Madison Johnson, LCSW

You moved 800 miles away for college and within a semester you started realizing things about your family you could not see when you lived inside it. The rules nobody named out loud. The version of yourself you had to be at home that does not fit anymore. The God you were raised to fear is feeling smaller, and it is making your mom cry on the phone, and you do not know how to want both things at once.

Or maybe it is the body. You came here promising yourself this would be the year you got it together, and instead the dining hall and the late nights and the new mirror in your dorm did the opposite. You are policing every bite. You are avoiding photos. You are thinking about food more than you are thinking about your major.

Or the friend who is also kind of not your friend. The one who only calls when she needs something. The one whose moods run your week. You know it is not working. You also cannot imagine ending it.

I work with college aged women navigating the layered, exhausting reality of growing into yourself while everything around you keeps shifting. I am especially good with the students unpacking the religious upbringing they no longer believe in but cannot fully shake. The students whose body image got worse in college, not better. The students realizing the family they came from was not okay, and now they are far enough away to actually feel it. The students whose first real long term relationship is ending, or should be, and who do not yet know who they are without it. The students carrying trauma they did not know was trauma until someone in a 200 person lecture hall said something that put a word to it.

If you are marginalized in any way, you already know what it is to be pushed to blend in. To live a life that does not quite fit. College has a way of making that louder, not quieter. You are surrounded by people, and somehow you have never felt more like you are living on an island. But even islands are connected through the seabed. There is no place too far to come back from.

My therapy is strengths based, client centered, and rooted in patience. I use CBT, ACT, and somatic work, depending on what you need. We will go where it needs to go. Together.