Abi Jennings (she/her)
Mental Health Counseling Intern
Specialities
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I work with people leaving or rebuilding their relationship to faith, particularly those shaped by conservative Evangelical environments and purity culture. That terrain is specific, and I know it from the inside.
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Nearly thirty years as a bodyworker and dancer taught me that the body holds what the mind hasn't caught up to yet. We slow down, listen to what's there, and work with the whole person.
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Anxiety often lives at the intersection of who we are and who we were told to be. I help clients untangle that, building awareness of patterns and creating room for a self that isn't organized around survival.
Therapeutic Approach
I work with people who are somewhere in the middle of becoming someone different than who they were taught to be. That process is rarely clean. It often involves grief, confusion about identity, and a body that has been holding things longer than the mind has been willing to look at them.
My work draws from somatic approaches, psychodynamic theory, Reality Therapy, and the Enneagram, which together ask: what are you carrying, where do you carry it, and what would you choose if you had more than survival as an option? I have studied relational modalities including Family Systems and the Gottman Method, and I pay attention to the systems, families, and communities that shaped the person in front of me.
About Me
I grew up in a conservative Evangelical Baptist environment and understand the specific weight of purity culture and religious deconstruction, the particular exhaustion of dismantling a framework that once organized everything. That background is part of how I listen.
Nearly thirty years as a bodyworker and dancer taught me that insight arrives in the body before it arrives in words. I bring that into the room.
Education
I am completing my Master's in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Antioch University New England. I intern at PHL Therapy Collective in Philadelphia.