More about Cheri.

For most of my adult life, I've been the person people call when something is coming apart.

Sometimes it's a leadership team on the edge of a decision that could unmake everything. Sometimes it's a friend calling at 11 PM because her teenage son has gone quiet. Sometimes it's a marriage that has run out of language.

I didn't set out to do this work. It found me — first in leadership development at Nike, where I learned how to sit in rooms with people whose next choice mattered enormously. And then in the moments after work: in phone calls, at coffee tables, in church parking lots — where friends and neighbors would find me and start telling the truth.

I began to notice a pattern. The moments that actually changed a family were almost never the ones on someone's calendar. They were the ones no one was scheduled to see — the drive home from the meeting, the argument that surfaced during the family vacation, the text at midnight that said "I don't know what to do."

Weekly therapy meets a family in a fifty-minute frame. But families in crisis don't operate in fifty-minute frames. They operate in real life — in the messy, unmapped moments between appointments. That's the space where I do my work.

The Family Compass Method

Over the years, I developed a practical framework for helping families read what's actually happening beneath the surface. It's not a workbook or a script — it's a way of paying attention. A set of instincts I've refined across hundreds of families and thousands of conversations. It's what keeps me steady when a family in crisis wants me to react.

My faith

My work is faith-informed. I'm a Christian. I believe restoration is possible. I believe no family is beyond the reach of hope. I believe being present matters more than being clever. I don't require faith of the families I serve — but my own is what has kept me in this work for 20 years.

What this actually is

What I do isn't therapy. It isn't coaching in the traditional sense. It's something older and quieter — closer to what a wise family friend used to be, before we started outsourcing our hardest conversations to specialists. I show up. I stay. I hold what needs to be held.

If your family is in a season that feels impossible, I'd love to walk it with you.