Women & Money is a monthly Piggyvest series that explores the relationship between real Nigerian women and money. This series sheds light on money, career, and business from a female perspective.
For this month’s episode of Women & Money, we spoke to Gbemi Adekoya, a Houston-based psychotherapist and coach. In this interview, the 47-year-old therapist recounts growing up in Nigeria, her family’s sudden financial setback, her twelve-year journey to becoming a licensed therapist in the US, and what financial freedom really means to her.
What do you do?
I’m a licensed professional counsellor and a licensed marriage and family therapist. I’m also a nationally certified counsellor, so the letters after my name are certifications: Licensed Professional Counsellor (LPC), Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT), National Certified Counsellor (NCC), and Board Certified Assistant Behaviour Analyst (BCaBA).
What does it take to become a licensed psychotherapist?
The process of getting fully licensed took twelve years. When I decided to become a therapist, I wanted to pursue the education, training, and supervised experience required for professional licensure, not simply adopt the title of therapist or counsellor.
I started my bachelor’s degree in 2012, graduated in December 2016, started my master’s degree a year and a half later, graduated during Covid, then completed roughly 3,000 supervised hours over at least two years before I got my full license in 2024.
Twelve years is a really long time. Was this always a dream of yours?
Not really. In Nigeria, I started with an OND in Insurance from LASPOTECH, followed by a B.Sc. in Business Administration. After that, I was a fashion designer and a tailor, running my own business right up until we migrated to the US in 2010. None of my education had anything to do with counselling or therapy.
I went back to school in 2012, two years after we moved, once I realised fashion wasn’t for me. I’d originally enrolled to study fashion merchandising.
So what changed?
One day I was praying, and the question that came to me was: if money wasn’t an issue, what would I actually be doing? The answer wasn’t fashion. It was helping people. I looked into what degree I would need to do that in America, and it turned out to be clinical mental health counselling—a master’s-level qualification.
My business degree didn’t qualify me for that, so I majored in psychology, then switched to behavioural science. After that, I got a master’s degree in clinical mental health counselling.
You put in the work.
That’s a mindset I’ve always had: whatever field you’re in, try to get a formal education in it.
Have you always had this altruistic worldview?
That’s a good question. My mindset has evolved over the years, especially when it comes to helping people without any financial gain.
So for context, we grew up moneyed. My parents were doing well; we went to good schools, but a series of unfortunate incidents left us poor. That completely reshaped how I think about money.
If you’ve never had money, you think about it one way. If you’ve had a lot and then lost it, you think about it very differently. This was not some deliberate personal growth. Life happened, and my mindset changed because of it.
What happened, exactly?
My father was a businessman, and his business was doing so well that at one point he told my mother she didn’t need to work. Around the same time, my mother gave her life to Christ and decided to close her beer distributorship, which, back in the 80s, was genuinely thriving.
My parents also ran a haulage trucking business, and my father did imports and exports. Then he had a terrible accident, and while he was still recovering, armed robbers came to our house and shot him.
Oh God. I’m so sorry.
His leg had to be amputated, and he had to go to Spain for his surgery. Our family’s life turned upside down. He ran the business alone and left bank overdrafts unserviced while he was unavailable, so the business collapsed, plunging us into debt.
That must have been really hard.
My mother had to retrain for work, and my father was out of commission for years. That period was so disorienting that after I finished primary school, nobody remembered to register me for common entrance.
My father eventually found a school in Shagamu, and that’s where I ended up. Financial ruin shaped my entire experience and mindset in my preadolescent years.
How have your money behaviours evolved from childhood till now?
I’m an Accumulator, according to the Sacred Money Archetypes framework developed by Denise Duffield-Thomas. I save, I hold on to money, and I’m very conscious of building a nest egg, which makes complete sense given the story I just told.
Before all of that, though, I was just a girl spending her father’s money. At least, I was before everything changed.
Let’s talk about leaving Nigeria. What led to that?
We won the Diversity Visa (DV) lottery, sixteen years ago, well before the japa wave. We weren’t planning to move at all. I’d just gotten married and had one child, my fashion business was doing well, and my husband, an architect, had a great job.
A friend came by one day and told us to try too. I didn’t believe it was legitimate prior to that, but we applied and won.
At our embassy interview, which was my first time there, we were approved. Interestingly, right before that, I’d been denied a visa for a fashion event in the UK. After we got the US immigrant visa, I appealed the denial, and it was approved as well. So I finally got to attend the short course I’d wanted to take at the London College of Fashion.
That’s so random and lucky!
Right? We only stayed five or six months that first time, because I wasn’t ready to live in America yet. I was pregnant with my second child, so we treated it almost like an extended vacation to have the baby, which was fairly common at the time.
I deliberately scheduled that London course so that, instead of staying in the US the entire time, we’d fly through London on our way back to Nigeria. So it was Houston, London, then back home, where we stayed another six months before I was finally convinced to return for good.
Why did you feel the need to come back to Nigeria?
My fashion business was still running well in Nigeria, my staff were holding things down, and I was still consulting remotely. I remember wondering how I would survive in America with two small children and a fashion business.
Valid. So what convinced you to return to the US?
My husband can be quite convincing. He made me see it as an opportunity worth taking, especially for our son, since his green card could be converted into a passport in five years. And after that, we could move back to Nigeria for good.
Honestly, I didn’t like it much when we first moved. I was constantly homesick. I’m very big on human connection, and I had a whole life built in Nigeria that I was proud of. It wasn’t that America was bad; it just wasn’t the dream I’d been chasing.
That’s also valid.
The second time, I came with every intention of continuing my fashion business. I brought my sewing machine and everything else. It was demanding, especially with a new baby and a toddler, but I figured it out.
Walk me through your career trajectory across those twelve years.
I was working throughout. After returning from Nigeria, I found out I was pregnant again, unexpectedly, with my third. That pregnancy was difficult, partly because it was unplanned and I already had two small children.
My husband had to travel back to Nigeria for work at one point, and since I could not manage both kids at once, he took our one-year-old daughter with him while I stayed in the US.
I remember being miserable, video-calling, watching her look sad in photos. During that period, I would call the crisis hotline, just to have someone to talk to.
Oh no.
Once I started school, I went back to that same hotline, this time to volunteer as a crisis counsellor. I was taking calls from people in genuine crisis, like someone on a bridge about to jump or someone who’d self-harmed and needed an ambulance dispatched while I stayed on the line.
That’s actually really cool.
Eventually a paid position opened, and my supervisor told me to apply, even without my degree. She said I was better than people who had one. That’s how I started getting paid to do counselling work, from around 2014 to 2016, until the hotline lost its funding.
While in undergrad, I also discovered Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA), the evidence-based treatment for autism, which led me to change my major to behavioural science. I got board certified and worked at an autism clinic doing supervised hours, first as an intern from 2015 to 2016. It overlapped with my hotline work, and I later moved into a higher role at another clinic after graduating. That role lasted until August 2017, when Hurricane Harvey hit Houston. It was devastating.
Oh my!
Our home wasn’t affected by the flooding, but so many people around us lost everything. The autism clinic couldn’t operate during the hurricane, so when an opportunity to work as a disaster case manager opened up, I took it. My job was helping displaced families, which is the kind of work I’ve always wanted to do. That position led to an opportunity to work as a Disability Integration Advisor for the US government, helping even more people, especially people with disabilities.
You really do love to help people.
I really do. While getting my bachelor’s degree in behavioural science, I was also very active on social media. I’ve been on Twitter since 2011, sharing my own parenting journey and how positive reinforcement has worked better for me than punishment or shouting.
An OG.
I built a decent following of people I was essentially teaching behavioural science to. People started sliding into my DMs asking for help, and I was upfront that I was a behaviour therapist, not yet a licensed counsellor, as I was still in grad school.
But it didn’t seem to matter.
I started getting clients and eventually started a coaching practice, which I first called “Your Behaviour Therapist.” I later renamed it “Behaviour Coach G” deliberately, because the word “therapist” would make people assume I was already a licensed mental health provider, when I was still years from full licensure.
How did your coaching and private practice side evolve?
In 2019, a client I’d met through Twitter told me how much I’d helped them and asked if I’d offer the same coaching to everyone at their company.
I was sceptical at first. Did their staff request this, or did the company want someone to report on its employees? It turned out they were completely legitimate; just a founder who genuinely believed in mental health support as an employee benefit, something more companies should really consider.
That gig is one I’m still doing seven years later, and I’ve since had to build a whole team around it.
What does that work actually look like?
Essentially, everything I do for my private therapy clients, minus the clinical component, which also involves diagnosing disorders. My license is specific to Texas, so if I want to be someone’s actual therapist, they need to live in Texas.
Because of that restriction, I created a separate, non-clinical category called coaching. Anyone outside Texas, including my clients in Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and the UK, receives coaching rather than therapy from me, which allows me to work across borders without violating licensing laws.
Smart.
For the employee assistance work, companies pay my team and me to support their staff members’ mental and emotional health. My speciality is providing world-class care for people who look like me, because I believe we deserve the same level of access available worldwide. That’s the throughline in everything I do.
Did getting licensed change what you were able to do?
Significantly. Full licensure made me a nationally certified counsellor across the entire US, with a state license to diagnose, treat, and prevent disorders. I’m also dually licensed as a marriage and family therapist. That opened up work I couldn’t have taken on before, including court-related cases.
What did work-life balance look like for you those early years?
There was no balance. My mental health was in shambles, and I leaned on every resource I could find. That’s why when women talk about postpartum struggles, my heart goes out to them. Even with a husband with whom I shared childcare as equally as we could, I struggled.
I had no family in Houston, which made things harder. I was used to having paid help in Nigeria, a whole team for my business, so adjusting to doing everything myself in the US was genuinely hard. It’s one of the reasons I initially went back to Nigeria for those six months. I couldn’t manage alone. When I got pregnant a third time, less than a year after my second, I remember weeping.
Awww.
There was one moment at church. I was heavily pregnant with my third, and I’d taken the kids to a children’s fair, sat down for a second, and fell completely asleep.
My children tried waking me, but I was deep in sleep, so a woman from the church noticed the ruckus, saw my exhaustion, and offered to drive us home. Not long after, my husband returned and took our one-year-old with him to Nigeria. We also had daycare support, even though daycare in the US is extremely expensive.
Does having to deal with others’ emotions constantly take a toll on you?
A significant toll, honestly. It’s why I’m a therapist who goes to therapy myself. Being a therapist doesn’t exempt me from the universal human condition.
I’ve been in therapy since 2019, and I take it seriously. I also self-disclose this often because it removes the stigma; people sometimes treat therapy as something you only need if something’s wrong with you.
My children have been in therapy for years; it’s a normal part of our lives. In my household, therapy is essential, not a last resort.
As a couples therapist, how often do you experience money conflicts among couples?
Money is a major source of conflict because our thinking about it is largely unconscious, yet it still controls our lives. Your beliefs about money form in childhood, long before your partner ever enters the picture.
Then you fall in love; love clouds your judgment — that’s what it’s designed to do — and you merge your lives, only to be blindsided by things your partner does with money that make no sense to you.
One person sees money as freedom, so they spend more. Another sees it as a security measure and therefore saves more. Neither of them is wrong. Your partner’s money mindset predates you entirely, even if you’re the one feeling its impact. That’s exactly what couples therapy exists to unpack, because it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever be with someone whose money mindset matches yours exactly.
Incredibly profound.
I also don’t believe in the “his money is our money, my money is my money” mindset. It doesn’t build a functional relationship. This is holding on to an outdated template instead of sitting down together to ask about your shared financial goals and values.
I believe in fairness: relationships should be mutually beneficial. Money affects love enormously. It shapes how far a relationship can go, and none of it is personal.
What does financial freedom mean to you?
To me, financial freedom is time freedom: the ability to choose what I do with my time, and when.
Would you say you’re getting closer?
I’m very close to that now. And if I weren’t in this career, I probably wouldn’t have that kind of flexibility.
Choosing how I spend my time matters more to me than the actual money. It’s also what lets me help more people, and since many who need my help can’t afford me, that freedom means I can show up for them anyway.
Any advice for people looking to go into your line of work, or for women more broadly?
It’s a great field if you enjoy helping people. It’s hard, often thankless work, but worthwhile. Take care of yourself too, and make sure you get proper training, because you can genuinely do more harm than good without it. We need more people helping people.
For women specifically: guard your capacity to earn jealously. Always work to improve your earning capacity. If your circumstances ever change, that capacity is what gives you options. It isn’t measured in dollars or naira.
If you’re already earning, keep growing it. If you’re not earning yet, work on building it. Even once you feel like you’ve hit your goal, keep increasing it. Anyone who can take your capacity to earn away from you has boxed you into a corner. Don’t allow it.
Anything else you’d want readers to take from this?
There’s a verse of scripture on my website that’s essentially my marching orders for life: Carry each other’s burdens and, in so doing, fulfil the law of Christ.
I may not be able to carry people’s burdens by being there for them physically. Still, I believe my life is meant to have a positive impact on people, and I try to do that daily through private practice, free content, and my Passenger to Pilot programme.
Everybody is looking for kindness and compassion, for someone who won’t judge them. We spend so much time looking for who will give to us, and not nearly enough time thinking about who we can give to. So when people ask how they can repay me, I always tell them not to. Pay it forward instead.
