About Jenna Amara
Mental Health Clinician · Researcher · Writer & Educator
Curiosity creates understanding.
Understanding creates possibility.
I don't believe my career has been defined by a single profession. I believe it has been shaped by a single question.
How do we become who we are, and how can greater understanding help us become who we hope to be?
Whether I was leading organizations, working alongside communities, returning to graduate school, supporting clients as a therapist, or beginning my journey as a researcher, I kept coming back to the same question. Over time, I realized my work was never simply about business, counseling, or education. It has always been about understanding human experience and helping people become more curious about their own.
Today, that same curiosity continues to guide my clinical work, research, writing, and educational work. I see each as part of a lifelong process of learning, exploring, and contributing to a deeper understanding of human development.
My hope is not to give people better answers, but to help them ask better questions, questions that deepen understanding, strengthen relationships, and create new possibilities for how they move through the world. Because I believe the questions we're willing to ask often shape what becomes possible.
After all, I don't aspire to have all of the answers. I aspire to remain curious enough to keep asking meaningful questions.
The Perspectives That Shaped My Work
How I See the World
Every experience has taught me a different way of seeing. Some taught me to notice. Others taught me to ask better questions. Some showed me how deeply trust, belonging, and environment can shape our experiences, while others challenged me to turn that same curiosity inward.
Together, they have shaped how I approach things. people, relationships, and human development. They remind me that understanding rarely begins with certainty. It begins with curiosity, with paying attention, asking thoughtful questions, remaining open to what we don't yet know, and recognizing that every person carries a story still unfolding.
That perspective continues to guide my clinical work, research, writing and education.
The Questions I Keep Returning To
Some questions stay with us.
They evolve as we learn, deepen through experience, and continue to reveal new layers of understanding over time. These are some of the questions that continue to shape my research, writing, clinical practice, and the conversations I hope to contribute to throughout my career and the remainder of my life.
"How can greater understanding help us create lives, relationships, and communities that allow people to flourish?"
"What kind of relationships, environments, and experiences help people become more fully themselves?"
"How can psychological research become more accessible, practical, and meaningful in everyday life?"
"What allows some people to remain curious while others become trapped by certainty, fear, or shame?"
"How do the stories we inherit, and the stories we create, shape our capacity to live with agency, connection, and purpose?
"How do attachment, identity, meaning, and agency influence one another throughout our lives?
"What experiences help people develop a stronger sense of agency, resilience, and hope, even after adversity?
"How do our earliest relationships continue to shape the stories we tell ourselves about who we are?"
Current Work
Clinical Practice
My clinical work is one of the places where the questions that guide my research become deeply human. Working alongside children, adolescents, adults, and families continually reminds me that every person brings a unique story shaped by relationships, experiences, strengths, and challenges that cannot be fully understood through theory alone.
As a pre-licensed mental health counselor, I view clinical practice as both a privilege and an opportunity to continue learning. Every conversation invites me to listen more carefully, remain curious, and better understand the many ways people make sense of themselves and the world around them. While research helps us identify patterns across groups, clinical work reminds me that every individual's story deserves to be understood within the context of their own life.
Rather than seeing clinical work and research as separate paths, I see them as continually informing one another. Research helps me ask better questions. Clinical practice reminds me to approach those questions with humility, recognizing that every person's experience is more nuanced than any theory can fully explain.
Clinical practice continually reminds me that behind every theory is a person, behind every question is a story, and behind every story is someone still becoming.
Research
Research gives me a way to explore questions about human development with greater depth, discipline, and humility.
My work has included research and program development through The Power Within Project, a school-based Positive Youth Development initiative led by the primary investigator Angela DeSilva Mousseau at Merrimack College, which examines adolescent development and well-being. I am also working on The RELATE Study, which explores relationships among early relational experiences, locus of control, perfectionism, and achievement-related anxiety.
My broader research interests include attachment, agency, identity, achievement, perfectionism, anxiety, and the ways relationships, and experiences may shape how people understand themselves and navigate the world.
What draws me to research is not simply the pursuit of knowledge, but the possibility that asking thoughtful questions can deepen how we understand ourselves and one another.
Writing & Education
Writing and education give me another way to follow the questions that emerge through research, clinical work, and everyday life.
I'm particularly interested in translating psychological research and complex ideas into language that is accessible without stripping away the uncertainty, context, and nuance that make human experience interesting in the first place.
Through essays, educational resources, and ongoing series such as Monday Mixtape and Thursday Rabbit Hole, I explore psychological ideas alongside music, culture, research, relationships, and the ordinary experiences that make us wonder why people think, feel, and behave as they do.
I don't see public education as providing people with another set of answers. I see it as creating opportunities to notice something differently, become curious, and perhaps discover a question worth following.
