Laura S. Brown, Ph.D. is a clinical and forensic psychologist in independent practice in Seattle, Washington. A speaker and author on feminist therapy theory and practice, she offers workshops and trainings to professionals and the public on such topics as trauma treatment, cultural competence, psychological assessment, and ethics.

Feminist therapy, Second edition
Feminist therapy, Second edition
In addition to updated references on feminist psychology and feminist practice, I have included analyses of feminist practice in the age of increased awareness of intersectional identities, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, and the effects of these and other emerging social movements on feminist practice.
Not the price of admission: Healthy relationships after childhood trauma
Not the price of admission: Healthy relationships after childhood trauma
I wrote this book because of my experience that many people who were abused, neglected, or otherwise given less-than-adequate experiences of attachment, love, and connection struggle in very predictable ways in their adult friendships, work relationships, and romantic relationships.
Your turn for care: Surviving the aging and death of the adults who harmed you
Your turn for care: Surviving the aging and death of the adults who harmed you
Your Turn is a book I wrote for adult survivors of childhood maltreatment and abuse whose abusive elder family member is now aging or dying. In it I speak to the special challenges and needs of people in this predicament and offer support for dealing with the emotional challenges of being a family caregiver or surviving the death of the abusive elder.
Becoming a trauma-aware therapist: Definitions and assessment
Becoming a trauma-aware therapist: Definitions and assessment
This course is part one of a three-part series on becoming a trauma-aware psychotherapist. Each course may be read online for free, with the option to purchase CE credits upon completion.
Feminist Therapy over time
Feminist Therapy over time
This DVD is a revealing and true-to-life portrait of how I practice feminist therapy. It’s a good teaching video for classes on feminist therapy, and also on psychotherapy skills in general.
Cultural competence in trauma therapy: Beyond the flashback
Cultural competence in trauma therapy: Beyond the flashback
In this book I hope to invite readers to become more culturally competent via strategies that reduce shame, enhance self-awareness, and increase understanding of peoples’ multiple and intersecting identities.
Subversive dialogues: Theory in feminist therapy
Subversive dialogues: Theory in feminist therapy
Subversive Dialogues represented my desire to create a true theoretical foundation for feminist therapy, which had been developing from grass roots practice for nearly two decades as I began to write.
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Upcoming talks and workshops

    None at this time

Recent recorded talks

Books for trauma survivors

If you’re a survivor of childhood trauma or neglect you may be interested in the two books that I wrote for and about your experiences. For a complete list of my books and other publications, please see the Written Work page.

 

COVID-19 update

I am offering clinical case consultation, forensic evaluations, keynote addresses, and workshops of the length of your choice via video conferencing during the current pandemic. I will continue to do so after it’s safe to meet in person again should that be more convenient for you or me.

 

Putting the Pathology Where it Belongs – A Glimpse Into My Musings on Disorder

Visitors to this site may have noticed that somewhere around the 2016 US presidential election I stopped publishing regular updates about my work. That event was one that upended my thinking in some ways, and deepened my analysis in others. The resultant effects on my vision for what constitutes a socially just practice of psychotherapy have been many, and as of now, not yet fully organized.

As a feminist therapist I have always known that words matter. What we call something reifies it, and gives it a position in our thinking. Thus, the question of what to call a “disorder.” I had found myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the “disordering” of so many things that people experience, of so many of the ways in which people who have been harmed in some manner have attempted to solve the problem of the effects of those harms on their neurologies and psyches.

Consequently, I want to highlight this podcast interview with Emma Sunshaw, a psychotherapist who lives with dissociative identities, as an example of where my thinking has moved with regard to the entire concept of what constitutes a “disorder.” In it I discuss how I no longer use the term “disorder” to experiences like Emma’s.

There is no term, no assigned pathology, in any diagnostic manual, for the phenomena of white supremacy and systemic hierarchies of oppression. There are no diagnoses for what made people believe the terrible lies uttered by the man in the White House last fall that led to people engaging in a violent attack on our institutions of democracy. There are words for the attempts to roll back voter rights, but they are not assigned a diagnosis in any manual, despite the deep pathologies of fear of democracy underlying these efforts. There is no “abusing your child disorder,” no “willful murder by law enforcement of Black, Indigenous and People of Color disorder.” We disorder the responses people make to being harmed. We do not, as a culture, formally disorder these and other sources of profound, persistent harm. My podcast interview with Emma, made at the beginning of the pandemic of 2020, is a glimpse into my thinking about what the field of psychotherapy needs to do to speak truth about what is really disordered. Because while the wounds are in human beings, the sources of those wounds, that actual pathology, is in the structures of a culture that has successfully colonized the field of psychotherapy to the extent that we have lost sight of where the actual pathologies can be found.