Today we’d like to introduce you to Dr. Vanessa R. Brooks.
Hi Dr. Vanessa R., thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I think my story really begins when I was eight years old.
It was my birthday, and my mother let me choose and wash my own clothes for my surprise birthday party. I picked turquoise corduroy jeans and a long-sleeved top—in the middle of summer. I know. It was hot. But I liked that outfit. I remember walking out to my party feeling good about what I had chosen, and someone laughed at me.
It sounds like such a small childhood moment, but looking back, I think that was one of the first times I learned to shrink. I became aware that the world wasn’t necessarily a safe place to show up as your authentic self. Somewhere along the way, I started becoming versions of myself that I thought would be more acceptable to other people.
For years, that showed up as self-doubt. As a little girl, I wanted to be a teacher. I was naturally curious and loved learning, but I struggled to finish what I started. I dropped out of college twice, and eventually I stopped dreaming as big. There was a period of my life when I genuinely believed maybe I just wasn’t one of those people who would do extraordinary things.
Life had other plans.
I eventually spent 14 years in pastoral ministry, built a career in human services, became an entrepreneur, earned a master’s degree in pastoral counseling, and ultimately earned my doctorate in executive leadership in mental health and human services. None of that was part of the life I originally imagined for myself.
Pastoring became one of the most formative—and difficult—chapters of my life. I loved people deeply, but I quickly discovered that loving people and knowing how to preach did not necessarily prepare me for the realities people brought through the church doors. Families were facing eviction. People were experiencing domestic violence, mental-health crises, financial instability, trauma, and relationship breakdowns. I was trying to help, but I didn’t have the training, resources, community partnerships, or even the language to understand everything I was carrying.
After 14 years, I burned out.
Closing the church in 2019 began what became a seven-year journey of deconstruction, self-examination, education, and, eventually, healing. I lost relationships. I questioned beliefs I had once considered unquestionable. I had to examine how some of my own theology had influenced the way I cared for people—and even the way I denied care to myself. But somewhere in all of that unraveling, I started meeting Vanessa again.
My first tattoo says, “Know thyself.” That became the work.
Eventually, the questions that haunted me as a pastor followed me into doctoral research. I studied depression in the Black Church because I needed to understand why clergy sometimes struggle to integrate evidence-based mental-health care with spiritual care. What began as an academic investigation became deeply personal. My research helped me understand the church differently. It softened some of my anger, gave me greater empathy for pastors who were often doing the best they could with the training they had received, and helped me see the enormous gap that still exists between faith communities and mental-health professionals.
Today, that research, my lived experience, and my love of technology and innovation are coming together through Affinity™, the Professional Pastoral Care System I’m building to help churches develop healthier pastoral-care practices and stronger collaboration with mental-health professionals.
In many ways, I think everything I’ve lived through was preparing me for this chapter.
The little girl who learned to shrink is learning, at 57, to take up space without apologizing for it. I’m learning that I am worthy of the stages I once couldn’t imagine myself standing on. And I have a much bigger vision now: I want to take this work around the world and help bring faith and mental-health communities closer together so fewer human beings fall through the gap between them.
Maybe that’s the thread running through my whole story. I spent a lot of years learning how to care for other people. This chapter is about helping build a world where caring for others never requires abandoning ourselves.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No, it has not been a smooth road at all. And I think one of my biggest struggles was that, for a long time, I became very good at looking like I was okay.
I had learned how to be the strong one. The pastor. The leader. The person other people called when their lives were falling apart. There is a certain identity that can form around being needed, and if you’re not careful, you can become so committed to being strong for everybody else that you stop giving yourself permission to be human.
I did that for years.
There were times when I was navigating my own mental-health challenges while simultaneously trying to care for an entire community. But because of what I believed strength, faith, leadership, and even being “anointed” were supposed to look like, I didn’t always give myself permission to receive the same kind of care I encouraged others to seek. I thought I needed to pray harder, endure longer, give more, and keep going.
Eventually, my body and mind said what I wasn’t willing to say: enough.
Burnout was one struggle, but there were others. I’ve struggled with self-doubt. I’ve struggled financially. I’ve started things and failed to finish them. I dropped out of college twice before eventually earning a doctorate. I’ve lost relationships that I thought would last forever. I’ve had to rebuild professionally and personally more than once. And deconstructing my faith publicly came with its own kind of loneliness because questioning beliefs can also mean questioning identities, communities, and relationships that once made you feel secure.
Entrepreneurship hasn’t been some beautiful straight line either. I’ve had ideas that worked and ideas that didn’t. I’ve had seasons when I was very clear about where my company was going and seasons when I wondered what in the world I was doing. Even after earning my doctorate, there was no magical moment when everything suddenly became easy. I still had to figure out how to turn what I knew into work that could actually make a difference—and build a sustainable business around it.
But I understand struggle differently now.
I don’t romanticize it. I don’t believe we have to suffer in order to become worthy, and I certainly don’t believe every painful experience happens because we “needed” the pain. But I do believe we get to decide what we create from what we’ve survived.
For me, some of the hardest experiences of my life became data.
They showed me where systems fail people. They showed me what happens when leaders are expected to carry responsibilities they haven’t been prepared for. They showed me what happens when theology doesn’t leave enough room for our humanity. And they showed me how dangerous it can be when the people caring for everyone else don’t believe they have permission to care for themselves.
So no, it hasn’t been a smooth road. But at 57, I think I’m finally less interested in appearing like I’ve had one.
I’m much more interested in being whole.
We’ve been impressed with Brooks Consulting & Training Solutions, LLC., but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
Professionally, I describe myself as a Leadership Scientist and Mental Health Systems Strategist, and I lead Brooks Consulting & Training Solutions, LLC. At the center of my work is a question I’ve become almost obsessed with: What happens when good people are given enormous responsibility for other human beings, but the systems around them were never designed to help them carry that responsibility well?
That question has taken my work into some interesting places.
My background spans more than 16 years in human services, 14 years in pastoral ministry, entrepreneurship, pastoral counseling, and doctoral research in executive leadership, mental health, and human services. For a long time, those experiences felt like separate chapters of my life. Today, I understand that they were giving me different lenses for looking at the same problem: people are often expected to solve complex human problems inside systems that were never adequately built for the complexity of being human.
That’s where my work lives.
I don’t consider myself a traditional business consultant, and I’m not a clinician. I’m a diagnostician and systems thinker. I look at what an organization says it wants to accomplish, what is actually happening inside the organization, and the gap between the two. I’m particularly interested in leadership behavior, decision-making, mental-health systems, organizational infrastructure, and how research can be translated into something people can actually use.
One of the most exciting expressions of that work right now is Affinity™—the Professional Pastoral Care System I’m developing from my doctoral research and lived experience in ministry.
Affinity grew from a problem I know intimately. Churches are often among the first places people turn when something goes wrong in their lives. A pastor may encounter grief, depression, domestic violence, suicidal ideation, financial crisis, family conflict, trauma, or a serious mental-health concern—sometimes all within the same congregation. Yet many clergy have never been given a comprehensive system for determining what belongs within pastoral care, when collaboration is appropriate, when referral is necessary, and what happens after that referral.
At the same time, simply telling churches to “send people to therapy” misses another part of the problem. My research helped me understand that there can be significant distrust between faith communities and mental-health professionals. Clergy may worry that clinicians don’t understand or respect the spiritual and cultural realities of the people they serve, while clinicians may have legitimate concerns about harmful theological interpretations or practices.
People can fall into the space between those two systems.
I’m building Affinity to help close that space.
It combines professional learning, decision support, practice-based training, implementation tools, and technology to help churches build healthier pastoral-care systems and stronger relationships with mental-health professionals before the crisis happens—not while everyone is scrambling to figure out what to do.
And I think that’s where the future of my company is headed.
I’m deeply interested in the intersection of research, human behavior, leadership, mental health, faith, and technology. I don’t want my scholarship sitting on a shelf somewhere being cited by twelve people. I want to turn research into infrastructure. I want to build tools, systems, and intellectual property that change how organizations care for human beings.
For years, I thought all the different parts of my career meant I had taken a very crooked path.
Now I realize the crooked path is the business model.
What makes you happy?
These days, happiness feels a lot simpler to me. My dog, Juliet, makes me ridiculously happy. My grandboys, TJ and Messiah, bring me so much joy. I love watching my adult children, Jada and Tre” thrive and become who they are. And I genuinely love this empty-nester season with my husband—the quiet, the freedom, and getting to experience life together in a different way.
But I think what makes me happiest is that somewhere in the rubble of all the storms I’ve lived through, I found myself.
There is something beautiful about finally meeting the woman who was underneath all the expectations, titles, roles, and versions of herself she thought she had to be. I’m still discovering her, and I really like her.
And through all of it, I carry my mama, Sarah, my dad, and my brother Bird with me. I like to believe they’re looking down on all of us and getting to see what became of this life.
That makes me happy.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://drvanessarbrooks.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drvanessarbrooks/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/drvanessarbrooks
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-vanessa-renee-brooks-11bb8928a/
