Rewriting the Story: Ashley Solomon's Galia Collaborative
Self-criticism. Perfectionism. Burnout.
If you've spent any time around high-achieving women, you've watched this cycle play out — or lived it yourself. It's exactly why we keep coming back to founders like Dr. Ashley Solomon.
Dr. Ashley Solomon spent a decade seeing women get stuck in an endless cycle of self-criticism, perfectionism, and burnout across every level of care she worked in.
What she noticed wasn't a lack of willpower. It was a lack of the right support to break free.
So, she founded Galia Collaborative to help women do three things: heal, thrive and lead.
Small Voice, Big Waves
Ashley traces a lot of her path back to summers in her grandmother's small Ohio river town, where visiting the local library was the highlight of the week.
She'd bring home stacks of books, suspense novels with fierce female leads stacked next to dense psychology texts, and somewhere between the two, she started asking the questions that would define her career: How do we become who we are? What shapes our motivations, our struggles, our capacity to rise above what tries to break us?
Ashley started making waves early. In second grade, she wrote letters to board game manufacturers about sexist commercials. Then, in fourth grade, she took on her own school board over unequal funding in sports.
That instinct, that systems only shift when individuals recognize their own power and use it, became the throughline of everything that came next.
From Reporting to Rewriting
In college, Ashley set out to elevate women's stories as a journalism major. It didn't take long to realize reporting the story wasn't enough. She wanted to help rewrite it.
She added psychology and women's studies to her course load, worked in trauma research labs and learned from children with differently wired brains.
By graduate school, her focus had sharpened around treating eating disorders; work that put her directly in front of the ways women and families get boxed in by systems that keep them suffering.
That focus led Ashley from a residency in Philadelphia to a fellowship in Chicago, then back to her home in Cincinnati, where she founded the Eating Recovery Center and spent the next decade treating women nationwide.
But infertility, then motherhood, changed everything: the pressure women carry was no longer theoretical, and neither was what became possible once she reclaimed herself.
Founding Galia: A Different Kind of Mental Wellness Organization
In 2018, Ashley founded Galia Collaborative to help women heal, grow into the identities they want to inhabit and lead with impact.
Galia's mission comes down to three words: Heal. Thrive. Lead.
That framework shows up in the way Galia operates today: a community of specialists working together to help women move past survival mode and into a life that feels like their own.
It's not a single therapist offering a single point of view. It's a collaborative built around the reality that women's mental health touches nearly everything—relationships, career, identity, family and the pressure to hold it all together.
Ashley also brings that work directly into organizations through corporate programs, speaking and consulting focused on women's mental health in the places we live and work. The goal isn't just individual healing. It's shifting the systems around women so healing doesn't have to happen despite them.
Sound like the kind of support you wish existed when you were in it? That's the reaction we hear most.
The Beliefs Behind the Work
Ask Ashley what she believes, and you'll get a list that reads more like a mission statement than a bio line.
Recovery is always possible.
Families are the number one resource for healing.
There's no such thing as low motivation, only fear.
Humans need connection more than anything.
If feminism isn't intersectional, it's nothing.
And, notably, that being good is overrated, and being free is even better.
It's a blueprint, not just a belief system, and it's exactly how her patients describe working with her: warm, direct and focused on real change over quick fixes.
The Instinct Driving the Impact
What stands out most about Ashley's path isn't just her (impressive) credentials. It's her clear instinct.
A small voice making waves. A reporter decided that telling the story wasn’t enough and set out to rewrite it.
A clinician watching women cycle through self-criticism, perfectionism, and burnout — then building something to break the cycle rather than accepting it as the norm.
That instinct is the one we look for in every founder we admire: see what isn't working, build the alternative, don't wait for permission.
Galia is that instinct at work. Heal. Thrive. Lead. Not just survival.
At Carter House Copy, we're drawn to founders who spot what's broken and build the alternative instead of waiting for permission — it's the same instinct behind every brand we're proud to work with. Ashley's version of it just happens to be helping women heal, thrive and lead on their own terms.
