Laura is located in Middle Tennessee and holds a license to practice therapy in the State of Tennessee. Coaching clients do not need to be located in Tennessee; coaching sessions are scheduled through the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery which you can find here.

Laura offers one-day intensive experiences for individuals. These intensive experiences are designed to help someone jumpstart or dive deeper in skills and interventions around trauma resolution. To find out more about the intensive experience, click here.

While Laura is not currently taking new clients, nor does she have a wait list, she highly recommends any of the practitioners at the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery. To read about them and schedule a FREE inquiry call, click here.

Occasionally Laura will offer support groups through the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery. Support groups are offered in the fall and spring; click here to see what groups are being offered.

Yes! Laura offers individual and group consultations which you can find more on here.

Additionally, in the future she will be offering large group drop-in consultations through the Religious Trauma Institute; click here to sign up for their email list so that you can be the first to know when consultation groups and other offerings will be available.

At this time all of the courses and seminars that Laura offers are through the Religious Trauma Institute. However, she is continuously revamping and creating in order to ensure that the resources she is providing are innovative and accessible which means that it’s likely that you will see courses, seminars, and other offerings become available through this website. The best way to be the first to know about new offerings is to sign up for Laura’s newsletter which you can do at the bottom of this page!

No. Laura is anti-harm, -abuse, -control, -power, -oppression but she is not anti-religion. She believes that each person is unique, including what is valuable and important for them in matters of faith, religion, and spirituality. It is not Laura’s place or goal to determine what your faith, religious, or spiritual practices (or lack thereof) should look like in your individual life. While discussions of faith, religion, and spirituality are a welcome part of client sessions, the goal is that the client would be able to figure out what is meaningful and important for them versus aligning with the beliefs or lifestyle of Laura.

Yes, Laura has regularly updated lists of resources on the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery’s website which you can access here.

Laura accepts donations through Venmo (click here to donate through Venmo) or “Buy Me a Coffee” (Click here to donate).

Additionally, you can support the work that the practitioners at the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery do by financially contributing. All donations are used for scholarships for support group members who may not otherwise be able to participate. To donate to the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, click here. Please note that these financial contributions do not guarantee a tax deduction nor are receipts/invoices/financial contribution statements provided from Laura Anderson or the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery.

In the past therapists and other helping professionals have been discouraged from sharing about themselves–called self-disclosure–and instead being an unbiased, rather emotionless professional in the room who kept the focus exclusively on the client as it was believed this would be most beneficial to the client. While this was, in part, done to ensure that the client’s session was focused on them (and not the therapist!) it often magnified a power dynamic and did not aid in building a safe therapeutic alliance/relationship. Therapists-in-training were told they were to use self-disclosure sparingly and often discouraged from sharing feedback that would somehow suggest where they landed on a given topic or in reference to what the client was discussing.

Interestingly though, as research was done regarding what helped a client the most in therapy, the therapeutic relationship, that is, the relationship between the client and therapist, was the number one factor helping a client make their identified changes and heal. Many therapists began incorporating more of themselves in the therapeutic process by sharing about themselves and how they experienced the client in front of them. Then, social media began to take precedence in the culture and therapists saw this as an opportunity to educate and share about therapeutic information that had formerly only been accessible in the therapeutic office.

Still, the social-media-therapist accounts that garnered the strongest engagement were the accounts that mixed professional knowledge with the therapist showing up as a human—whether that was sharing funny memes, letting people have a look inside their homes and lives, disclosing their own mental health and trauma histories, or where they stood on certain issues. Therapists began to be seen as humans first–humans who brought themselves into therapeutic spaces rather than a stuffy professional behind a clipboard. While there is still discussion and concern over “how much is too much?” for a therapist to share, in general, the willingness of many therapists to show up as a human and professional (instead of a professional human) has appealed to many.

For her part, Laura recognized several years ago that when she shared bits and pieces of her own story, expressed emotions with her clients, and viewed herself as a compassionate witness rather than an expert or authority on someone’s life, her clients expressed feeling more seen, understood, and cared for. Additionally, Laura realized as she began working with religious trauma clients that the addition of sharing her own story and healing journey as it pertained to religious trauma often helped clients feel more at ease and relieved to know that they were not the only one who was experiencing psychological and physiological impacts after leaving a high demand/high control religion.

Ultimately, Laura decided to specialize in religious trauma because of her own story and journey of healing. The discouragement she experienced from not finding professionals to support her who understood religious trauma as trauma (and not just a bad church experience) often landed her in places of shame and doubt that only increased the physiological and psychological impacts she was already experiencing. A helper and supporter at heart–even dating back to her days in professional ministry–Laura made it her mission to provide the help and support that she never received and so desperately needed.