Richard Aab

Richard has always had a passion for understanding emotions and the personal stories and values that create meaning in our lives. After honing his unique listening skills by earning his BFA in theater at NYU, he turned his professional pursuits toward understanding clients’ long-term goals and creating financial pathways to achieving them as a registered Financial Advisor with UBS. After years in the financial services industry, he found himself longing for a more personal connection with clients. Utilizing years of experience in his own personal wellness journey, he embarked on helping individuals create their own physical transformations as the owner of Apparently Different Fitness in Charlotte, NC. However important the physiological techniques he utilized, he quickly discovered that it was his clients’ emotional and mental connection to health, aging and fitness that was the driving force in their success. By understanding their stories, their values, and the meanings that they created for their futures (and their pasts), he found his true calling: helping clients unlock their personal motivations to create change in all areas of their lives. In the spring of 2023, he completed his studies in the Clinical Mental Health Counselor, M.Ed. (Master’s in Education) program at NCSU and became a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor Associate (LCMHC-A) and Nationally Certified Counselor (NCC). As a counselor, his guiding principle is autonomy: you are in charge and have the answers and wisdom inside you. His job is to help draw out the emotional and mental health and vibrancy that is already there.

Richard works exclusively with adults via telehealth and has completed all required coursework for designation as an NBCC Certified Telemental Health Provider (BC-TMH), with expected accreditation in November 2023. He utilizes a combination of existential and humanistic techniques within the specific modality of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a 3^rd-wave cognitive-behavioral therapeutic approach, to help clients achieve their goals. This includes the exploration of personal values, the meanings we give the stories of our life and experiential, behavioral strategies to align clients’ values with the content of their lives. He also utilizes Motivational Interviewing (MI) techniques to address personal motivation to create change. As a LCMHC-A, Richard will be under the direct supervision of Dr. Elizabeth Grady, LCMHCS.

Richard has a deep commitment to working with individuals overcoming developmental and complex trauma, and combines cutting-edge, neuroscientific research with traditional existential and behavioral therapeutic modalities to first unlock how the experiences from our past influence our present and then move past these experiences into a desired future. He holds the Certified Clinical Trauma Specialist—Individual (CCTS-I) designation from the Arizona Trauma Institute.

As you work together, Richard will support you as you create your own goals and design your own strategies for testing new ways of being in the world that empower you to craft the life you want. In the words of Victor Frankl: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Richard looks deeply forward to exploring that space with you and helping you find your own freedom.

Click here to view Richard's profile on Psychology Today.