Our Fierce Renewal Story
It all started on Sydney’s couch.
If you believe in the invisible string theory - we’re your girls!
What began as a best friend meet-cute moment in the trenches of graduate school (working on our master's in clinical mental health counseling) bloomed into everything and more in front of you today.
We could talk for hours about how we made it to this point, co-owning Fierce Renewal Counseling LLC and being a part of the Charleston Wellness community; so we’ll give you a brief highlight reel, with some humanness sprinkled in!
Our DIY headshot photoshoot for our practice.
2020 - We met in graduate school at Northern Kentucky University and learned to be counselors in the middle of a global pandemic.
2021-2022 - We both found ourselves at the same community mental health internship site and inevitably graduated in the Spring (Sydney) and Winter (Tiffany) of 2022.
Summer 2022 - Sydney graduated and moved solo with her dog, Rosie, to Charleston to pursue a dream of living by the coast. She worked in group private practices in the area for a little while until Tiffany moved down to SC too. This period of time came with a lot of challenges and perseverance - a lot could have changed if she didn’t push through the many obstacles that came her way during this time.
Winter 2022 - Tiffany was working at a practice specializing in the mental health care of the cancer population. Despite feeling called to work with these clients, she found herself seeking balance in and out of the therapy office. By the end of the year, she decided she was going to move to CHS too.
2023 - Tiffany made the move to Charleston finally (we couldn’t do long distance friendship anymore and the beach was calling her name too). After some hiccups with original plans for Tiffany and dissatisfaction with work-life balance for Sydney, we sat down on Sydney’s living room couch and decided it was time to try making our own path. We knew there was a healthier way for us to show up as clinicians and lead in a practice that allowed us to be our most authentic selves. It sounds romantic, but it was really fucking hard. We built FRC from the literal ground up and have not looked back since.
Spring 2023-now - We’ve grown so much as people, therapists, and best friends. We have been able to grow in our physical office spaces, our clinical skills, and our connections with other healers in Charleston. We have been involved in the community and work hard to advocate for mental health accessibility & normalization. We have gained so much in taking a huge risk on ourselves and we show up each day wearing that & our hearts on our sleeve.
This was never meant to be an easy path for us (we knew that back in grad school), but it is the most fulfilling to us. That is where “fierce renewal” comes from - it is our call to action and serves as a reminder that we get to choose this path and our hard. We believe in the narratives we write for ourselves (and challenging one’s others try to write for us) and this led to us reclaiming what being mental health therapists could be/feel like/look like. Our chronic healing, friendship-fueled confidence, and support systems allowed us to be fierce in our renewal and pursuit of our future.
The amount of people who we’ve been able to work with, heal with, grow up with has been so impactful on us and our lives. We love what we do because we learn just as much from our clients as we hope they learn from us. Being able to do this every day is a dream for us - and some days that looks different than others. We manage our own grief, chronic health, relationships, and mental health. We see that humanness as our superpower though and always hope to reflect that in our therapeutic relationships with you.
So, if you know us from our therapy office or telehealth box, a community event, networking coffee, or from seeing us around Charleston - thank you for being a part of our story and for supporting us in this beautifully chaotic life of ours.
