By Liz Moomey
liz.moomey@salisburypost.com

SALISBURY — Constance Ebomah has always worked with families.

She is a social worker and owns what she calls a bridge of services: Your Way Life Coaching and Consulting. Her mission is to coach families and help them stay together.

“I just want us to make a difference here in this county,” Ebomah said.

She wants clients to say Your Way Life Coaching helped save their family.

Ebomah focuses on a healing model that evaluates whether something is broken; a restoration model; and a SWAT model that shuts everything down to determine what is problematic.

Ebomah said her coaching is primarily hands-on and the majority of the work happens in the family’s home and community. The program is geared to be at most six months long, because she wants it to be lasting.

“My signature program that I do here is family preservation services. And what that program does is attempt to prevent out-of-home placement for children, or if they are placed outside of their homes, to get them back to their homes as soon as possible,” Ebomah said.

Ebomah initially was going to be a therapist, but she didn’t think it was a right fit for her.

“I didn’t feel like the mental health system was really helping people the way that it should help people,” she said. “I didn’t want to fall into the system of going around and around in circles.”

She said as a social worker, she understands the problems of unifying families. She wanted to start a business to bring all the resources into one place.

Ebomah learned a valuable lesson during her first training as a social worker: Judgments can wait. At first, she laughed to herself thinking that it was stupid. Now, she carries this advice in her work.

“I got that judgments can wait,” she said. “Get in here and work with these families, help them achieve what their goals are so they can be strong families.”

With social work, she knows to not look at people and immediately think the worst.

“My attitude was, ‘You don’t have your kids because you don’t want them,’” Ebomah said. “’If you wanted your kids, you wouldn’t do x, y and z.’ And being a social worker taught me things happen, life happens. We all are a step away from a bad situation.”

Ebomah is aware of the stigma that comes with therapy. “Life coaching” is less judgmental.

“When you talk to people and you say, ‘I’m a therapist; come see me,’ a lot of people aren’t receptive to that. You don’t want to tell people, ‘I have a therapist. I see a therapist.’ But if you’re saying, ‘I have a life coach,’ ‘I want to go to my life coach and work on several things.’ people are a lot more receptive to that.”

She said her program has flexibility a therapist doesn’t have.

“I want to give people what they need, when they need it, how much they need it,” Ebomah said.

Your Way Life Coaching and Consulting is at 530 E. Innes St., Suite 106. To contact Ebomah, call 980-643-4030 or go to yourwayllc.com.

Her office is open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday and on Saturday by appointment.