Healing has Limitless Power

By: Jazmyne Courtnii Byrd

Ask Demetrius Rayford how she ended up in the mental health field, and she doesn’t dress it up. “Trauma,” she says. “Trauma and lots of it.”

Then she tells you the rest, plainly and without flinching. It’s a story of a girl who needed help and didn’t get it, and the woman who decided to become the help other people were missing. Today, she’s the founder of Thirdlife Consulting, a Recovery Coach Professional, and a graduate student working toward a future in forensic social work. “My own trauma led me to want to be the person I needed growing up,” she says.

She wears a lot of hats. Mental health specialist, Mitigation specialist, Recovery coach and an Advocate. Her path started in criminal justice, where she earned an associate degree in 2017 and a bachelor’s degree with honors in 2023. She’d originally gone to school to become a nurse, but life pushed her another way. She was sexually assaulted at 16, and she says it took her 18 years of advocating for herself to get her case moving. It’s set to go to trial on January 26. “It’s taking me 18 years to advocate for myself,” she says.

Her first internship, with a domestic violence monitoring court, opened the door to social services. After graduating in 2017, she went to work with a family service organization, supporting children with behavioral diagnoses. The goal was to keep them from being removed from their homes through incarceration, hospitalization, or alternative school placement. The longer she worked with those families, the more she recognized something. Many of the people she was serving needed the same things she had needed when she was growing up.

From there, she joined the Family Justice Center in her city as its first AIR triage advocate, a role built around Advocacy Initiated Response. She structured and spearheaded the pilot program herself. Within the first three to six months, she and her team presented their data to the city council, and the program was awarded $1.3 million. She went on to become the trainer and then the supervisor, creating all the training materials for the advocates and helping update the policies and procedures. Everything she built came from a survivor’s lens. “These are the things I needed when I was going through my situation, and nobody helped me.”

That’s the part that still stings. She says the system failed her twice, and she’s been in a court process for three years now. Which is how she came to name her business. ThirdlifeConsulting is quite literally built around the number three. She laughs about it. She doesn’t keep a job longer than three years, she hasn’t kept a man longer than three years, and she says she falls three times a year. “Me and three go together real bad,” she jokes. But she’s quick to point out that the third time is the one she’s building something with.

Her title is Recovery Coach Professional, and she’s careful about what that means. She isn’t a therapist. She’s a peer support professional, and that distinction shapes how she shows up. Her clients can be triggering for her, because she has chosen to work with survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault while she’s preparing for her own trial. But she says that awareness keeps her honest. “I just treat people how I needed to be treated.” She listens. She doesn’t jump into savior mode. She asks people how they want to move forward and then walks alongside them. Her own options were taken away during her case, and she learned the system so she could advocate for herself. She refuses to take that power away from anyone else.

To make sure she can do this work for the long haul, Demetrius is now pursuing her Master of Social Work degree. She’s on track to finish in December 2027. Her goal is to move into forensic social work and keep serving survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.

Her clarity about advocacy has been tested closer to home. Her relationship with her mother is complicated, and she’s honest about it. Her mother didn’t protect her, and Demetrius says she doesn’t forgive her for that. “I don’t owe forgiveness to nobody. If I ever become ready to, then I will.” But she understands her mother, at least in her head. Her mom’s coping skill was to act like it never happened. Demetrius’s was to knock everything over. “I understand it in my head and not in my heart.”

That understanding doesn’t stop her from showing up. When her mother was sick earlier this year, Demetrius made sure she was treated like a person. At one point, the hospital was preparing to discharge her mother to a nursing home without telling Demetrius, and her mother wasn’t able to consent. She stepped in. It’s the same principle she applies to her clients: people’s choices should never be taken away from them. “I protect her when she can’t protect herself,” she says. “But I can still not have a good relationship with her.”

Honesty runs through everything she does, including how she raises her sons. She’s the family historian, she keeps an Ancestry account, and she doesn’t believe in pretending that painful things didn’t happen. If you pretend life is sweeter than it is, she says, you send people into the world with a rosy view that doesn’t match reality. In her home, there’s an emotion wheel on the wall and something called a chill pill, a way for her kids to name what they’re feeling and take a minute to regroup. She apologizes to her children when she’s wrong, even though she admits she hates doing it. She says that’s how they’ve become emotionally intelligent. “I’m not sending out no little Black boys that are broken.”

Her oldest son was born when she was a teenager, and he has autism. He was the first child in the family with the diagnosis, so there was no one to ask for advice. He was hitting his milestones and then he stopped. She remembers how unhelpful that was. But she says she never saw another option. “Either there is a way or I’m going to make a way.” She worked to help him find his voice. He was nonverbal until he was four. Today he’s verbal, a high school senior, and doing well. She finished two degrees along the way, and her son’s principal once told her she’d always been an exemplar parent.

What drove her was a fear and a promise at once. She knew she wouldn’t be here forever. If she didn’t protect him the way she was never protected, what would happen when she was gone? Her children will still need therapy someday, she says, but not for as long as she has, because she did the work. “I wanted my child to not be dependent on somebody, and not be dependent on me, because I’m not going to be here forever.”

Her younger son is six, 11 years younger than his brother, and she describes him as a no limit soldier and a menace. She taught him baby sign language before he could speak, and now, she laughs, he never stops talking. When she told him he had to get his hair done for her alumni hall of fame induction, he looked at her on FaceTime and asked what it had to do with him. She admits he wasn’t wrong, but he still had to get his hair done. Her sons are very different. The oldest is gentle and calm until you push him. The baby, she says, is just like her.

That’s exactly how she wants it. She grew up being told she was disrespectful for speaking her mind. In her house, it’s the opposite. “My children are allowed to talk back and ask questions, and I love that they exercise that right.”

Demetrius Rayford has had more than one life already, and she’s still building the next one. She’d call it her third. She’d also tell you she wouldn’t change a thing about who she’s become, because the person she needed growing up is the person she gets to be now.