I'm Tyler Pruitt, a Licensed Professional Counselor of 5 years and owner of Mud Lotus & Fire Psychotherapy, PLLC— working with clients across Texas through telehealth.

Maybe you understand what’s happening in your life but still find yourself caught in the same patterns. Maybe a relationship keeps landing in the same argument, a family relationship has become complicated or distant, you've started questioning beliefs that once felt certain, or you've simply reached a point where the life you've been living no longer feels like one you can keep living.

I know something about what it means to have to figure things out the hard way.

My own life has included leaving home young, navigating difficult circumstances without having everything figured out, making choices that helped me survive at one point but created problems of their own later, and having to build a life that looked very different from the one I started with. I don't bring those experiences into therapy as a substitute for clinical training, or assume that my story is your story. I bring them because I know that change is rarely clean, that survival doesn't always look healthy, and that sometimes building a better life means figuring out who you are after leaving behind things that once defined you.

My approach is genuine and human-centered. I work alongside people to understand the patterns, experiences, and relationships that shape their lives, combining clinical training with a practical perspective shaped by both professional and real-world experience. Life rarely fits neatly into a textbook, and I don't think therapy should pretend otherwise.

I believe effective therapy is more than identifying symptoms or handing out advice. My work is about helping you understand why you respond to situations the way you do, challenging patterns that stopped serving you a while ago, and building solutions that actually fit your real life—not an idealized version of it. I care about collaboration, problem-solving, and figuring out what you specifically need to move forward, rather than what therapy is supposed to look like in general.

My areas of focus include anxiety, depression, trauma, and relationships, including work with couples, as well as identity and self-esteem. I have particular focus areas in religious trauma and deconstruction, LGBTQ+ affirming therapy, and estrangement between adult children and their families. I also work with people wrestling with bigger questions: who they are, what they actually believe, and how they want to live once the answers they inherited from other people stop fitting.

I also believe therapy works better when the person sitting across from you feels like an actual person. Outside of work, I play a lot of Final Fantasy XIV and World of Warcraft, I train Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and I listen to a lot of Spiritbox, Dayseeker, and Nerv. I spend a fair amount of time reading philosophy, particularly Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Jung, partly because many of the questions that show up in therapy—meaning, identity, suffering, responsibility, and how we make sense of ourselves—have been wrestled with for a very long time.

None of that is random. BJJ is humbling in a way that translates directly to therapy: you get better by getting tapped out a lot and staying curious about why, not by pretending you're already good at it. Philosophy has given me a framework for sitting with difficult, unresolved questions instead of rushing to close them. And having interests that have nothing to do with clinical work keeps me grounded and genuinely present.

I try to bring that same authenticity, curiosity, and directness into the therapy room. You don't have to perform, have the right answers, or present a cleaned-up version of yourself here. You can be honest about where you actually are, including the parts that don't make much sense yet.

A diagnosis can be a useful clinical framework, but it isn't a definition of who you are. People are more complicated than the labels used to organize symptoms for clinical and insurance purposes, and therapy should make room for you to live beyond that label, not inside it.