Therapists for college students near Duke University
Life was supposed to get easier after high school, after college, after landing your dream job... but something still feels missing. Despite feeling like you have things 'figured out', you struggle to settle in and find balance. I specialize in working with anxiety, perfectionism and trauma. Some of the techniques I use when working with clients include EMDR, ERP, and sandray. Curiosity and compassion are the basis to my counseling approach. I know that reaching out for counseling for yourself can be a vulnerable process. If you’ve worked hard to figure it out on your own or are feeling like you’ve tried it all, it’s time to take a creative approach together. In our sessions, we will work together at your pace to understand the layers of your experience. I hope to help you find self-compassion, new perspectives, and healing
If you feel like you’re feeling the pressure of what’s next, stop scrolling because trust…you’re in the right place. College is supposed to be an exciting experience but for a lot of students, it feels like: • “I’m behind.” • “Everyone else has it figured out.” • “I’m stressed all the time.” • “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.” If that’s you, I can assure that you’re not broken. You have reached your emotional capacity, feel overwhelmed, and you don’t have to carry that alone. At ThrivePath, we help students slow down, feel safer in their own bodies and minds, and learn how to move through life from alignment, not survival mode. This is therapy and support that feels: ✨ supportive ✨ honest ✨ culturally-aware ✨ and actually helpful No “fix yourself” energy here. At ThrivePath, our energy reads more like “let’s figure this out together.”
About Me I believe that the changes that we want to make in our lives start by finding meaning in our experiences and connection with others. My time working in schools, outpatient, and acute settings provided me with the tools to support you or your loved one through a collaborative relationship. My Approach Whether it is your first time looking for support or if this is a part of a longer process, I would like to meet you where that is. I work with individuals from childhood through adulthood who are seeking support for various reasons such as life transitions, anxiety, depression, personal identity, stress, and relationships. With your goals in mind, I draw from a variety of evidence based therapies such as psychodynamic and play, as well as cognitive and dialectical behavioral. I have expertise in grief and loss, caregiving, physical health related problems, and cultural identity. In addition to psychotherapy, I also provide child, adolescent, and adult educational and psychological assessment for various referral questions to address academic, behavioral, and emotional challenges.
I love working with college students to help identify barriers to reaching your goals. I pull from a variety of therapeutic approaches to fit my client's specific needs and skill sets. I work with clients to build their resilience and identify gaps in their strengths so they can face each day and each challenge with confidence. We can look back at recent patterns you have been facing and look at a variety of factors that may be impacting you such as genetics, family of origin, interpersonal relationships, eating habits, school stress, thought processes, trauma history, emotion regulation, coping skills, pressure felt externally and socially, and more. My clients are motivated to make changes and I help them navigate the path to reach their goals.
Jackie Quartuccio, LCSWA is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker Associate in North Carolina. She graduated with her Masters in Social Work from Rutgers University in New Jersey. Before receiving her graduate degree, Jackie spent time working for a non-profit alongside single mothers seeking family preservation services and studying psychology for her undergraduate degree. Jackie believes so passionately that counseling can be a helpful and healing process for those who seek such help. When Jackie was a teenager, she sought counseling herself and was able to identify her feelings and process them in a healthy way. This positive therapeutic experience drove her decision to go into the counseling field and sparked her passion to help those who find themselves in with similar negative thought patterns. Jackie strives to use various counseling modes to allow space for healing, growth, and freedom. True change can influence your physical, emotional, and relational health. She will work with you and/or your family to create a counseling plan focused on decreasing symptoms and improving quality of life. She enjoys building relationships with children, adults and couples.
I am an LCMHC (#17753), as well as a National Board Certified Counselor (1674955). I approach counseling with the foundational belief that every individual has inherent value and worth. Because of that, I believe a fulfilled life is worth pursuing. I desire to create an environment of trust for clients through genuineness and empathy. This foundation provides a place to heal and grow through the challenges of life, and fosters the development of helpful awareness and tools to increase life functioning and satisfaction.
We are a team of Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselors (LCMHC), Licensed Clinical Social Workers (LCSW), and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists (LMFT) that share the goal of creating a welcoming and safe space to explore mental health concerns, develop tools and resources, and provide support in becoming the you that you aspire to be. We chose the name Tides, not only for our shared love of the beach but also because in life "tides" or circumstances often change and we strive to be agents of positive changing tides in the lives of people we serve. Our focus is to help individuals, couples, and families heal, energize, and become aware of their inner strengths. We achieve this by providing a neutral safe space, listening to your concerns, and customizing a therapy treatment plan. We promise to be there for you every step of your journey. Our goal is to help you grow from your struggles, heal from your pain, and move forward to where you want to be in your life.
I believe that with increased awareness comes a sense of control and the ability to act with intention. My work often focuses on practicing greater self-compassion, emphasizing strengths, building awareness, and encouraging genuine acceptance. I utilize a personalized approach to help clients find creative solutions to problems and achieve lasting, positive results. I support gender, sexual, and relationship diversity and provide open-minded care in a safe space that acknowledges and celebrates each person’s unique abilities and challenges. I believe that Black lives matter, that love is love, that no human is illegal, that women’s rights are human rights, and that all bodies are beautiful.
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College can be exciting, overwhelming, and everything in between—and you don’t have to figure it all out alone. As someone who’s been through the college journey myself, I understand the pressure to succeed, the weight of family expectations, and the struggle to balance mental health with everything else life throws at you. I’m here to support students who are feeling stuck, anxious, burnt out, or unsure of who they are or where they’re headed. With a background in health systems, early childhood development, and clinical training across diverse settings, I offer a space where you can be yourself—no judgment, no pressure. Whether you're processing past experiences, adjusting to a new environment, or just need someone to talk to, I’ll meet you with empathy, tools that work, and a deep respect for your lived experience. Let’s make space for you.
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Melissa Sisco, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist with 18 years of clinical experience. She is best known for her expertise in trauma recovery, aggression management, healthy sexuality, and systems of identity. She has a special interest in providing services for first responders and people with exposure to systems of aggression (sexual oppression, domestic violence, war, civil unrest) as well as communities of control (gangs, cults, unhealthy families). Clinically, Dr. Sisco operates primarily from a cognitive behavioral framework; however, she may shift strategies if an alternate modality is identified by clinical trials as the more effective treatment corresponding to a given diagnosis. Primary skillsets include: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Motivational Interviewing (MI), Mindfulness-based Interventions, Guided Self-Hypnosis Training, Systematic Desensitization Therapy, Harm Reduction, and Brief Strategic Family Systems Therapy (BSFT), Insight-Oriented Therapy, and Reality Therapy. She has also engaged in mentorship/coaching, positive psychology, play therapy, and animal assisted therapeutic services. When working with Dr. Sisco, you will always be greeted with a sincere warmth and concern for your well-being. She “shoots from the hip” in a nonjudgmental way to help embrace personal truths and build the glory after the challenge. You will also notice that she can switch gears to hear you in the moment when a quiet presence is needed and help guide you towards answers when the time is right to address the problems. She will honor and respect your time schedule and your definition of clinical goals. She will accept you as you are and help you see the wonder in yourself while learning to navigate the struggles that we all face. Dr. Sisco’s experience and training has led her to four fundamental beliefs about all individuals: (1) We all have basic human drives, private desires, insecurities, ascribed identity, and an ongoing personal narrative that drive our interaction with the world. (2) Seemingly unimportant decisions lead to habits which cascade into life-changing results. (3) We all experience jilting traumas that alter us in some fashion. (4) We can all be well, whole people who love, are loved, and add value to the world. Specialties Dr. Sisco provides individual, couples, family, and group therapy, as well as clinical supervision. Throughout her career, she has worked with a variety of clinical populations, such as: first responders, healthcare workers, those in forensic settings, trauma survivors, sexual and violent offenders, those in substance abuse recovery, individuals experiencing severe mental illness, adults and children on the Autism Spectrum, adults and children diagnosed with Intellectual Developmental Disorders (IDD), parents of troubled children and teens, refugees, military Veterans, individuals with gang involvement, survivors of war crimes, and marginalized communities. Dr. Sisco’s skillset includes: assessment, report writing, case management, therapeutic sessions, administration, supervision, program development and evaluation, empirical standardization and manual development and implementation, crisis response, and community repair. She specializes in treating Mood Disorders (Depressive Disorders, Bipolar Disorder), Severe and Persistent Mental Illness (SPMI), trauma and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Anxiety Disorders, Panic Disorder and Specific Phobias, anger and aggression, relationship problems, issues related to sexuality, gender transition and identity, addictions, stress and adjustment, personality disorders, weight loss, and smoking cessation, evaluation for bariatric surgery, and transplant preparation. Education and Training Dr. Sisco graduated in 2011 with a joint PhD in Clinical Psychology and Psychology, Policy, and Law with a minor specialty in Program Evaluation and Research Methodology from the University of Arizona. During this time, she participated in teaching, grant writing, providing research and statistical support, engaging in case review of civil and criminal cases regarding undue influence, working in clinical settings and supervising others in clinical settings. In addition, she aided in designing and implementing the first restorative justice program in the US, addressing date rapes on campus with Dr. Mary P. Koss of the R.E.S.T.O.R.E. project. She designed modified treatment curriculums for special populations of sex offenders (brain injured and developmentally delayed as well as female sex offenders) that were implemented in the Arizona Department of Corrections in 2013. She was also an integral part of building one of the first therapeutic mentorship programs designed to service foster-care youth with behavioral challenges with Dr. Julie Feldman. She worked most closely with her major advisor, Dr. Judith Becker, best known for her work on the Jeffrey Dahmer and Green River Killer cases. In her spare time, Dr. Sisco delighted in rehabilitating aggressive animals, predominantly horses and dogs, to provide hope for their rehoming. Dr. Sisco was selected for predoctoral internship at the University of Illinois at Chicago Medical Center, Trauma-Specific Track. During her internship, she specialized in trauma-response care in emergency medical settings, outreach to high-risk, marginalized urban youth and their families during and after violence exposure, and identifying susceptibility to recruitment in terroristic and gang-related organizations due to community trauma. During her off time, she began training as a boxer and fell back into her roots of youth mentorship due to the engagement she experienced while training. She built a mentorship program for youth in crisis, BoutIt Mentorship program, specifically designed and implemented for youth housed in a crisis shelter. Participants in the program learned how to cope effectively with intensive trauma, aggression, and mental health diagnoses. In her work as a clinical consultant, Dr. Sisco provided education to the International Court of Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina on the psychology of serial sexual assault during wartime. Dr. Sisco served as a professor at Roosevelt University for many years, as well as a forensic adjunct at the Chicago Professional School of Psychology. It was at this point that she incorporated Animal Assisted Therapy into her services; she delighted in seeing her clients and students find peace and release from being in the presence of her therapy dog. In 2017, Dr. Sisco returned to North Carolina, where she worked as a senior psychologist at Broughton State Hospital in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains. While there, she worked with people who suffered with severe, debilitating mental illness and aided in a state shift to positive psychology and universal acknowledgements of strengths as opposed to illness. Dr. Sisco has published predominantly regarding systems of intimacy and violence. She has worked with many different populations including: persons struggling with addictions, veterans, inmates, international tribunals of war, psychiatric inpatients, families with marital and/or parenting concerns, sexual and domestic violence aggressors and victims, at risk youth, gangs, homeless, refugees, exonerees from capital cases, youth on the autism spectrum, people with severely and profound developmental delay, people with serious mental illness, people classified as serious violent predators, First Responders, police de-escalation teams, survivors of homicide/suicide of a loved one, and, of course, students and community members struggling with daily stressors. Additional Trainings Dr. Sisco has extensive training in Applied Behavioral Analysis, Multicultural Sensitivity, and Crisis Intervention Training. She is also well-versed in a variety of neuropsychological assessment batteries and engages in report writing for forensic and clinical purposes. Professional Membership American Psychological Association North Carolina Psychological Association National Register of Health Service Psychologists
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We are a diverse group of clinicians specializing in treatment of clients dealing with psychological and behavioral challenges. We offer individual, couple and family therapy. Our core values are quality of care, individualized approach, person centered & cultural competence.
Seeking therapy can be an intimidating process. For many, it is a necessary step on the journey towards greater peace and healing. My goal is to create a safe, nonjudgmental and supportive environment for all of my clients so they can heal, grow, and become the best versions of themselves. Whatever your goals may be, I look forward to the opprotunity to help you achieve them.
Please visit my profile to learn more about my services.
Please visit my profile to learn more about my services.
We’re here to support you through life’s challenges whether you're feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or seeking deeper self-understanding. At Insight Therapy Group, we offer inclusive, evidence-based therapy for older teens and adults navigating ADHD, autism, anxiety, depression, trauma, and more. We believe in the power of meaningful connection, and we provide a safe, affirming space where you can feel seen, supported, and empowered to grow. Healing happens in connection. Let’s take that first step together.
Are you struggling with boundaries in your life? Are you feeling overwhelmed and stressed out about everything you have to do? Are you a young adult entering a new life season/change and have no clue how to navigate this? Are you needing a comfortable space to just process life? Are you looking for a laid back and easygoing therapist who is fun, nonjudgemental and allows you to show up as your full self (ex. cursing is always acceptable here!)? I am here for you, and I am glad you made it here! Life is crazy and bit annoying at times but together we can work to make it more manageable and enjoyable for you!