Blog Article From the Lecture Hall to the Therapy Room

For over fifteen years, my job was to stand in front of a classroom and teach students how communication is the foundation for healthy living. My hope was that young adults might question and discover patterns that are helpful and unhelpful as they began seriously considering long-term partnerships, family planning, aging parents, and friendships that ebbed and flowed. As a professor at NC State University, I taught courses at the intersection of relationships, families, and health — and I built a research career studying the same questions I now sit with in the therapy room every day. How do people stay connected? How do families weather crises? What actually helps when someone is hurting?

Although teaching and researching were fulfilling (and fun), I realized I wanted to do more than study those questions. I wanted to help people live the answers.

So, in 2023, with excitement and a bit of “what the hell am I doing?” I set out on the journey of developing a second career. Although I left a tenured position to become a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor, it wasn’t a departure from my research — but an extension and fulfillment of what I had been working toward.

A Different Kind of Fieldwork

People are sometimes surprised to learn that a clinician has a research background, as though the academic and clinical worlds are entirely separate. In my experience, they’re not. My dissertation and years of published research were, in a sense, a long apprenticeship in paying close attention to how people communicate — with romantic partners, with family members, in moments of health crisis, in grief, in conflict. I bring this same attention to therapy now.

A few threads of that research feel especially relevant to the work I do with clients today:

Family communication patterns and non-traditional family forms. Much of my published work examined how families communicate through transitions that don’t fit a neat script — stepfamilies, childfree and childless-by-choice couples, foster families. I studied the stress and disclosure processes that come with these transitions, and the kinds of support that actually help versus the kinds that unintentionally add strain. That research shows up constantly in my work with couples navigating identity, life-stage transitions, and the family stories they inherit or choose to rewrite.

Equine-assisted psychotherapy and trauma communication. For several years, I conducted research with CORRAL Riding Academy in Cary, NC studying how equine-assisted psychotherapy helped adolescent girls with adverse childhood experiences develop emotional regulation and communication competencies — skills like reading nonverbal cues, tolerating psychological stress without shutting down or lashing out, and coordinating with another being (in this case, a 1,200-pound horse) who doesn’t respond to words alone. That work sits close to the surface in how I think about trauma and attachment today, noting that healing often happens nonverbally and relationally, long before it happens in language.

Disenfranchised grief and loss. With colleagues, I co-authored work on how the grief of losing a companion animal gets communicatively managed — and too often dismissed. Pet loss is one of the clearest examples of what grief researcher Kenneth Doka calls “disenfranchised grief,” a loss that isn’t openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned, or given room to be mourned, even though it’s one of the most common and profound stressors of the family experience. Our work looked at how that grief gets minimized or invalidated by well-meaning others, and what it takes to re-enfranchise it — to make space for someone to grieve a pet with the same legitimacy as any other loss. I carry that directly into the therapy room. Grief doesn’t need to fit a socially sanctioned category to deserve full acknowledgment, whether it’s a pet, a miscarriage, an estranged relationship, or any other loss that others might quietly expect a client to move past.

Ambiguous loss and communicative resilience when mental illness enters a family. With my colleague, Jessica Moore, our writing, “Mental Health, Ambiguous Loss, and Communicative Resilience in Families,” drew on the concept of ambiguous loss — grieving someone who is physically present but psychologically changed — to understand what families experience when a loved one is diagnosed with a mental illness. The person hasn’t died, but the relationship as it was may feel gone, and that kind of loss rarely gets acknowledged or grieved in any conventional way. We examined how families build communicative resilience through that fog, specifically, how they keep functioning, stay connected, and make meaning of a diagnosis that reshapes roles and expectations without a clear script for how to grieve what’s changed. That framework is one I return to often with clients whose partner, parent, or child has received a health diagnosis — the loss they’re carrying is real, even when no one has died, and naming it as loss is often the first step toward resilience rather than just endurance.

Why This Matters for You

I bring this to you because these research endeavors have influenced the kind of therapist I am. My clinical approach is grounded in relating, communicating, and connecting during hardship, but it’s also shaped by having spent years asking, systematically and rigorously, “what actually helps people communicate and connect?” I’m not guessing. I’m not just relying on intuition, though intuition matters too. I’m drawing on a body of research — my own and the field’s — about what genuinely cultivates change in relationships and families. Every one of my treatment specialties has a thread running back to something I studied for over a decade before I ever held a clinical license.

The Common Thread

But there’s a personal thread running through this work, too. I didn’t just study these topics from the outside. I’ve sat on the other side of a family member’s shift in identity and felt that hard-to-name grief of loving someone who is there physically but changed mentally. I’ve grieved a pet the way most grieve family members, and had that grief quietly minimized by people who meant well. I’ve made difficult choices in family planning and had those choices questioned and invalidated. I’ve navigated my own mid-life transition that didn’t come with a script. I’ve not just studied these things, I’ve lived them in my own way.

I don’t say this to make the work about me. I say it because I think it matters that the person helping you through a hard moment of your life has actually walked through some hard moments of her own — not as a research subject, but as a person. My training gives me the frameworks. My own experience is part of why I trust those frameworks, and part of why I don’t expect clients to simply “apply the research” and feel better, but to seek insight and healing in their own way. The way I counsel honors that very integration of science and personal lived experience to make for a compassionate and informed approach uniquely suited for each client.

Liz Craig, PhD, LCMHCA, is a couples and individual therapist at Craig Counseling & Consulting in NC, specializing in Emotionally Focused Therapy, attachment-based work, women’s mental health, and rupture and recovery in relationships. Before becoming a therapist, she spent over 15 years as a communication researcher and professor at North Carolina State University.