Healing two generations, at once.
Cheryl Przezdziecki
Founder & Clinical Director, The Women’s Center for Healing
Cheryl Przezdziecki is the Founder and Clinical Director of The Women’s Center for Healing, where she leads clinical operations and mentors clinicians in trauma-informed care. She holds a master’s degree in Counseling Psychology and is a Certified Narcissistic Abuse Treatment Clinician (NATC), specializing in narcissistic abuse, relational trauma, and complex family dynamics among adult survivors of childhood abuse.
Her approach helps clients move beyond the impact of trauma toward greater agency, resilience, and a more authentic sense of self. A mother of two, Cheryl went back to graduate school when her children were 2 and 3.
← All profilesThere is something about raising a literal child that breaks open your own inner child in ways you cannot imagine.
Cheryl Przezdziecki, Founder, The Women’s Center for Healing
Read it the way it ran in print.
Cheryl Przezdziecki went back to graduate school when her children were 2 and 3, chasing the thing therapy had given her after they were born: a way to understand herself. That’s where her feature opens in the October 2026 issue, pages 28–32. Below is the actual spread, page for page, exactly as it appears in print.
You went back to graduate school when your children were just 2 and 3 years old. Looking back, what gave you the courage to pursue such a significant goal during a season of life when so many mothers are simply trying to make it through the day?
I don’t necessarily think it was courage at the time as much as it was a deep desire to channel something that had become really meaningful in my own life. I had experienced firsthand the power therapy could have, particularly after having children and having so many things surface during that time.
I think there was a deeper drive behind that decision that I wasn’t fully aware of at the time, and I simply trusted it. And maybe, looking back, that was courage after all. Not necessarily the courage of knowing exactly what I was doing or knowing how it would all work out, but the courage to trust something I couldn’t yet fully explain, and to follow it anyway.
You shared that motherhood didn’t lessen your ambition, it gave it deeper purpose. How did becoming a mother change not only what you wanted to achieve, but why you wanted to achieve it?
When my children were born, everything seemed to shift into focus. Suddenly, the things that once seemed mundane had meaning. The small choices weren’t small anymore because I had two tiny humans to consider in everything that I did. And then I realized they were watching. Everything I chose to do had significance beyond the singularity of my own life. No pressure, right?
Motherhood changed what I wanted to achieve because it gave greater meaning to why I wanted to achieve it. I no longer wanted to simply build something for myself; I wanted to move through the world with a deeper awareness of how my work, my choices, and my actions might shape my children, and the world I leave behind.
Read the full feature in the October 2026 issue.
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