Howdy, I’m Laury!
I’m a California-based expressive artist and an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT#158568) with a creative, playful approach to therapy in dark times.
I love to work with artists, creatives, neurodivergent, ADHD and/or Autistic, highly sensitive people, and helpers/healers experiencing the crippling creative stuck-ness of burnout.
Therapy, beyond words.
These days, darkness is all around us and being reflected back to us through these small dark handheld mirrors. It’s an awfully isolating time to be growing up in this world. We are inundated with information, but left to our own devices.
I too walk this path.
After discovering my neurodivergence in grad school, I was left feeling lost. All of the knowledge I had as a growing therapist in treating disorders couldn’t help me help myself.
I saw several therapists who specialized in ADHD, but no matter how much I talked about my experience, I felt misunderstood. I dreamed of a neurodiversity affirming therapy that let me wander in the field of myself, roll around in the mud and splash in the rain puddles of my dreams.
I discovered child-centered play therapy, a creative modality for children. I witnessed the deeply healing transformative power of play. I experienced the waves of change that arose from that sense of permission and trust in our therapeutic relationship.
I watched the change ripple out.
In a year, one child went from being non-verbal in class to befriending a group of girls who loved studio ghibli films just as much as she did.
I sat with an ADHD boy who drew and scribbled and painted in silence for weeks. By the end of our time together, we were conversing and trading paintings.
In between sessions, I scribbled with paint pens. I wondered, what would it be like to do something “badly” without needing for it to be “good”. What if I could make something without the pursuit of its perfection in my eyes or anyone else’s. With art, I found alongside my clients, it’s incredible potential to be freeing.
I found art to meet words, where language falls short to encompass experience, a pained stroke across the page is felt. Beyond words. Art lets us know ourselves so we can be ourselves in a world that so often punishes for this.
I want to say this:
If you have tried traditional talk-therapy, and found that it hasn’t “worked”, it may be time to get creative.
My approach to therapy goes beyond words, though words are welcome as they come, they are just de-centered, with the permission to go beyond them. After all, our very first human expression is a cry. Then we grow up, and have experiences in our lives that leave us utterly speechless.
Grief.
Trauma.
A late neurodivergent diagnosis might be the catalyst for you (it was certainly for me).
After a lifetime of masking yourself, it can seem utterly impossible to love “yourself”, when that person is someone who hasn’t felt loved, or related to. You may be looking for a warm space to land.
My approach is just that, warm and deeply understanding, because I know what it’s like to be late-diagnosed neurodivergent. I know the feeling of being misunderstood, from a deep and dark place.
Sometimes, we grow up and realize we didn’t get to experience the childhood we needed. Together, with the full range of creative possibilities, I invite the freedom of your childhood, now.
Together, we go where your heart takes you.
Together, we can discover what it’s like to be you, authentically you, and experience the wonderful freedom that comes with unmasking you.
Healing with Laury is about gifting ourselves the childhoods we we missed, the freedom of growing up and discovering who we really are through art, through play, and through creative expression.
Healing with Laury gives you a chance to connect to your personhood, to reclaim your childhood, through the permission to be free right now.
Healing with Laury invites the overdue permission to be a child again. The full, silly, beyond-judgment space to finally feel what it’s like to be witnessed, seen, and accepted as your authentic self.
