Home / Meet the Therapists / Maddy Dombrowski
Madilyn “Maddy”
Dombrowski,
MSW, LCSW-A
Licensed Clinical Social Worker Associate. Grief, body image, and identity in women 18 and older.
Grief and the things that reshape a life don’t run on a schedule.
Body image and disordered eating
Grief and traumatic loss
Identity exploration
Faith-integrated
Substance use and recovery
Currently accepting new clients. Book online, email info@allorarise.com, or call or text the office at 910-408-2302.
Someone died, or something ended. Everyone around you has moved on from it at a pace you can’t match. Or being good at things became how you know you’re okay, so you keep achieving and it never adds up to feeling okay. Meanwhile food and your body take up more room in your head than you would ever say out loud.
You couldn’t name exactly what you want to be different. You just know you’d like to feel like yourself again. Finding the reason underneath is the work and nobody will ask you to justify the timeline.
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Maddy Dombrowski is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker Associate at Allora Rise Counseling and Therapy, seeing women 18 and older at the practice’s Wrightsville Beach office and by telehealth throughout North Carolina. Her clients often come in feeling stuck, anxious, disconnected, or unsure what needs to change, and there’s usually more to it than the thing that prompted the call. They want to reconnect with what they value, repair a relationship, or work out where faith and self-worth sit in all of it.
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She works most often with three things.
Grief and traumatic loss
Nobody warned you that grief would keep arriving in ordinary moments, months after the casseroles stopped. Maddy’s work in hospice and trauma-focused settings shaped how she understands loss and how people carry it.
Body image and disordered eating
You don’t feel good enough about how you look, and worth has quietly become something you earn by achieving. Maddy’s time working in an eating disorder treatment setting taught her how much sits underneath that, and she approaches it with curiosity rather than correction.
Identity exploration
You’re not sure who you are outside of what you do for other people. Maddy works through values, beliefs, and a sense of purpose without judging any of it.
Beyond those three, Maddy also works with anxiety and panic, social anxiety, OCD, perfectionism and high-functioning anxiety, burnout and chronic stress, depression, trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), relational trauma and toxic relationship patterns, substance use and recovery, and the impact of a loved one’s addiction. She also incorporates faith into the work for clients who want it there.​
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Outside what she treats, Maddy knows one stretch of life particularly well. Her clinical work with college students and young adults gave her a feel for the balancing act of workload against relationships against identity against becoming an adult.
Clients describe Maddy as gently challenging, warm, authentic, humorous, and relational.
She gives clients a glimpse of her own life early on, because an honest room has to be honest in both directions.
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She’s trained in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), motivational interviewing, and person-centered work, and incorporates Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)-informed skills. She reaches for ACT with clients who feel stuck or disconnected from themselves and need to make real choices while difficult emotions are still present. She uses CBT when perfectionism, self-criticism, and unhelpful thinking are what is holding the pattern in place, and DBT skills when emotions are running hot and someone needs concrete tools.
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On grief specifically, Maddy is clear that the goal isn’t moving on. It’s being able to hold the loss and still experience joy, without treating that as a betrayal. In session, grief shows up as tears, silence, anger, laughter, a memory worth telling, or the logistics of a changed family. A word she uses for her own approach is respect: clients don’t have to perform their grief, and they don’t have to minimize it.
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Outside the office, her faith is where she finds moments of peace, and slowing down on purpose is something she practices rather than recommends.
Your first session
Maddy treats the first session as a get to know you. The goal isn’t to find all the answers but to start working out what your time together might look like. She asks what feels hardest right now and what you hope will be different, then about your experiences, relationships, and values, because those are what shaped who you are today. She wants you to leave hopeful, and more than that, to leave feeling heard.
Whether Maddy is your fit
Maddy works one-to-one with women 18 and older. Her practice is built around grief, body image, and identity.
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Her work is exploratory, which asks for some patience. If that is what brought you here, a free fifteen-minute consultation with Maddy is the fastest way to know. If you want something more directive, email info@allorarise.com or call or text 910-408-2302, and we’ll point you to the therapist here who works that way.
PRACTICAL DETAILS
INSURANCE
Aetna
Blue Cross Blue Shield NC
SELF-PAY
Private pay accepted
Superbill provided on request for out-of-network
SEES
Individuals
Women 18 and older
WHERE
530 Causeway Drive
Suite A2
Wrightsville Beach, NC 28480
Telehealth throughout North Carolina