About The Line Between
The Line Between is a consulting studio focused on the emotional and psychological realities of modern work.
I help leaders and organizations make sense of burnout, identity strain, grief, and the unseen labor that shapes culture, performance, and retention.
The Way We Help
Sustainable performance depends less on motivation and more on whether people have space to think, reflect, and recover inside the systems they work within.
Meet Cheryl
I'm Cheryl Walpole Tiku.
I started my career in product development at Ralph Lauren. The work moved fast and demanded precision. What I kept noticing was what it was doing to the people around me.
I left corporate, trained at Pratt Institute, and became a licensed clinician. I've spent the 17 years since inside high-pressure systems: inpatient psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital, therapy groups for refugees from the wars in Syria and Iraq in Jordan, and 12 years of private practice in New York.
In private practice, my clients were founders, operators, and leaders in tech, law, and financial services. Session after session, the same thing surfaced. The problem was rarely the person. It was the system around them: the emotional load nobody had named, the friction nobody could see, the costs that never showed up on a survey and always showed up in turnover.
The diagnostic skills I'd spent nearly two decades building, reading what people can't yet put into words and catching strain before it becomes a crisis, were exactly what organizations needed and didn't have. So I built The Line Between around them.
I hold clinical licenses as an LPC, LCAT, LPAT, and ATR-BC in New York, New Jersey, and Texas. I'm a Fulbright Specialist, a guest lecturer, and the editor and contributing author of The Business of Art Therapy (Routledge, 2026).
I'm based in Austin, with deep roots in New York.
If your people are running below capacity and you can't say why, that's where I start.
Burnout is rarely a failure of resilience. It is more often a signal that a system is asking for more than it can sustain.
High performers often exceed their capacity long before they exceed their capability.
Where Clinical Expertise Meets Organizational Design
I help organizations address the human dynamics beneath performance. The leadership strain, emotional labor, and capacity limits that shape outcomes but live beneath language.
Not everything shaping performance can be solved through conversation. Some insight emerges only when we step outside language.