I am Dr. Allie Davis, a mother, therapist, researcher, and educator working at the intersection of maternal mental health, ecology, and recovery.
I serve as a steward of Maternal Ecopsychology, tending the language, research, and relational containers through which maternal ecodistress can be understood with clarity and dignity.
This work took shape during a period of profound reorganization. Motherhood arrived alongside instability and dislocation, and my body responded by becoming more precise in its perception. Questions of safety, belonging, and continuity moved into daily experience.
What I was feeling was not confusion. It was discernment. It was emerging ecological intelligence responding to real conditions
During that time, I spent long hours beneath a juniper tree near my home in the Hill Country of Texas. I returned to her for steadiness and orientation. She showed me how living beings endure contaminated landscapes, how they sense threat early, work to contain it, draw nourishment from depth, and remain anchored even when conditions are hostile. She showed me how truth holds when mistruth circulates.
When my life reorganized again and I came to the high desert of New Mexico, I encountered juniper once more. Seeing her here mattered deeply. The same species, rooted in a different place. Here she is recognized and protected, and that clarified something essential. Belonging is not always tied to origin. Roots know when the ground can hold them. Context reveals rather than remakes.
This way of learning from land, pattern, and context became foundational to how I understand maternal ecodistress and ecological intelligence.
My Beliefs
Ecodistress (sometimes called climate anxiety or grief) is not pathology, it’s a call to reconnection.
The healing of the Earth and the healing of mothers are one and the same. Mothers are often climate canaries.
Through juniper, I began to understand maternal ecodistress as a form of ecological intelligence that emerges during matrescence. Mothers become finely attuned to relational, systemic, and environmental threat because the work of care requires it. What often appears as overwhelm reflects perception moving faster than the structures designed to support it.
This understanding reshaped my clinical and scholarly work. I developed the Mother Tree Method™ as one applied framework within Maternal Ecopsychology, supporting mothers and professionals in understanding maternal distress as signal, development, and response.
My work draws from ecopsychology, trauma theory, matrescence research, and lived experience to offer a grounded map for those navigating transition, rupture, and rerooting.
I live and work on Tewa and Tano land with my two children. The land continues to teach me about adaptive resilience, care that preserves selfhood, and forms of belonging that survive disruption. I believe healing unfolds through relationship, through place, and through truth that is allowed to root.
Read My Publications
What Professionals are Saying
Feedback from students in my graduate courses in institutions of higher education and my certificate program.
"[This training] brings together the personal, the collective, and the planetary in ways that feel both intellectually rigorous and deeply embodied."
Izabella Naomi Pedersen, Denmark, Environmental Technologist & Postpartum Counselor
Maternal Ecopsychology Certification® Student
"Not only do I learn how to be a better counselor from [her courses], I also learn about myself."
Graduate Clinical Counseling Student
Anonymous Teaching Evaluation
"Dr. Davis is a true gem. She [is] an example of what a professor should be. [….] compassionate and understanding."
Graduate Clinical Counseling Student
Anonymous Teaching Evaluation
"This program has enriched my work in land regeneration […]. I’m better equipped to create spaces that honor both the Earth and the mothers who care for it."
Ana María Cañas, Columbia, Regenerative Agriculture & Community Health
Maternal Ecopsychology Certification® Student
What Mothers are Saying
Feedback from 1:1 clients and mothers who have participated in my support groups.
"The group shifted my understanding of motherhood by empowering me to honor this new stage of my life as an opportunity to reconnect with my ecological self and navigate how it is evolving."
"Through this group, I realized I am not alone. So many mothers share these feelings, and being in community helped me feel part of a web of mothers instead of isolated."
"Eco-distress used to feel like weakness, but now I see it as my body responding to the Earth’s cries. That shift has made me feel connected instead of broken."
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