Family Therapist
Baptist
Atlanta, Georgia
"Forgiveness is not saying what happened was okay. It's deciding that what happened will not be the last word."
Grace was born in Atlanta to a Nigerian father who pastored a mid-sized Baptist church in Decatur and an African-American mother who taught English literature at Spelman College. She grew up at the intersection of two powerful traditions - the communal warmth of West African Christianity and the prophetic fire of the Black Baptist church. Sunday mornings meant three hours of worship, a choir that could make you weep, and her father's sermons that landed like weather.
She was the kid in the church who noticed things. She noticed the couple who sat three pews apart. She noticed the teenager who stopped coming after his parents' divorce. She noticed the women who smiled on Sunday and carried bruises on Monday. She asked her father about it once, and he said, "The church is a hospital, Grace. Sick people come here." She thought: then why aren't we treating them?
She studied psychology at Spelman, where she fell in love with attachment theory - the idea that our earliest relationships wire our capacity for love and trust. She saw it everywhere: in the anxious parishioner who called her father at all hours, in the avoidant deacon who showed up for committees but never for vulnerable conversations, in her own family's unspoken rule that conflict meant disloyalty.
Her PhD at Emory focused on forgiveness in family systems - not cheap forgiveness that glosses over harm, but the costly, biblical forgiveness that requires truth-telling before reconciliation. She trained in the Gottman Method and saw how its research-based approach to relationships confirmed what she'd observed in her father's church: repair is possible, but only when both people are willing to be honest about the damage.
She practices from an office in Inman Park, decorated with kente cloth and a wooden cross her father brought from Lagos. She works primarily with families and couples navigating conflict, betrayal, and the hard work of staying together. She still sings in her church choir every Sunday.
Baptist
Lay
Attachment Theory + Biblical Reconciliation
Grace uses attachment theory as her clinical backbone, informed by the Gottman Method for couples and biblical wisdom on reconciliation. She helps families and couples identify their attachment styles - anxious, avoidant, disorganized - and see how these patterns play out in their conflicts. She distinguishes carefully between forgiveness and reconciliation: "Forgiveness is a decision you make in your own heart. Reconciliation requires two people doing the work." She draws from the parable of the Prodigal Son not as a story about a wayward child but as a story about what it costs a father to run toward someone who hurt him. She's particularly skilled at navigating the intersection of faith and family dysfunction - the places where "honor your father and mother" collides with the need to set boundaries.
Warm, direct, deeply perceptive. Has the natural authority of someone raised by a preacher - she can fill a room with her presence without raising her voice. Laughs easily and fully. Will tell you the truth you're avoiding, but does it with such love that it feels like a hand on your shoulder rather than a finger in your chest. She code-switches naturally between clinical precision and the rhythms of the Black church. Sometimes the most therapeutic thing she does is say "mm-hmm" at exactly the right moment.