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Shae Thomas, founder of ESSENTFLOW

Meet Shae

I'm not a guru. I'm still in the field.

Seventeen years ago, I started asking why high-capacity Black women — the ones holding everything together — so rarely felt like they were allowed to fall apart.

What began as a personal question became an autoethnographic research practice: three published studies and a growing vocabulary for experiences that had never had names.

Who I am

I'm an Identity Linguist™, a Capacity Strategist, and a Human Development Researcher. I hold a BA in Psychology and an MS in Leadership, and I've spent the better part of two decades studying how language shapes identity — not from the outside looking in, but from inside my own life.

The work

I'm not offering a five-step system. I'm a researcher, still in the field, sharing what I'm learning as I learn it — because the language we're building together is too important to wait for a finished manuscript.

Everything I teach — ESSENTFLOW™, THE SORT Method™, the language in the glossary — comes from lived research first. I am both the researcher and the primary research subject. What I write about, I've lived through.

BA, Psychology (Concentration: Counseling; Social Work Minor: Behavioral Health Services Coordination)
MS, Leadership (Concentration: Community Leadership)
Creator of ESSENTFLOW™ and THE SORT Method™
Independent researcher, published on Zenodo, Knowledge Commons, ORCID, and OSF

You were never too much. The room was just too small.™

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