About Erika

 Who Is Erika Orriss?

Licensed Mental Health Counselor | Engineer Turned Therapist | Rare Disease Survivor | Community Advocate

Erika Orriss is not your typical therapist — and her path to the counseling chair makes that abundantly clear.

Her career began not in a therapy office, but in a server room. For more than 25 years, Erika worked as a software engineer — building a life that offered financial stability, intellectual challenge, and the flexibility to be present for her family. She was good at it. But life, as it often does, had a different design in mind.

In her mid-thirties, with two young children at home, Erika was struck by a rare and devastating illness that took away her ability to walk or breathe on her own. She spent four months on a ventilator. What followed were years of grueling physical therapy, fierce determination, and what she describes simply as God's grace — a slow, hard-won return to herself.

It was during that recovery that something unexpected happened: instead of retreating, Erika leaned in. She began volunteering for others living with the same rare condition. She felt — with a certainty she could not ignore — that she was being called to something more. And so, while still working to rebuild her own strength, she enrolled in graduate school and earned her license as a mental health counselor. Getting to class was sometimes a monumental effort. But it gave her something powerful: purpose beyond her pain.

For several years, she balanced her clinical training with the practical demands of corporate employment. She waited. She knew her time would come.

When a second health challenge arrived and her physician advised her to step away from the pressures of corporate life, it felt at first like another door closing. But that same doctor — someone Erika considers a true angel in her life — offered her a different perspective:

“

Erika, you have a degree where your personal experience can help others,  Use it.. Use it. Start small.

”

It was exactly the hope she needed to hear. She took his advice. She began to practice.

What had felt like loss became purpose. What had felt like limitation became the very foundation of her work.

Today, Erika brings something to the therapy room that no textbook can teach: she knows what it is to have her world collapse and to find a way through it anyway. She has faced her own mortality, fought for her life, and chosen — each time — to keep going. She understands from the inside what it means to feel like there is no way out. And she knows that sometimes it takes someone else's perspective — someone standing at a different angle — to help you finally see the path that was there all along.

Outside the counseling office, Erika is a writer, an advocate, and an active voice in her community. She fights for children, for those navigating rare and misunderstood illnesses, for the dignity of people who feel unseen, and to restore health to the field of mental health 

She shows up.

And she will show up for you, too.