From Wall Street to Counseling: Finding a New Direction
In this episode of the Grit Won’t Quit podcast, Tom sits down with Lori Ann Roland of Lori Ann Roland Counseling LLC for a wide-ranging conversation about career changes, counseling, addiction, social media, youth mental health, fitness, and the challenges facing the next generation.
Lori’s career path is anything but conventional. After graduating from college, she began her professional career at Morgan Stanley in New York City at just 21 years old. Working as an analyst on the government side, Lori dealt with Treasury bonds, bills, and other financial instruments.
While the experience taught her a great deal, she eventually realized that corporate America wasn’t where she wanted to spend the rest of her career.
One part of her job stood out to her: talking with prospective candidates about their careers and what they wanted to do with their lives. That experience planted the seed that would eventually lead Lori toward career counseling and, ultimately, clinical counseling.
She went back to school at Montclair State University to study counseling, human development, and clinical work. Along the way, one of her professors challenged her assumptions about addiction and helped her understand just how interconnected addiction can be with many other areas of counseling.
That education eventually led Lori to a position in a Monmouth County school, where she discovered the role of a student assistance counselor. She also began coaching because of her background in dance and cheerleading.
Interestingly, Lori says coaching was one of the things that kept her in education. Although she considers herself primarily a clinical person, she found herself building a career working with students.
From there, she gained experience in private practice before eventually opening her own counseling practice.
Growing Up in the Age of Smartphones and Social Media
One of the biggest topics of the conversation is the dramatic change technology has brought to childhood and adolescence.
Tom and Lori discuss how different growing up was before smartphones and social media. When Tom and Lori were younger, embarrassing moments weren’t instantly photographed, posted, shared, and permanently preserved online.
Today, kids can have an audience for virtually everything they do.
Lori points to the increasing presence of smartphones and social media as an important part of the changing environment in which young people are growing up. In her work, she has seen concerns surrounding anxiety, depression, and other mental health challenges become increasingly important.
Social media also creates another problem: comparison.
Most people don’t post their worst days online. They post vacations, celebrations, accomplishments, parties, relationships, fitness milestones, and other highlights. The result can be a constant stream of other people’s “best moments” presented alongside someone’s own everyday reality.
For young people who are still developing emotionally and cognitively, distinguishing between an online image and someone’s actual life can be particularly difficult.
Lori’s approach is to help young people question what they’re seeing.
Is someone’s life really as perfect as their social media account suggests? Or are they seeing a carefully selected highlight reel?
That distinction can be an important part of helping young people step away from comparison and focus on their own lives.
Success Looks Different for Everyone
The conversation also turns toward the pressure to look successful.
Social media is filled with images of expensive cars, businesses, vacations, beautiful homes, and seemingly perfect lifestyles. But success isn’t necessarily about having the most money or the most impressive possessions.
For one person, success might mean building a huge business. For another, it might mean having a strong family, taking care of the people around them, or simply having enough to live comfortably.
Lori emphasizes that happiness isn’t linear.
People don’t reach one magical point where they’ve “made it” and remain happy forever. Life naturally moves through highs and lows.
Counseling isn’t necessarily about eliminating every difficult emotion or problem. Instead, it can be about developing the tools and coping skills necessary to navigate whatever life brings next.
The Complicated Conversation Around Marijuana and Youth
The episode also tackles one of the more controversial subjects Lori encounters in her work: marijuana use among young people.
Lori makes an important distinction between adult use and adolescent use and explains that her concerns are primarily based on what she has observed through her work with youth.
She describes situations in which young people may use marijuana not simply because they want to get high, but because they don’t want to feel what they’re experiencing.
For a teenager dealing with trauma, instability, loss, family problems, or other difficult circumstances, marijuana can temporarily provide an escape.
That creates a difficult challenge for counselors.
If something is helping a young person avoid emotional pain, simply telling them to stop may not address the underlying problem. Counseling has to get to the reason they’re using it in the first place and help them develop healthier ways to cope.
Lori also discusses her concerns about the potency of today’s cannabis products and the changing landscape surrounding marijuana, vaping, and other substances.
Her broader point is that young people need accurate information about how substances can affect their lives, rather than simply receiving messages that tell them something is harmless or socially acceptable.
The Challenge of Helping Someone Who Doesn’t Want Help
One of the realities of counseling is that not everyone walks into an office because they want to be there.
Some people are referred by courts, schools, employers, or other institutions. Others arrive because someone else believes they need help.
That means the counselor often has to begin by building trust with someone who may be angry, resistant, or completely uninterested in changing.
Lori believes that meaningful change starts with a relationship.
That relationship takes time. A counselor can’t necessarily walk into a room, say the perfect thing, and immediately change someone’s behavior.
Early in her career, Lori believed that if she could just find the right words, she could convince someone to stop using substances.
A judge eventually gave her a perspective that stayed with her throughout her career: a counselor is part of a person’s journey, but isn’t responsible for owning that person’s successes or failures.
That lesson has remained important to Lori.
Sometimes a former student or client doesn’t recognize the impact of counseling until years later.
Lori regularly hears from former students who reach out to tell her where life eventually took them. Some tell her they have been sober for years, are working in treatment centers themselves, or simply want to thank her for the role she played when they were younger.
Those messages are a reminder that counseling can have an impact long after the original conversation has ended.
An Unsung Hero Profession
Counseling isn’t always a profession where the results are immediately visible.
There aren’t necessarily awards, headlines, or public recognition for helping someone make a better decision years down the road.
Lori describes it as an “unsung hero” type of job.
The counselor often works behind the scenes, helping people build the skills and relationships they need to move forward.
For Lori, the occasional message from a former student years later is proof that the work mattered.
Why Parents Are Part of the Process
When working with adolescents, Lori says involving parents is critical.
You can’t effectively work with a young person in isolation from the environment they’re living in.
That doesn’t mean every parent and child will agree on everything. In fact, Lori acknowledges that parenting and childhood have changed significantly over the years.
The challenge today is helping parents understand what their children are experiencing while also helping young people develop independence, resilience, and healthy coping mechanisms.
For Lori, that means the counseling process often extends beyond the individual sitting in her office.
The Problem With “TikTok Psychology”
Another interesting part of the conversation involves the growing amount of mental health information available on social media.
Platforms like TikTok and Instagram have made psychological concepts more accessible to the general public. But accessibility doesn’t necessarily mean accuracy.
Lori points out that terms such as “narcissist” and “narcissistic abuse” have become common parts of everyday conversation.
Not every difficult relationship or disagreement means someone is a narcissist.
There are qualified professionals sharing useful information online, but there is also plenty of content being created by people without appropriate training or expertise.
For anyone trying to understand their own mental health or relationships, learning how to distinguish credible information from oversimplified social media content is increasingly important.
Working With Survivors of Narcissistic Abuse and Trauma
While much of Lori’s daytime work has involved youth and adolescents, her private practice also focuses on adults.
Her areas of work include trauma, addiction, narcissistic abuse recovery, and working with police, military veterans, and first responders.
She explains that people who have experienced prolonged traumatic relationships can experience significant effects on their emotional and neurological functioning.
For those clients, finding a therapist with appropriate experience and training can be an important part of the recovery process.
Again, Lori emphasizes the importance of accurate information, particularly in an age when people can easily self-diagnose based on something they watched online.
Movement, Fitness, and Mental Health
Lori’s work doesn’t stop with traditional counseling.
She has also been a fitness professional for more than 20 years and believes strongly in the connection between physical movement and mental well-being.
Her philosophy is simple: movement can play an important role in healing.
Exercise can provide physical benefits while also supporting confidence, mood, and overall well-being. Lori has found a way to combine her backgrounds in counseling and fitness through her work developing continuing education courses for fitness professionals.
Those courses explore topics such as recovery, fitness, and transforming trauma through movement.
For Lori, the integration of physical and mental health makes sense. A healthy life isn’t necessarily divided into separate categories where physical health exists in one box and mental health exists in another.
The two influence each other.
Finding Purpose Through Change
Lori’s journey is ultimately a story about recognizing when something isn’t working and having the courage to change direction.
She started her career on Wall Street, discovered that corporate life wasn’t where she wanted to spend her future, went back to school, entered counseling, worked in education, built experience in private practice, and eventually opened her own practice.
Along the way, she discovered additional ways to combine counseling, fitness, education, and wellness.
Her story is a reminder that a career doesn’t have to follow a perfectly straight line.
Sometimes finding your purpose means being willing to admit that the path you started on isn’t the path you want to stay on.
And sometimes the most meaningful work is the work that happens quietly — one conversation, one student, one client, and one relationship at a time.
Listen to the Full Conversation
Tom’s conversation with Lori Ann Roland covers much more than career changes and counseling. They dive into social media, smartphones, youth mental health, addiction, marijuana, parenting, narcissistic abuse, fitness, resilience, and what it takes to help people navigate the highs and lows of life.
It’s an honest conversation about the challenges facing young people today and the importance of giving them the tools to handle those challenges.
To learn more about Lori and her counseling practice, visit Lori Ann Roland Counseling or connect with her through social media.
This podcast episode was filmed at Wingman Planning in Belmar.
