Starter Stories: Cecily Moore

Written by Margee Stanfield
Photos by Trunetta Atwater

Dr. Cecily Moore wishes people could witness the magic that happens in her sessions. 

 “It's therapy, so obviously it's confidential, but the transformation that people are able to tap into just by having a safe space curated for them,” Cecily said. “I have people come to me all the time and they're like, ‘Oh my gosh, thank you for being a part of my journey.’ I keep those words in my head all the time.” 

Her business journey began when she found out she was pregnant and decided she wasn’t going back to work. She didn’t know what that would look like at the time, she just knew she wasn’t going back. After she had her baby, she decided to start a counseling practice serving black mothers who had traumatic birth experiences. 

She was a Jackson native living in Florida at the time due to her husband’s position in the military. When she returned to Jackson she decided to apply for theCO's CO.STARTERS program, a nine week program designed to equip entrepreneurs to turn their business ideas into action. 

“[CO.STARTERS] was something I had my eye on for a while, but I just wasn't in the Jackson community,” Cecily said. “It made me start to think about simplicity and streamlining. I struggle with ADHD and so there's always a flight of ideas and a shiny object somewhere. So that experience helped me not just focus in, but talk to people in businesses who were like, ‘Yeah, we had to do that too. This is the thing you need to focus on.’”

Cecily started to take her business more seriously after CO.STARTERS, since her business was initially more of a side hustle, not the thing funding her quality of life. After CO.STARTERS, she feels like that has flipped.

“I think for the first time I started to think about what are the nuts and bolts and what are the pieces of the puzzle to run a business if I want to step away from higher education,” Cecily said. “So I feel like I have a strategy or plan to allow my business to fund my quality of life and let the teaching be the side gig.”

Now she gets to help her clients go through some of the same things she was going through.

“It is amazing how much of my business has come from my humanity and my lived experience and how it evolves based on those things,” Cecily said.

At the same time Cecily was building her business, in the middle of a pandemic with a newborn, she was also completing her dissertation on “unlearning the strong black woman narrative.”

“The business honestly became the research project, and so I went into my dissertation knowing I wanted to research what I was seeing my clients struggle with in session and build something for them,” Cecily said. “A lot of my clients look like me, have the same problems as me, and so it's really been kind of this love letter to black women.”

Another product of Cecily’s CO.STARTERS experience was connecting with Trunetta Atwater to collaborate on photo therapy sessions. 

“She was taking pictures of me and she was joking about being a  photo therapist. For years we played around with this idea of photo therapy,” Cecily recalled. “So when I did CO.STARTERS she was like, ‘I have this creative idea. Let's partner and do the thing we've been joking about.’”

Photos were taken of participants before they had a counseling session. There were intake questions like “What is this part of your life looking like?” “What are you struggling with?” Then they worked through those things in session and then there was a post photo journey. 

“It's very symbolic and kind of tells that story,” Cecily said. 

Moving forward in her business, Cecily is going to shift away from one on one therapy and start offering intensives. She also wants to offer more nature based therapy.

“An intensive is like a three or four hour therapy session. Specifically, I'm getting a lot of people who have work related stress or work related trauma.  So I've designed an intensive to help them walk away from their job,” Cecily said. “It connects to my work because in my dissertation findings, the two hardest areas for black women to unlearn the strong black woman narrative is in their intimate relationships and their work relationships. People with the work stuff continue to find me.”

For Cecily, the work is always personal. It’s rooted in her story, shaped by the women who sit across from her, and carried forward by her desire to make healing feel possible again. What began as a leap of faith during a transformative season of her own life has grown into a place where others can experience transformation, too.

You can learn more about Dr. Cecily Moore’s business on her website.