About – jacquelinejohnsoncollins.alphaxolution.com

ABOUT JACQUELINE

The woman behind the work.

And why a lived experience changes everything.

My Story

In 1997, a neurologist looked me in the eye and said four words that were supposed to end my story:

“You have multiple sclerosis.”

Then he said something else. He told me I would be in a wheelchair within ten years.

At the time, I owned 250 pairs of shoes. High heels in every color, on a rack in my basement that my husband bought me from a store going out of business. Those shoes told a story about who I was — a woman with a life fully in motion, a calling not yet answered, and a future she was just beginning to step into. A neurologist was now telling me to prepare for the end of my mobility.

I was finishing the last semester of my first college degree. I had a young daughter at home, a husband who supported me, and a body that had been sending signals for years that no one could read — unexplained falls, numbness, and electrical sensations that doctors dismissed. I finally had a name for what had been happening. And the name came with a prognosis I refused to accept.

I finished that semester. I graduated cum laude. Then on to the second. And finally, I earned my Master of Social Work from the University of Cincinnati — with a newborn, a full-time job, a required internship, and an MS diagnosis. I sat in parking garages with my head on the steering wheel, often too exhausted to drive. But I did anyway.

But here is what I need to tell you, because this is the part that most people don’t know:

I was not okay.

I was performing strength I didn’t always have. I was pushing through pain I wasn’t acknowledging. I had confused getting up with not falling apart. I had confused forward motion with actually living.

I lost my mother — my best friend — to cancer in 2003, just months after watching her cheer at my graduation. I grieved the way many professional women are trained to grieve: quietly, briefly, and between obligations.

For years, I couldn’t even look at that rack of heels. Seeing them meant confronting everything MS had taken from me. The shoes sat untouched — a quiet reminder of who I used to be.

It wasn’t until 2018, sitting in church feeling my body fight against me again, that I finally heard something shift. Four quiet words:

“Play the hand you’ve been dealt.”

Not surrender. Not resignation. Permission. Permission to stop fighting the life I had and start authoring it.

I am a licensed mental health therapist and social worker with over 25 years of clinical experience. I have spent my career sitting with people in their most broken moments — guiding them through grief, trauma, identity loss, and the devastation of having a life rearranged by forces outside their control.

But it was my own life that taught me the thing the textbooks do not teach:

“Getting through something is not the same as reclaiming yourself after it.”

Today, I still live with a secondary progressive MS diagnosis. I also walk on my own terms — defying a surgeon who told me I would permanently walk with a limp. I retired from a demanding career in 2019 to build a life that is genuinely mine. I wrote The Get Up Principle. And I built the AUTHOR methodology — a framework born not from a textbook, but from 25 years of clinical wisdom and my own hard-won reclamation.

I am not a woman who got through it and moved on. I am a woman who got through it and came back to tell you: there is a life on the other side of surviving. And it is worth reclaiming.

Credentials and Background

Licensed Mental Health Therapist
Social Worker
Master of Social Work, University of Cincinnati (honors)
25+ years of clinical experience in mental health and social work
Published Author, The Get Up Principle
Personal MS diagnosis since 1997, Secondary progressive

Testimonials

But it was my own life that taught me the thing the textbooks do not teach:

"I have always been an independent, educated, accomplished woman — so I was completely unprepared for how lost I felt when my daughter left for college. I did not expect the transition to hit me the way it did. Jacqueline helped me understand that what I was feeling was not weakness — it was completely normal. More than that, she helped me rediscover who I am outside of being a mother. For the first time in years I am exploring what I actually want — and honestly, it has been joyful."

Alison

Designer

For as long as I can remember, I gave everything to everyone else — my family, my work, the people around me. Somewhere along the way I stopped trusting my own choices. I would say yes when every part of me wanted to say no. Jacqueline helped me see that constantly saying yes was quietly eroding my own power. Three words changed everything for me: No is a complete sentence. I have never felt more like myself."

Alison

Designer

WHY THIS WORK

I built this for you.

Not for the woman who has it all figured out. For the woman who looks like she has it all figured out, but who cries in the car on the way home and cannot remember the last time she made a decision purely for herself. For the woman who has survived her diagnosis, her divorce, her loss, her career disruption, her empty nest — any season of life disruption that quietly took her identity with it. Who now stands in the aftermath, wondering who she is when she is not performing strength for everyone else.

I see you. I know this road. I have walked it, and I have walked it in heels.