While Dr. Mariechia has always known that she wanted to pursue a career in healthcare, she anticipated her interests and desires would lead to nursing. But after completing her undergraduate studies, she had an opportunity to explore therapeutic foster care, an experience that definitively shifted her professional course. Having grown up with a parent who battled addiction, her casework made her want to delve deeper into the disease, and its undeniable impact on children. She knew first-hand how drug dependency and mental health challenges shattered families, and as she began her Ph.D. studies with the intention of devoting her career to clinical research, she realized that if she really wanted to help people, she needed to practice outside of the classroom. She needed to be hands-on with families that had been destroyed by dysfunction for generations.

She needed to be a healer — of broken homes, families and hearts. 

Once she became a licensed clinician, Dr. Mariechia began to take a closer look at the dynamics that kept many of her patients from moving forward in their lives. There was the stigma that came with mental health challenges that prevented people from seeking the treatment they needed, but even for those who were brave enough to get help, traditional counseling often failed them. The reason was that their therapy didn’t connect their current habits to where their brokenness began. Her solution was an agency where she could equip her patients with the tools to discover where and how they need to heal with self-exploration and reframing their past experiences and perceptions of themselves and their lives.

SPRING Eternal is that place.