About UsTwo psychologists. One very good idea.
Zero pretension.
We're Essence and Emily Deming-Rivers — married, co-founders, and genuinely convinced that the people holding this community together deserve a lot better than what they're currently getting from the system.
People say we're approachable.
We'd say accessible.
We're not the consultants who waltz in with a deck full of frameworks you'll never use. We're the people who sit in the room with you, notice the thing nobody's saying, and find a way to name it that doesn't make anyone want to run.
We're really good at our jobs. We also happen to be warm, a little funny, and genuinely invested in the people and organizations we work with. Those things are not in conflict. In fact, that's exactly the point.
We're psychologists. We do therapy half the week — and the reason we say that is because we're actively doing the work we're talking about. This isn't something we used to do. We're still in it, still taking continuing education, still sitting across from real people every day. We haven't lost the thread of what this actually looks like on the ground, and that matters a lot to us.
What Makes Us So Cool 🧊
Together, we bring expertise from therapy sessions, board rooms, classrooms, and grassroots movements. We believe that psychological safety is clinical, cultural, and communal—and it should be built on purpose.
How we got hereThis didn't start as a business plan.
It started as a friendship.
The kind built shoulder-to-shoulder doing work that changes you — and watching what the system quietly expected everyone to tolerate along the way.
2021
Palm Beach County Youth Services — where it started.
We met doing direct clinical work with teen girls at a residential facility — and if you've ever met a teenager who doesn't want to be there, you know that's not a soft environment. We were doing therapy, running groups, collaborating on treatment teams, teaching parent groups, navigating bureaucratic nonsense, all of it inside an agency that was trauma-informed through the Sanctuary Institute. Teenagers are one of the hardest populations to get through to, and we figured out early that we were good at it — and even better when we worked together. We'd tag team on things constantly. A lot of people liked when we did stuff together. And what we realized in that environment was that our approaches were genuinely complementary in a way that wasn't a performance. We worked out the kinks before we even liked each other — and we think that matters, because we know how to do this together when it's high stakes, not just when it's easy.
We started noticing the same things independently and then, inevitably, together. The organizations doing the most important work were the ones most likely to be burning their people out. Leadership that genuinely cared but didn't have the tools. Teams that were loyal to the mission but quietly disappearing inside it. We started talking about what it would look like to do something about that — not just in therapy rooms, but at the system level.
2022
The friendship became the foundation.
We moved to Sarasota together, and it just felt right.
2023
Not because it was some calculated next step — it just made sense in a gut-level, this-is-where-we-need-to-be kind of way. We started showing up at the luncheons, the galas, the community events, and the more we got in the room with people doing this work in Sarasota, the more we understood what was actually going on underneath the surface.
DRSC actually started as a wedding theme — and then became a real thing.
2024
We used it as the concept for our wedding in September 2024, and honestly the whole vibe just felt so us that in April 2025 we decided to turn it into an actual consulting practice. The Social Club part isn't just a name — it's genuinely how we show up, as people who live here and care about this place, not as outside experts flying in to fix something. DRSC is our attempt to put our clinical training in service of the structural problems individual therapy was never designed to solve.
Meet the humans behind the work.
We're different from each other in all the right ways — and that's kind of the whole point.
Emily Deming-Rivers, PhD
Emily is the executive functioning of this entire operation and honestly of our relationship too — she's got a PhD in Clinical Child Psychology from West Virginia University, she's a licensed psychologist in Florida, and she's a certified PCIT trainer, which means she's not just doing the work herself but also teaching other clinicians how to do it well. She's an Enneagram 1, an Aries, has dry humor that sneaks up on you, and she speaks with a kind of quiet authority that makes you feel grounded instead of nervous, which is genuinely hard to do.
Her clinical background is behavioral and deeply family-systems focused — she's spent her career working with children, parents, and the spaces between them. She's also the 2024 Sarasota Out Awards "Favorite Therapist," which tells you something about how this community already sees her. She has a strong moral compass and a quiet, consistent protective nature. She knows exactly which rules exist to protect people and which ones exist to protect systems. She'll name the difference, straightforwardly, without drama.
Essence Deming-Rivers, PsyD
Essence is the one who will say the thing you didn't realize needed saying — in a way that's so disarming you almost miss how precisely she just named it. PsyD from Xavier University. Licensed in Florida. 2025 Gulf Coast Leadership Institute. She's been doing this work long enough to have a dissertation on adolescent treatment outcomes and an undergraduate research grant on the psychology of ostracism — which, if you know her, makes complete sense.
She's an Enneagram 9w1, a Taurus, and genuinely creative in a way that means she's the one making the Canva decks and building the frameworks and finding the visual language for things that didn't have one before. As Director of Psychological Services at their therapy practice — a separate thing from DRSC but deeply connected to it — she's the person who can hold a big picture and build toward it at the same time. As a queer, multiracial, neurodivergent woman with ADHD and a chronic illness, she doesn't fit into one box, which means she's really good at thinking intersectionally — and it gives her an angle that changes what's possible in a room.
We can finish each other's sentences, read each other's minds, and take turns telling a story — and it will be completely cohesive because we're just like that. It's not a bit. It's what happens when two people with genuinely complementary wiring decide to build something together.
Emily is the left brain. Essence is the right brain. If there's a problem that needs to be solved and you need someone to take it and get it done — that's Emily. If you need someone to help you think something through, brainstorm, see it from a different angle — that's Essence. And then they come back together and it's actually better than either one of them would've gotten to alone. They approach things so differently that very little falls through the cracks — and what does, Montie usually barks at until they pay attention.
Together, we cover things from all angles.
Fun facts
We wear matching clothes. Unironically. Frequently.
Dessert o'clock is non-negotiable. Every night. We love it and we're not embarrassed.
Reality TV is research. (That's our story and we're sticking to it.)
Montie is our dog and he is extremely important to us and the business culture overall.
We really, really love each other. That's not background detail. It's what makes any of this possible.
Also, we actually live here.
We moved to Sarasota because it felt right, and we've been showing up ever since — at the events, the luncheons, the galas, the places where this community actually happens. We're still getting to know it honestly, but we're genuinely in it, not orbiting from the outside.
Florida's philanthropic sector is doing something genuinely hard, and we see it up close because we're here too — in the same heat, dealing with the same funding anxiety, watching the same people stretch themselves past what's sustainable. We're not outside observers. We're neighbors.
The 750:1 resident-to-mental-health-provider ratio in Florida isn't an abstraction to us. It's the reason we stopped waiting for individual therapy to be enough and started building something that could work at the system level.
Ready to work with people who actually mean it?
Book a free 30-minute culture strategy call. We'll listen, ask the right questions, and tell you honestly what makes sense for your org — no pitch, no pressure.