Autobiography

Pax et bonum- peace and good!  I’m Ashley Schumacher, and I believe that healing is never just clinical. It is personal, relational, and spiritual because we are not simply minds or bodies, diagnoses or symptoms. We are whole persons, and healing has to make room for the whole of who we are.

My path to becoming a therapist was not a straight line, and the different experiences that brought me here continue to shape how I understand this work.

I spent five years in religious life, where I encountered both the beauty and complexity of what it means to give one’s life to something greater than oneself. That experience taught me a great deal about suffering, faith, vocation, and the human person. It also taught me that we cannot always understand what someone is carrying simply by looking at what is happening on the surface. Sometimes we have to slow down, listen, and become willing to wonder about what is underneath.

My time serving in the United States Navy as a Chaplain Assistant (RP) on an aircraft carrier stretched that understanding in another direction. I walked alongside service members and their families through some of the hardest moments of their lives, often far from home and in high-stress environments. I saw firsthand the ways that faith, relationships, responsibility, and resilience can become especially important when life is difficult. That experience deepened my conviction that people are never reducible to what has happened to them or to the symptoms they are experiencing. There is always more to the person.

My academic training gave me the clinical foundation to do this work well. At Fontbonne University, I developed a strong foundation in psychological science, and at Divine Mercy University, I found a graduate program that allowed me to integrate that clinical training with my Catholic understanding of the human person.

That integration is central to the way I practice. I do not believe that faith and clinical care have to be separated. When a client desires it, I welcome the opportunity to make room for faith, prayer, Scripture, and questions about meaning and purpose within the therapeutic process. I believe Jesus is our ultimate healer, while also believing deeply in the value of the clinical work we can do to understand ourselves, heal our wounds, and grow in greater freedom.

I am particularly interested in the role of moral imagination in healing. When we have been wounded - especially through trauma, relationships, or experiences that have distorted the way we see ourselves and others - it can become difficult to imagine that anything different is possible. We can begin to believe that what happened to us is who we are, or that the future can only look like the past.

Therapy can create space to begin seeing differently.

For me, that is where wonder becomes important. Wonder is the capacity to remain open to the possibility that there is more than what we can currently see or understand. It allows us to become curious again. It allows us to recognize that our story may be more complicated than the conclusions we have drawn from our wounds, and that there may be possibilities for our lives that we cannot yet imagine.

My goal is to offer sound, evidence-based clinical care while honoring the complexity and dignity of the person sitting with me. I want therapy to be a place where we can attend honestly to what hurts without losing sight of what is good and beautiful, what is true, and what may still be possible.

Because I believe healing is not simply about becoming less symptomatic.

It is about becoming more fully ourselves - and recovering the freedom to wonder about who we might still become.