Mariam Shaat (she/her), LCMHCA, earned her master’s degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Wake Forest University. Before becoming a therapist, Mariam worked in the corporate world in accounting. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as longstanding social injustices became increasingly visible in the news, media, and everyday life, she felt called toward work that allowed her to support people more directly. What began as something pressing on her spirit became a career shift toward counseling and a commitment to creating space for people to understand themselves and their experiences within the larger systems shaping their lives.

As an Egyptian American who has lived across countries and cultures - including the United States, Kuwait, and Egypt - Mariam knows the complexity of trying to understand where and how you belong. Her experiences as a bicultural, neurodivergent, and gifted person also shaped her understanding of what it can feel like when important parts of who you are go unrecognized, unnamed, or unvalued. Those experiences influence the way Mariam sees people: as individuals with their own distinct stories who are also living within families, cultures, communities, histories, and systems. She believes honoring someone’s individuality doesn’t require separating them from their culture. Instead, therapy can hold both—the ways culture shapes, challenges, and sometimes constrains us, as well as the traditions, relationships, histories, and shared experiences that can connect us to communities and ways of understanding ourselves that extend beyond the individual.

Mariam doesn’t see herself as the authority on someone else’s life. Her role is to bring her training, curiosity, and perspective into the room while trusting that clients bring something she can’t: the lived experience of actually being themselves. Her style is informal, deeply humanistic, egalitarian, and grounded in curiosity rather than judgment. She sees therapy a little like a Ferris wheel: every seat represents a different part of a person’s journey, and sometimes changing where we sit allows us to see the same experience differently. Her work is grounded in social justice-centered, liberatory, feminist, existential, and humanistic approaches. She also draws from psychoanalytic theory, CBT, and DBT, adapting therapy to the person in front of her rather than expecting the person to adapt to therapy.

Mariam works with adolescents ages 13+, adults, couples, and partners experiencing anxiety, depression, life transitions, neurodivergence, bicultural stress, religious trauma, and questions around identity construction and deconstruction. She loves working with LGBTQIA2S+ clients and with people navigating the intersections of culture, identity, relationships, spirituality, and belonging. Mariam also welcomes clients for whom religion or spirituality is an important part of their lives and can intentionally incorporate a client’s faith, spiritual practices, or religious framework into therapy when they want it there. Whether someone is deeply connected to their faith, questioning it, reconstructing it, grieving what it has meant in their life, or figuring out what they believe now, Mariam makes room for that exploration without assuming what the answer should be.