Therapist, blogger, and podcaster Davia Roberts is prioritizing self- and mental health-care for all women.
By Amanda Pinney
When it came to her career as a therapist, Davia Roberts was certain she wanted to work with women and girls. She had always felt passionate about serving and mentoring other females. When the 27-year-old completed her graduate program at the University of Texas, she quickly realized her desire to work with women would require her to gain experience in trauma work.
“Sadly, statistics show that most women have some area of trauma,” Roberts says. “I started figuring out ways to just support women so they can feel whole because that’s something I always struggled with.”
This personal struggle motivated Roberts to create an outlet through which she could share her journey to discovering wellness with women of all backgrounds. In July 2015, the idea for Redefine Enough was born and, before she knew it, Roberts had become a wellness blogger. The mission behind her blog is to help other women reach a place of self-acceptance and engage in conversations about mental health.
“We’re talking about mental health and wellness and the different stereotypes and stigmas,” Roberts says of her online workspace. “Just having these conversations that normally aren’t had, it can be really freeing.”
Part of Roberts’ goal is to steer the topic of mental health away from being labeled as taboo. With this in mind, in February she created a podcast called Affirm to augment her wellness blog. With a total of eight 30-minute episodes, the podcast often features Roberts interviewing other women, who share aspects of their life, such as experiences with anxiety and depression or a personal journey through self-care.
Roberts wanted to make sure the podcast was specifically focused on mental health, not just life and womanhood. She wanted it to be very direct in addressing how mental health isn’t scary, and she hopes that by discussing the topic, it will normalize a subject so often stereotyped and stigmatized by the public.
“I think the No. 1 stigma people have with mental health is they assume mental health equates to a mental illness, and that’s just not the truth,” Roberts says. “Mental health is really just the state of your mental and emotional well-being.”
Although Roberts understands the importance of achieving positive mental health, she fears this same importance is not fully recognized within our society. She feels the problem comes from a treatment gap, one that leaves the needs of people who need support unmet. Traditional therapy is too expensive for many women, and that’s one of the reasons Roberts created her blog and podcast. She knew they might reach women who need professional help but don’t have the resources to seek it.
“When you have all these barriers in the way, people’s mental health suffers,” Roberts says. “If we’re not meeting the basic needs of someone’s mental well-being, how are we supporting them in their life? We’re not.”
Roberts is confident Redefine Enough is a step toward filling these needs, these gaps. In just two years’ time, her blog and podcast community has grown tremendously and is now on social-media platforms like Instagram and Twitter, which help serve as modern-day means for women to connect and share stories.
May 1, Roberts launched a new Facebook group called The Inner Circle to help extend her message to the public and create more conversation. She says continuance of conversation is the most powerful tool for self-care.
“It’s really exciting because these words do have purpose, they do bring healing and just reduce some shame for a lot of women,” Roberts says. “The reality is life is hard and we all go through our stuff, and if more of us were willing to talk about it, we’d see that we weren’t the only ones.”