My story

Hi! I’m Laura Moss (she/her). I know from personal experience that finding a therapist who is the right fit can be a daunting task, so I want to share a little more about who I am to help your decision-making process as you look for the right support for you.

I also want to disrupt the traditional therapy model where only the client is expected to be vulnerable so that our working relationship is a little more real and balanced. (While I’m sharing more personally here so you have some more context for who I am, when we work together as therapist and client, our will always be focused on you, your experience, and your healing goals.)

I was born and raised in the south end of Seattle, Washington, where I still call home today. I feel so lucky to be surrounded by so many trees and so much water. The natural world is one of my greatest resources for healing. As a kid, I always sensed that the world was unfair and had a deep-down desire to make it better. I think it had to do with being Jewish, a youngest sibling, and having some pretty unfair (and traumatic) things happen to me and my family in my young life. Alongside those challenges, I was a white kid with relative economic privilege in a neighborhood with a lot of immigrant and POC families who were struggling. The disparity was something I sensed but didn’t know how to make sense of. I always empathized with the underdog and wanted to be a helper of some kind, but up until my mid twenties, I was pretty shut down emotionally and dissociated from my body. I hated what my body looked like and most every other thing about myself. My negative self-talk was constant and my confidence was shaky. I was pretty insecure and hung up on figuring out what I was “supposed” to be doing. I had a persistent experience of feeling powerless. 

In my mid twenties, with some good luck and some good support, I started to explore my sexuality and wake up to my body’s capacity for pleasure and joy. Instead of fixating on what I “should” want, I started to learn how to feel my actual desire. Feeling that desire scared me, but its power was undeniable. This gave me a compelling reason to start to pay attention to my body- not just how I looked, but how I felt. I began to unthaw. I also started getting connected with social justice movements and culture and began to feel from the inside how I had been impacted by sexism and narrow ideas about what bodies are desirable.  I started talking to more people about this, especially people who shared my experience and my identities. I realized the deep shame I felt about myself was not unique to me. I was able to put more space between myself and judgments like, “lazy,” or “undisciplined.” I began to understand myself with more compassion. I came to realize that being hard on myself was not going to get me where I wanted to go. This is a lesson I come back to over and over as I deepen into my healing.