Cultivate

Through our Gatherings and counseling center, Cultivate helps women cultivate joy, courage, & freedom as they pursue emotional, mental, and spiritual health.

05/20/2026

Empathy is often be misunderstood, and too often, people think to be empathetic we need to have walked in someone else's shoes or we need to imagine what it is like to walk in someone else's shoes.

That isn't necessarily empathy.

Empathy is understanding the other person experience of walking in those shoes. Empathy is about the other person- their feelings, their experience.

Being empathetic does not mean we imagine what it would be like if what was happening to the other person happened to us. We do not need to insert ourselves into their story like that. That is not how we connect. When we do that, we are making the situation about ourselves- imagining what we would do, what it would be like for us, rather than focusing on the other person's experience and trying to understand their feelings.

Empathy does not mean we join our story to theirs. Instead, we want to listen to understand, not necessarily to share or compare. Practicing empathy is not an opportunity to share about yourself. It is an opportunity to listen, understand the other person, and give them the gift of feeling seen and heard.

05/11/2026

We are not created to feel happy all the time. We are not created to feel calm all the time. Trying to feel happy and calm all of the time, or most of the time, will inevitably lead to stuffing, ignoring, or avoiding other feelings that are actually really important.

Remember, feelings are neither good nor bad, but they can be comfortable and uncomfortable. However, even the most uncomfortable feelings are valuable because we can learn something from them.

Feelings are messengers. They tell us something valuable about ourselves, our relationships, and our environments.

05/10/2026

For the person marking their first Mother's Day without their mother... Lord, hear our prayer.

For the person marking their 20th Mother's Day without their mother... Lord, hear our prayer.

For the mother marking Mother's Day while also grieving the loss of a child... Lord, hear our prayer.

For the mother facing an empty nest in a few months... Lord, hear our prayer.

For the women who's hearts have longed for a child and dread today as it marks what has not happened in their lives... Lord, hear our prayer.

For the women who raise the children they birthed and the children who were brought into their lives... Lord, hear our prayer.

For the new mother who is celebrating her first Mother's Day... Lord, hear our prayer.

For the mother who has strained relationships with her children... Lord, hear our prayer.

For the person who has a strained relationship with their mother... Lord, hear our prayer.

For the mother who is feeling especially overwhelmed by this current season of motherhood... Lord, hear our prayer.

For the women who MOTHER everyday and in every possible way as they love, nurture, and lead others all around them... Lord, hear our prayer.

05/05/2026

The school year is rapidly coming to a close and college students will be returning home for the summer. Whether you want to address lingering hurts and unhelpful habits, manage stress or anxiety, repair relationships, or gain clarity about big life decisions like internships, majors, or career steps, Cultivate is here to support you and help you move forward with confidence.

For more information about our counseling services, go to our link in bio or www.cultivateatlanta.com

04/30/2026

As parents, we often hear the oxygen mask analogy when it comes to taking care of ourselves and parenting our children. We must put the oxygen mask on ourselves before we put it on our children. We must take care of ourselves if we are going to take care of our children.

But what does that actually look like?

Yes, that can look like taking care of our bodies with exercise and taking care of our spirits by connecting with others. But the greatest parenting hack of all is taking care of our emotional health, working on ourselves so that we are our most emotionally healthy selves for our kids.

Working on ourselves looks like:

💫 Becoming aware of our baggage
💫 Healing and releasing that baggage
💫 Increasing our self awareness
💫Increasing our emotional awareness and ability to identify, communicate, and process your feelings
💫 Understanding our stress response
💫Learning how to handle our stressors effectively and productively
💫 Learning and practicing empathic communication

Remember friends, this may be hard work, but you are worth the work. 💜

04/28/2026

After working as a practicing therapist for almost 20 years, here is what I believe more than ever... Coping skills and just managing the symptoms of our anxiousness, depression, lostness, and despair will only get us so far. They will only provide so much relief.

Eventually...

The walks outside stop bringing relief...
The rest stops being restorative...
The time away feels shorter each time...

Eventually, we end up back where we started... with ourselves... with the habits we keep tripping over, the hurts we keep trying to ignore, and the thoughts we keep trying to silence.

But when we courageously dive beneath the surface, when we look for the origin, when we go to the root of that feeling, that fear, that long held behavior, we discover a path to freedom.

Imagine you're swimming in a dark body of water, you dive down, you discover a tunnel. When you swim through that tunnel, you will come out the other side into light, brightness, and fresh air. But you can't get to that light unless dive into the deep.

That is what it is like to dive into the roots of our hurts, feelings, and habits. It feels scary. It feels scary to look at the past trauma, to investigate those primary relationships, to look at how we got here. But going to the root is how we find long term healing and freedom.

Dive for the roots, friend. Give yourself freedom, not just temporary relief.

04/22/2026

Sustaining a long-term relationship can be one of the hardest things we do. We bring our unconscious relational patterns to this relationship and find ourselves stuck in patterns that are hurting both ourselves and our partners. We reach for the skills we have, but sometimes those very skills end up sustaining the pattern rather than helping us step out of it and create something new.

At Cultivate, we understand the complexity that leads to these relationship dynamics and want to help you and your partner build insight, compassion, and a new roadmap– one where you’re united against the problem, instead of seeing one another as the problem.

If this resonates, we invite you to reach out and explore how couples therapy can support you in creating the relationship you both want. You don’t have to navigate this alone.

For more info, go to link in bio or www.cultivateatlanta.com

04/16/2026

Unpopular opinion incoming... Therapy can be life changing. However, working with the right therapist who understands you and your situation is vitally important. This is especially the case in couples counseling.

If you are in a marriage in which there are toxic patterns present, it is incredibly important that you work with a couples therapist that understands and has expertise in working with toxic/antagonistic/narcissistic personality styles AND understands how victims of abuse present in counseling. Unfortunately, not all couples therapists are educated on these topics, and they miss the cues and signs of covert emotional abuse.

04/13/2026

Shame shuts down our ability to empathetically connect with others. Shame will block our ability to listen and take in someone else’s perspective and hear their needs. When we walk around with a lot of shame, we then filter our experiences through that shame lens.

Someone else’s negative experience becomes about how we weren’t good enough. Someone else’s needs becomes about how we aren’t doing enough.

Shame inhibits our ability to hear someone else’s perspective, listen, practice empathy for what they are feeling. Shame leads us to personalize everything and then turn everything into how we are not good enough.

When we can become more aware of our shame and shame messages, we can identify when our shame gets activated, remove that shame lens so we can then hear and experience the situation without it being filtered through our shame lens. This keeps us out of defensiveness and personalizing so that we can truly listen, empathize, and respond productively rather than react in a way that makes someone else's feelings and needs about us and shuts the conversation down.

Address

3525 Piedmont Road Buildling 7, Suite 408
Atlanta, GA
30305

Telephone

+1 404-624-6740

Website

http://www.cultivateatlanta.com/

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