Orrin Swayze

✐ orrin.swayze@tapestryassociates.com | ☏ 770.425.8275

Story

Do you believe that your story matters? Orrin believes that telling your story is transformative. The opposite is also true—Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” An unexamined past diminishes our abilities to tend to our own emotional worlds, contributing to a range of issues such as anxiety, depression, shame, anger, addictive behaviors, difficult relationship patterns. Without realizing it, we can spend so much of our energy avoiding and managing our pain, that we have little left over to pursue the lives we want and 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-Christian-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.

Orrin finds people and their stories fascinating. When he graduated from the University of Georgia, his career path looked hazy. But he knew that whatever he was going to do with his life, it would involve people and stories. 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 the characters, worlds, and language of novels and poems. While teaching was a tremendous joy, Orrin eventually felt a pull towards counseling and earned his M.A. from Richmont in Atlanta. Orrin’s early clinical experience included private practice therapy with adults and adolescents, as well as group therapy and assessments in psychiatric hospital and non-profit settings. In his work as a therapist, Orrin draws primarily from principles of attachment theory and family systems theory in order to help clients identify issues and move out of “stuckness” into new understanding, healing, and growth.

When he’s not at the office, Orrin enjoys reading fiction, watching too many Braves games, cooking, and being outside. Most of all, Orrin loves spending time with his wife, his two-year-old daughter, and his friends.