We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Laura Wood a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Laura , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. When you’ve been a professional in an industry for long enough, you’ll experience moments when the entire field takes a U-Turn, an instance where the consensus completely flips upside down or where the “best practices” completely change. If you’ve experienced such a U-Turn over the course of your professional career, we’d love to hear about it.

I’m excited about where parts of the psychotherapy field are going. I’m starting to see a major shift into whole-person care that we haven’t seen before. For a long time, the field has focused on cognitive treatment methods that really don’t work for everyone, and now the industry is beginning to use a comprehensive approach with new information about the nervous system, neurobiology, and developmental trauma that gives clients a much better chance of success. I hear from people all the time who have said that they’ve been to therapy before and it didn’t work for them, and those stories break my heart. What excites me about the future is that we’re employing newer treatment modalities like EMDR, Neurofeedback, Polyvagal exercises, and other bottom-up protocols that treat the actual root cause of your distress in the nervous system, not just focusing on thoughts a behaviors.

Laura , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m Laura Wood, the founder of Benavieri Counseling. We’ve been open for about 5 years now, and offer counseling and coaching services to men, women, children and teens in Chandler. I started this company as a response to the need for comprehensive mental health care that focused on developmental trauma, treatment resistant challenges, and dysregulated family systems. I am most proud to be the last therapist one has to find to finally find healing. We treat root-causes, not just symptoms and behaviors. We believe that every client deserves the highest quality of care.

Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?

As a trauma therapist and a business owner, it’s critical that I take care of myself, too. The work I do can be especially challenging and it requires a well regulated nervous system. The two most helpful things I’ve done to keep myself physically and mentally well are: doing my own therapy work, and getting professional consultation. These things are not optional if I want to continue to be successful in this field. When you’re responsible to co-regulate with clients and keep your staff grounded and functioning well, you must have a solid foundation.

Every therapist should be doing their own work because we are often wounded healers. If we aren’t careful, it can become difficult to discern between subjective and objective realities. We have to remember that even if our clients are going through the same things we’re going through, it’s not our experience that matters in the therapy session, it’s theirs. The client’s experience is the one we need to focus on, and if we have too much of our own stuff getting in the way, it weakens our ability to stay present and attuned to our client.

Professional consultation is a requirement for me and my staff at Benavieri Counseling. We need to learn from each other and work together to sort out some of our most difficult cases. Having a group with different experience and knowledge is incredibly helpful for each individual’s personal and professional development. Consultation gives each of us new perspective and ideas to help our clients move forward and helps us stay grounded.

If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?

If I could go back, I would have started sooner! I love what I do. When I was in school, I wasn’t sure where my career would take me, I didn’t see myself working for an agency, but I also wasn’t sure if I could run my own private practice. Along the way, I realized just how many things I can do if I keep my mind open to them. I couldn’t have predicted that I would be teaching at a University, running a group practice, maintaining a caseload of individual clients, and speaking professionally. This field has offered me so many opportunities to use my skills and knowledge in a variety of ways. It’s been rewarding and delightfully surprising.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.benavieri.com
• Instagram: /benavieri
• Facebook: /benavieri
• Linkedin: /company/benavieri
• Youtube: @benavieri