Stephanie Burton, LMHC

If you’re new here — Hey, hey! Welcome! 👋🏾

I’m Stephanie. I’m a licensed mental health counselor in the state of Indiana. I daily walk holding the healing and the heaviness of the work we do as mental health therapists. I also know that the best work often happens outside the therapy room, and that therapy is super expensive. That’s why I created SoulFULL by Design. SoulFull by Design exists to create clinically grounded, culturally rooted tools, stories, and spaces that honor the full humanity of Black women. I am committed to making healing, rest, and sisterhood accessible, by design, and without apology, through pyschoeducation, accessibility and liberation.

My work lives at the intersection of clinical care, cultural truth, and community. I believe healing is political. I believe Black Lives Matter (that means ALL Black Lives, all ages, shades, socioeconomic backgrounds, LGBTQIA+…ALL 🤌🏾✨). And I believe Black women deserve spaces that actually see them.

So whether you found me through the Sisterhood & Seasons Workbook, a reel, or somebody sent you this page, I’m glad you’re here.

Comment and I’ll slide in your DMs with the link to my free mental health guides!

Sisterhood has seasons, and so many of us were never taught how to navigate all of them.

The Sisterhood & Seasons Workbook, written by me, Stephanie Burton, a licensed mental health therapist, is your guided journey through the real, beautiful, nuanced world of Black women’s friendships.

It blends therapeutic insight, cultural wisdom, and personal touches that make it feel like a conversation with a friend who also happens to be a therapist. Mirror Moment Reflections to help you write and process, Girlfriend Gem Exercises to strengthen and tone how you talk about your friendships, Crown Check Affirmations to lift you when sisterhood gets heavy, and a Soul Sista Soundtrack of some of my personal favorites, setting the vibe for every single chapter.

We cover Attachment styles, apologies, forgiveness, the hard conversations, friendship wounds, relationship breakups, reunions and so much more.

When you purchase through Bookshop.org, your healing journey gives back by supporting an independent bookstore of your choice.

Tap the link and grab your copy today. Let’s navigate sisterhood together.

Sisterhood & Seasons Workbook: Reflections and Practices for the Seasons of Black Women's Friendships Reflections and Practices for the Seasons of Black Women's Friendships

Join us as we celebrate five years since Courageous Healing opened the doors to our brick-and-mortar home at our 5th Anniversary Community Block Party!

📅 Saturday, June 27, 2026
⏰ 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM
📍 Baker Street Centre | Fort Wayne, IN
🗣️ Community Listening Session | 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Bring the whole family for an afternoon of celebration, connection, and fun featuring:

🎶 Music & entertainment
🍔 Food trucks
🎮 Electronic gaming experience
🍭 Cotton candy
🎈 Games & activities
🤝 Community vendors and resources

This event is free and open to the public because healing happens in community, and this milestone belongs to all of us!

As part of this milestone celebration, we'll also host a Community Listening Session to talk all things Courageous Healing, introduce our upcoming Mobile Crisis Unit, and gather feedback from the community. Together, we'll discuss how we can continue to reimagine healing, community care, and making mental health support accessible to all.

Come celebrate where we've been and help shape where we're going.

Lately, I’ve been sitting with the thoughts of how wildly similar the times we are living in are to the overt racism laden days of previous generations. It reveals that the weighted blanket of “I see no color” multiculturalism was just that: a blanket. A blanket to cover up the underlying hum of pervasive racism. As a kid growing up in the 90’s, I feel as though in some ways, we were made to believe the racism of our grandparents did not exist anymore. That it magically disappeared. But it didn't. The racist insult hurled at former First Lady Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama, a beautiful Black woman, in every sense of the term, is the trillioneth and 1 piece of evidence that that racism didn’t disappear at all.

It was a public ritual of degradation directed at a Black woman on federal property, in front of a cheering crowd, with the President of the United States present and smiling. The White House lawn has its own history, built by enslaved people. To use that space to mock, diminish, and dehumanize a Black woman carries a weight that transcends any one fighter’s words. Black women have historically been the target of coordinated attacks on our femininity, our bodies, and our humanity. From the exhibition of Sara Baartman, to the caricatures of Mammy and Sapphire, the project of denying Black women’s womanhood is very old.

This most recent insult taps into deep anxieties about Black femininity being “too strong,” “too powerful,” “too unruly” to be real womanhood. Michelle Obama was, by nearly every measure, a beloved First Lady. Educated, elegant, warm, disciplined…and that felt threatening to White nationalists. Thus, the response has been an attempt to strip her of her womanhood, and ultimately her humanity. It’s a pattern historically connected to how enslaved Black women were denied legal personhood, how they were described in medical and scientific literature as masculine or subhuman, and how the “Strong Black Woman” archetype, which sounds like a compliment, has been weaponized to argue that Black women don’t need protection, or care, or that we are somehow undeserving of the preservation of our dignity.

When Melania Trump is insulted, the administration responds with the quickness, and with so much bass in their chest. When a Black former First Lady is publicly mocked at a White House event, with the president in the front row, the communications director says the fighter “had a great win.” This lack of response sends a clear message that says White women’s dignity is more worthy of fighting for than that of Black women.

From a clinical lens, Michelle Obama’s response of pivoting to a beautiful, legacy-centric portrait, is a very specific kind of psychological move. That move is refusal. Refusal to let someone else’s hatred become the organizing principle of her public presence. There’s real ego strength in that, AND I have to hold space for the fact that it likely costs something privately that she doesn’t owe any of us access to. And, if she’d decided to go all the way Southside with regard to the situation, she was well within her rights to do so, because you can only keep poking somebody for so long before they’ve simply had enough.

For many of us Black women watching, the vicarious trauma is so real. Watching a Black woman be publicly mocked on the White House lawn, with no institutional rebuke, while the crowd laughs activates the very survival adaptations we all know all too well. Hypervigilance. Grief. Rage with nowhere to go. Exhaustion that comes from never fully being off guard. What happened Sunday night is a reminder that Black women’s survival and wholeness is still contested public territory. Literally. And Michelle Obama, who has spent years carefully, strategically, and gracefully managing the impossible task of being a Black woman in the most public possible life, responded by posting a portrait. By insisting on beauty. By refusing to make their hatred her headline. That is equal parts beautiful and exhausting.

We watched Issa, Molly, Kelli & Tiffany love each other, and sometimes hurt each other, in ways that felt very familiar. 👀

Attachment styles show up in our friendships, too. How we reach out, pull back, over-explain, or go ghost… it’s all connected to how we learned to attach.

Attachment styles aren’t fixed. They shift and grow as we experience safer (or not so safe) relationships, do the inner work (or don’t do the inner work), and choose differently over time.

Which character’s friendship style resonates with you? Drop her name below. 👇🏾

Sitting with the discomfort of offering peace without chasing a response can be so much easier said than done. I know firsthand, as I’ve intentionally been working over the years at healing my anxious attachment tendencies…but I’ve learned it’s necessary for my healing.

When we say we’re “protecting our peace,” let’s say it with a clarity of what that actually means, and what it actually looks like.