
Why the Books, the App, and your Last Therapist Didn’t stop the snapping
You’ve read Burnout and Fair Play and Drop the Ball. You’ve listened to every podcast about working motherhood and high-performance career strategy on your commute. You downloaded Headspace, you bought the magnesium glycinate, you tried the weighted blanket. You did therapy a few years ago and your therapist was kind and you understood yourself better, and you’re still snapping at your kid and waking up at 3am with the deck in your head.
None of it stopped the snapping because the snap happens before you’ve had a chance to think. By the time you remember the technique from the book or open the meditation app, the snap has already happened.
What Changes in Your Week After Six to Twelve Months of Therapy With Me
You sleep through more nights than not. You stop waking up at 3am to move the week around in your head. You wake up with enough patience for the morning chaos, and you still have energy left when you sit down at your desk. You open the first email of the day ready to think instead of bracing for it.
Saturday afternoon you take your kid to the pool. You’re there for two hours and you’re not on your phone for one of them. She makes a friend, you watch the friendship form in real time, and you remember why you wanted this in the first place. When you get home, you make dinner together. You don’t escape upstairs to your laptop the second you can.
Your teenager says something cutting later in the week, the kind that used to send you down the hallway with a lecture. You let her go to her room and you breathe, and you knock twenty minutes later to ask if she wants to talk. Sometimes she does and sometimes she doesn’t, and either way she slams her door less than she used to. There are nights when she comes downstairs at 10pm and asks if you have a minute, and you sit on the couch while she talks about something a friend said.
You sit through a board meeting, or a long case review, or a presentation, or grand rounds, and your thoughts stay in the room instead of going to your kid’s school project or the kitchen calendar. You hear what’s being said, you write the follow-up note in twenty minutes the way you used to, and you’re still thinking clearly at 5pm when you used to be staring at your laptop unable to form a sentence. By Friday you can tell what you accomplished this week, and you’re proud of the answer.
Sundays come back, and instead of dread building through the afternoon you take a walk after lunch and read for an hour on the porch. By the time your kids are in bed you’ve read forty pages of a book that has nothing to do with work or the next promotion. Saturday morning you make pancakes because you want to, and by Monday morning the weekend feels like a weekend instead of a 48-hour pause before the next stretch.
The late-evening email still comes in. You see it, you decide it can wait until morning, and you close the laptop. You have an evening back, and you read with your partner on the couch, or you go to bed early, or you have a conversation that lasts more than ten minutes. Your work waits because the work has always been waiting; you just used to think you had to keep up with it in real time.
How Therapy With Me Changes the Snap Itself
I work with women who’ve already figured themselves out and are still snapping at their kids, still waking up at 3am, still doing all the right things and feeling depleted. I don’t do the version of therapy where you sit on a couch and tell the story of your week.
I’m trained in evidence-based approaches that help smart, self-aware women change responses they already understand but can’t seem to stop.
I keep a small caseload, around ten clients at a time, so I know your situation between sessions. If something comes up during the week, you can reach out. I won’t tell you to hold the thought until next Tuesday.
I see clients exclusively by telehealth, with no commute and no childcare for the appointment. You log on from home, from the office, sometimes from the car between meetings.
our sessions will be
01
Collaborative: We will figure this out together. It won’t be one more thing your on to-do list for you to accomplish solo.
02
Encouraging: Sometimes it’s hard to see your strengths when things feel so overwhelming. I know you have them, and I will help you name them. In case you’re wondering…yes, I have had folks roll their eyes at me for this.
03
Real: I'll be honest with you; don’t worry, I don’t like how therapists sound on TV either. I’m confident that, if I inadvertently stumble into therapist cliché territory, one of us will call me out.
04
Fun: I can pretty much guarantee we’ll laugh together—maybe even develop some inside jokes; it’s a good brain break and just the stress reliever I know you need.
i’m Emily.
About dr. emily fornwalt
Therapist for Professional Moms
I’m a licensed therapist in North Carolina with a PhD in counseling from UNC Charlotte. I spent years in community mental health and academic teaching before opening my private practice, and a lot of those years studying what changes people and what doesn’t. The answer, it turns out, isn’t more insight.
I’m warm, and I’m honest. You can bring me the tired version of yourself, the angry version, the version that just snapped at her kid over a Sunday afternoon at the pool and is mortified about it. I won’t flinch, and I won’t judge you. I’ve sat with women whose lives looked exactly like yours, and not one of them was a bad mother.
Session Length, Fees, and How to Schedule
Sessions are 45 minutes, typically once per week, at $225 per session. Initial sessions are 90 minutes at $450.
Sessions are completely private pay. I don’t bill insurance, and I don’t provide the paperwork some practices give you to submit to your insurance for reimbursement.
I see clients exclusively by telehealth. You can be anywhere in Virginia with a stable internet connection.
how to start
Schedule your first session using the link below, which takes you to my private and secure calendar.
Complete intake paperwork that arrives by email.
Show up. That’s the hardest part, and you’ve done harder things this week.
Schedule Your First Session: Book your first session online here
-
No. All sessions are online. Telehealth works for Charlotte moms whose schedules already don’t have room for a commute on top of the workday, the kids’ activities, and the travel rotation. You log on from home with the door closed and headphones in, from the office, or from a car parked somewhere quiet.
-
Most of my clients meet during the workday. We can schedule a recurring time that fits your calendar, including over lunch. Some clients use a midday slot from a private office or a parked car between meetings. Most clients leave a session steadier than they walked in. We plan around the meeting you can’t move.
-
Most clients notice changes in the first few sessions: a little more space between the trigger and the snap, slightly better sleep, slightly less reactive at bedtime. Bigger changes in stress, parenting, work focus, and relationships usually unfold over six to twelve months of consistent work.
-
No. I’m completely private pay, and I don’t provide reimbursement paperwork.
-
Yes. Many of my clients travel for work. Sessions are online, so you can log on from a hotel room or anywhere you have privacy. I am licensed in several states, so we have options. If a session needs to move, we work it out together.
frequently asked questions about online therapy in charlotte
Not quite ready to book? Send me a note instead.
Call or Text
423.281.4089
emily@alignedcounseling.com
Office mailing address
404 S Roan St., Johnson City, TN, 37604
areas served in charlotte
Online therapy for professional moms in SouthPark, Myers Park, Dilworth, Ballantyne, Cotswold, Eastover, Plaza Midwood, Elizabeth, Foxcroft, Mountainbrook, Beverly Woods, Madison Park, Davidson, Huntersville, Cornelius, Waxhaw, Matthews, and surrounding Charlotte neighborhoods.
also serving professional moms across north carolina
I work with professional moms across North Carolina, including Raleigh and the Triangle and other communities.