Carter Cunningham, MS, NCC, LPC
Licensed Professional Counselor
Pittsburgh PA
My work is grounded in the conviction that health isn't a destination — it's an ongoing, embodied practice of waking up to your own life. I work collaboratively and relationally, meeting you where you are rather than where you "should" be. Sessions draw on mindfulness, somatic awareness, and present-moment contact to help you move from chronic self-avoidance toward genuine engagement with what matters most.
I'm particularly drawn to working at the edges: questions of identity, mortality, consciousness, and meaning. I have deep clinical interest in chronic pain, cancer, grief, psychosis, trauma — including religious trauma — and experiences that resist easy categorization. If you're someone who thinks carefully about your own mind and wants a therapist who can meet you there, I'd be glad to connect.
I came to this work through a genuine interest in the hardest questions — what it means to be conscious, to suffer, to change, to die. Those questions haven't left me. I spend time in nature, sit in daily meditation, and read widely across philosophy, literature, poetry, and science — not as hobbies separate from the work, but as the same ongoing inquiry.
I've navigated my own difficult terrain, and that shapes how I sit with people in theirs. I'm not here to observe from a distance. I'm here because I find human experience — in all its weight and strangeness — genuinely worth attending to.
I hold a master's in Clinical Rehabilitation and Mental Health Counseling and a second master's in Neuroscience — with a research background spanning psychedelics, addiction, and social cognitive neuroscience.