Online counseling for moms in Knoxville | Dr. Emily FOrnwalt, PhD
Counseling for Professional Moms in Knoxville, Tennessee
Therapy For overwhelmed working Moms
It’s a Tuesday evening and you walked in the door fifteen minutes ago from a day you can’t fully explain to anyone in your house. The work is technical, the meetings were political, the deliverable is months away. Your daughter is at the kitchen table with her homework. She asks how your day was. You say “fine, busy.” She asks if you can help with her math. You snap at her about how she needs to try the problem first and you’ll look at it after dinner. She gets quiet. You keep moving in the kitchen, and you catch yourself thinking that you’re getting really good at this and really bad at it at the same time.
You’re going to be back at the office or the lab or the medical center late tomorrow. The proposal needs another revision. The deadline you’ve been pushing toward is somehow both still months away and already late. The work has to be done because the work is grant cycles or patient outcomes or the program you spent years getting funded, and none of it pauses because you need to be a parent.
You did this because you wanted the career, and you still want the career. You worked your way up. The PhD or the MD or the bar. The postdoc or the residency or the senior administrator track. The lead investigator role or the department chair seat or the senior leadership title. You learned to be three steps ahead, to translate between scientists and administrators or clinicians and finance or federal program officers and the people doing the work. 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 a math problem you should have helped with, you answer your partner’s question about the weekend 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 Sunday afternoons before the week even starts. You catch yourself unclenching your jaw during a department meeting. 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 responsibilities: the proposal due Tuesday, the lab meeting Wednesday that you’re chairing, the review at the medical center Thursday, the conversation with your department head about whether you can keep this pace, your kid’s school project that needs poster board, the parent-teacher 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.
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 when you sit down at your desk. You open the first email of the day ready to think instead of bracing for it.
You walk in the door at the end of the workday and you take three minutes before you talk to anyone. The transition that used to be impossible is just three minutes now. Your kid asks you how your day was and you answer her in more than two words. She asks you to help with her math and you sit down with her at the kitchen table and work through the problem.
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 for twenty minutes about something a friend said.
You sit through a lab meeting, or a department meeting, or a grant review panel, 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 ask the questions you want answered, and the proposal you’ve been putting off gets finished. 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 research or leadership or the next funding cycle. 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.
i’m Emily.
About dr. emily fornwalt
Therapist for Professional Moms
I’m a licensed therapist in Tennessee 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 math problem 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.
How to get started in Counseling
Prices and logistics:
Sessions are 45 minutes, usually once a week, and cost $225 each. Your first session is a 90-minute intake, and it costs $450.
My practice is private pay. I don’t bill insurance, and I don’t provide superbills, which are the receipts some clients send to their insurance company for out-of-network reimbursement. Because I don’t bill insurance, no information about our sessions goes to an insurance company.
I see moms online in Iowa, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, and you’ll need to be in one of those states during each session.
Self-Schedule here:
Choose an appointment time through my HIPAA-compliant calendar using the button below.
I’ll review your request and confirm it, usually within one business day. Then you’ll get your new client forms by email and a text from IvyPay asking you to add a card.
Log on for your first session at the time you scheduled, using the secure video link in your confirmation.
Have a practical question before Scheduling? Send me a message below.
If you have a question before you schedule, send it here and I’ll reply personally within two business days. This form is private and secure, so you’re welcome to share as much or as little as you’d like about what’s bringing you to therapy.
This form is only checked during regular business hours, so if you’re in crisis or need help right away, please call 911 or go to your nearest emergency room.
Thank you for your message.
I’ll reply personally within two business days.
areas served in knoxville
Online therapy for professional moms in Sequoyah Hills, West Hills, Bearden, Farragut, Hardin Valley, North Hills, Fountain City, Concord, Powell, Karns, Maryville, Alcoa, Lenoir City, Oak Ridge, Loudon, and surrounding Knoxville-area communities.
also serving professional moms across tennessee
I work with professional moms across Tennessee, including Nashville, Chattanooga, and other communities.