Orrin Swayze

✐ orrin.swayze@tapestryassociates.com | ☏ 770.425.8275

Story

Orrin believes that an unexamined story diminishes our abilities to tend to our own emotional worlds, contributing to a range of issues such as anxiety, depression, shame, anger, addictions/compulsive behaviors, obsessive thought patterns, and difficult relationship patterns. Without realizing it, we can spend so much of our energy avoiding and managing our pain that we have little energy and freedom to pursue the people we want to become.

Orrin’s own story bears this truth out. For years, Orrin walked through life largely ignoring the voices of anger, sadness, and shame as they tried to speak up about his experience. Growing up in Atlanta, Orrin played the “good boy” role well, learning to reject any part of himself that didn’t fit into this model—and assuming God and others would as well. It wasn’t until he began to practice vulnerability that he opened himself to being loved and embraced exactly as he is—not as he should be.

When he graduated from the University of Georgia, he knew that whatever he was going to do with his life would involve people and stories, which have always fascinated him. Orrin spent two years in college ministry, where he relished the sacred work of creating space for students to share their hurt, confusion, and shame. As a high school English teacher, Orrin aimed to help his students find threads of their own stories within novels and poems. Orrin later earned his M.A. from Richmont in Atlanta, and has clinical experience with private practice, psychiatric hospitals, and nonprofit settings. He has worked with individual adults and adolescents, families, groups, and couples. In his work as a therapist, Orrin draws primarily from principles of attachment theory to help individuals and families move out of “stuckness” into new understanding, healing, and growth. With adolescent clients, this work usually includes building emotion regulation, learning relationship skills, and identifying new ways for a teen’s family to deepen their connections and support one another’s growth. 

When he’s not at the office, Orrin enjoys reading fiction, watching the Braves, cooking, and being outside. Most of all, Orrin loves spending time with his wife, his two daughters, and his friends.