Venice Garner Moore: Offering Gentle Healing Through Listening, Lived Experience, and Human Care

Venice Garner Moore: Offering Gentle Healing Through Listening, Lived Experience, and Human Care

Creating Space Where Healing Feels Safe!

Growing up around heavy feelings can teach a child how silence sounds when help feels distant, and that early closeness to pain often forms the way care later flows from the heart. For Venice Garner Moore, while those early years in the Bronx were fun and nurturing, they were also marked by confusion, loss, and prolonged emotional weight, yet they also instilled a desire to treat people with kindness and patience.

As a young girl, she watched her mother struggle with sadness while moving through social services that felt cold and rushed, and those memories stayed with her as lessons rather than scars. They showed her how powerfully tone and presence can change a human moment, and how care delivered with warmth can restore dignity. Over time, that awareness grew into purpose.

Today, as Founder and CEO of Embrace Your Difference, Inc., Venice works as a therapist and spiritual life coach, guiding people through their own healing journeys with calm honesty and respect. Her work is built on listening deeply, allowing space for emotions, and helping individuals see value in every part of their story. She believes growth begins when people feel seen rather than judged.

Her path demonstrates a simple truth formed by lived experience: healing happens when care feels human. Through her practice, Venice offers what she once hoped to see more of as a child: steady support, gentle guidance, and the reassurance that every person carries worth, even in moments that feel hardest.

Building a Purpose that Could Not Be Ignored

Before Embrace Your Difference Inc. existed, Venice spent years in the corporate school sector, moving from social work into director and executive director roles across an entire region. The workload was heavy, but the pull toward deeper impact was stronger. Alongside that career, she began offering therapy part-time and noticed a clear pattern. People, especially women, were drawn to her for guidance and encouragement.

That clarity arrived fully in 2015 during her first Embrace Your Difference Conference. The experience anchored her sense of direction and confirmed that this work was larger than a single event. She stepped away from her job, built the organization from scratch, and did so while on bedrest during a very strenuous and tumultuous pregnancy with her youngest son, Khristian.

The name reflected her own life story, formed by standing apart, embracing both strengths and painful experiences, and transforming them into purpose. For her, every experience carried meaning, rooted in the belief that growth is intentional and designed.

Blending Therapy with Inner Transformation

Balancing clinical depth with motivation requires more than technique. Venice approaches her work from the inside out, integrating her training as both a therapist and a certified life coach. From the first session, she invites clients to define where they want to go, then draws on clinical tools to access both visible and hidden trauma they may carry.

Her coaching centers on internal and spiritual alignment. Clinical structure provides safety and clarity, while the coaching process focuses on awareness, healing, and personal responsibility. Together, those elements create space for real breakthroughs rather than surface-level change.

Learning from Communities Carrying Silent Trauma

Years of working with marginalized and underserved communities shaped how Venice views mental health advocacy today. She has seen how unresolved trauma follows people from childhood into adulthood, spilling into workplaces, relationships, and parenting. Much of this pain remains unnamed, carried quietly because discussing mental health was discouraged or dismissed.

Advocacy, for her, means pushing against that silence and ensuring access to services for those who need them most. This perspective also led to the organization’s guiding principle: Mental Health Care is Not Taboo, It’s Essential.

From Mentorship to Deep Healing Retreats

Traditional mentoring revealed its limits when deeper healing was required. Over time, Venice and her team reshaped their mentoring programs into focused retreats for women, men, and couples. While mentorship continues, these retreats concentrate on inner work that allows participants to begin genuine healing.

The impact extends beyond the individual. As participants become more whole, that healing reaches their families and communities. The retreats serve as starting points for long-term change rather than short-term motivation.

Why Financial Education Matters for Mental Health

Financial stress rarely stays isolated. Venice highlights the strong connection between money and mental wellness, a link she sees repeatedly in her work. Financial strain can trigger anxiety and emotional instability when people lack understanding or tools to address it.

Because of this, retreats include structured segments on financial literacy and building a long-term financial legacy. Education in this area reduces daily stressors and helps participants address the deeper roots of financial disconnect rather than just managing symptoms.

The Message She Wants Every Audience to Carry Home

When Venice speaks on stage, her focus stays grounded in responsibility and honesty. She urges audiences to recognize how unaddressed personal issues can disrupt careers and relationships over time. Healing work, when postponed, does not disappear. It compounds.

Her core message centers on self-honesty and accountability. For those with families, she frames inner work as a form of protection, a way to create a lighter life while living, not just surviving.

When Personal Healing Expanded Her Impact

One realization stayed with Venice throughout her leadership journey. The deeper her own inner work became, the more her clients benefited. In 2017, she shared a personal story about childhood trauma tied to holding secrets. That vulnerability opened an unexpected connection with an aunt who had experienced something similar.

The moment revealed how trauma can pass through generations and strengthened her resolve to do the work for her children and those who follow. This path also led her to pursue Spiritual Life Coaching through the Inner Visions Institute for Spiritual Development, founded by world-known life coach Iyanla Vanzant, an intense program designed to help people uncover the truth of who they are internally through their oneness with God, a step she credits as life-saving.

Once You understand your oneness with God/Source while doing your healing work, worries seem minor or non-existent. You can then become unstoppable and lighter than ever. This peace is priceless.

Guiding Clinicians Through the Reality of Private Practice

Starting a private practice often looks simpler than it is. Venice knows this firsthand. Early in her career, she lacked guidance and made mistakes that could have been avoided with the right structure and support.

That experience informed the creation of her Private Practice Masterclass. The program offers clinicians a clear blueprint for launching their practices with intention, helping them sidestep common pitfalls and build sustainable foundations from the start.

Extending Reach Through Writing

Writing has always been part of Venice’s identity. Through her books, her work reaches people beyond therapy rooms and coaching sessions, allowing readers to engage in inner work at their own pace. The Self Love & Healing Workbook encourages reflection on topics many avoid, including trauma, grief, finances, and mental health.

Her first book, Because I Am Different, uses poetry through the lens of a young girl, which readers have described as therapeutic. Embracing My Difference demanded the most courage, opening space for readers to feel less alone in trauma, grief, and relationship struggles while learning how to move through trials with awareness.

Why Community Collaboration Changes Everything

Breaking generational cycles around mental health stigma does not happen in isolation. Venice views community collaboration as essential. Shared spaces remind people that mental health challenges affect everyone, including leaders and those seen as successful.

She calls for more summits, programs, and organizations that normalize these conversations and expand access to care. Visibility and collaboration reduce shame and replace isolation with collective responsibility.

What Comes Next for Embrace Your Difference Inc.

Venice remains deeply invested in retreat work. She plans to expand men’s, women’s, and couples retreats, with a young adult retreat on the horizon for ages 18 to 21 to 25. She sees this age group as especially in need of guided inner work.

Alongside retreats, she has introduced couples intensives, 5 – 8 hour sessions designed for focused inner work. These intensives help couples peel back layers and reconnect both individually and together.

Her latest project addresses unresolved family dynamics. The Parent Adult Child Conversation Cards aim to open conversations often avoided due to discomfort and assumption. Many clients arrive carrying unspoken issues with their parents. This tool is designed to bring those conversations into the open, where healing can begin.

Quotes:

“I realized this is where I belonged and that something bigger was going to be created, to support people with mental health services as well as motivating people to reach their full potential.”

“I Coach from the inside out, and I combine my skills as a Therapist and Life Coach to support my clients with greater awareness and growth.”

“So many people who grow up in marginalized communities live in trauma or have been through traumatic experiences and have yet to realize how much they have carried some of this with them.”

“The most important take away is if you have a family, do your inner work and know that it is another level of life insurance that insures a lighter life while living.”

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