Laura Merritt, LCSW

05/16/2026

Here’s me just before presenting at Thrive Therapist Conference in Portugal! Can’t wait to explore psychedelic medicine with this room full of great therapists to help them become psychedelic-informed! I can talk psychedelics in the therapy room all day and am grateful for this opportunity! Let’s go!

05/14/2026

What restores and inspires you? One of the ways I get inspired is through travel and time in nature. When I can pair that with presenting at a conference and connecting with other therapists, I feel especially lucky!

05/13/2026

Excited to be speaking at the Thrive Summit alongside some incredibly thoughtful clinicians and leaders in the field.
I’ll be presenting From Sage to Psychedelics: Legal, Ethical, and Clinical Considerations for Client Safety, a training designed to help therapists feel more prepared, grounded, and clinically sound when clients bring psychedelic use into the therapy room.
As psychedelic conversations move further into the mainstream, many therapists are finding themselves caught between curiosity, concern, outdated training models, and very real ethical questions. This presentation explores how we can support client safety without stepping outside our scope, losing clinical rigor, or ignoring the cultural roots these medicines come from.
Also... not a bad excuse to gather in Portugal for a few days!
And if you can’t make it this year, next year’s summit will be in Paris!

05/07/2026

Hello from Portugal! I’m in this beautiful country to present at the Thriving Therapist Conference! I’ve always wanted to visit Portugal and attending a conference is a great way to travel and get CEUs! Have you visited Portugal? Send me your recs on things to do!

03/06/2026

01/14/2026

Grad school didn’t train me to sit with mystical experiences in the therapy room.
It trained me to track symptoms, assessment tools, data points.

When clients return from psychedelic experiences, this gap in training matters.

I remember the first time a client told me they had met their ancestors in ceremony. They described messages, a felt sense of being held by something larger than themselves. I froze.
Should I redirect?
Should I stay “clinical”?
Should I ask about medication or risk?

What stopped me was the connection, maintaining the connection.

So I didn’t redirect. I leaned in and asked them to tell me more.

What unfolded over the next sessions changed how I understand trauma healing.

Over time, and through my own experiences with Indigenous healers, I learned this was not an anomaly. It was access to the Consciousness or Spirit dimension of life that Western psychology often dismisses or pathologizes.

When clients share these experiences, they are not asking us to believe what they believe. They are asking us to stay present.

The therapist who redirects to work stress? I understand the impulse. We’re trained to stay in our lane.

What I’ve learned is this: when we dismiss spiritual experiences, we quietly tell clients that a whole dimension of their humanity is not welcome in the therapy room.

You don’t need to adopt the cosmology.
You don’t need to believe in plant spirits.
You do need curiosity. You do need to lean in.

How have you engaged in a this conversation when a client returns from a plant medicine spiritual experience?

12/26/2025

I hear this all the time: "I've had therapy before but it didn't really help." "I tried meds." "I work out every day", "I tried meditation, journaling, energy work..."
The challenge is that we've been conditioned to expect rapid results. You try one thing, it doesn't work quickly, so that must have been a failure. Move on to the next thing.
But honestly? Trauma didn't happen overnight and it won't get fixed that quickly either.
The next hot trend might promise to be your gateway to cure trauma, but that's an empty promise. Yes, you can get improvement, reduced symptoms. But healing takes time and consistent effort across multiple dimensions.

It builds on itself:
Talk therapy helps you understand yourself and patterns, learn how to be close and intimate, building safety and trust
Somatic work helps your body release what it's holding, adapt
Spiritual practices help you find meaning, connect with a deeper part of yourself, to the sacred
Movement helps regulate your nervous system, build interoception or body awareness
Trauma processing helps you tolerate difficult emotions, sensations and memories, releasing avoidant patterns
None of these alone is THE answer. Together, over time, with patience? That's where transformation happens.
Stop looking for the one thing that will fix you. Start building a practice that addresses all the dimensions of healing: the physical/mental, the energetic/emotional, and the spiritual/consciousness.
It's not sexy. It's not quick. But it works.

12/23/2025

Peru, 2012. My journey of healing religious trauma started with a search for spiritually powerful places. The first was Machu Picchu.
The 5-day hike on the Inca Trail was instrumental in connecting me to my love for culture, history, sacred practices and sacred spaces. I was seeking to learn, not through reading, but through lived experience, by feeling it, by suffering through each ascent, trekking along these magnificent mountains.
Machu Picchu sits on significant Ley Lines, fault lines, and is considered the earth chakra. The Incan's saw the sun, moon, rivers, and land as alive and sacred. This view, called Andean Cosmovision, stresses living in harmony with nature. This resonated deeply with me, living so close to the earth, learning the local traditions and snacking on the local medicinal plants like coca was profound.
What I'd tell that version of me, standing in the mist:
This matters. This journey, this seeking, this opening to new ways of understanding spirit, the sacred, it's all part of your healing. You're not running away. You're growing, shedding, receiving.
And, this is just the beginning, there's more work ahead. The insights you're gathering here, the connection you're feeling, it needs time. It needs to come home with you. Into your body. Into your relationships. Into your everyday life.
Both are important. The seeking and the settling. The expansion and the embodiment.
To anyone healing from religious trauma and exploring new spiritual paths: keep going. The search for something beyond what's familiar is important. Honor it. Walk the trails. Open up.
Have you been deeply touched by a spiritually powerful place?

12/21/2025

After 20 years of working with trauma, I see this pattern constantly: people doing ALL the healing work but still suffering. Still stuck. Life getting smaller, not bigger.
Sometimes our healing practices become another form of avoidance. Not because the practices are bad, but because we use them to skip the hard emotional work.
I wrote about this (link in bio) because I've been there, too. I spent years in spiritual communities using "high vibes" to avoid my anger, my grief, my actual messy life.
Have you been there? And if so, just sit with it. You don't need to fix anything today. 💛

12/03/2025

I love the holiday season, while it’s beautiful it’s also stressful. It asks a lot from our systems… more stimulation, more social energy and there never seems to be enough time. Which means real self care becomes less of a luxury and a real necessity.

I’ve been leaning into things that support my nervous system instead of overwhelming it, and this self care gift box from is exactly that. Clean products, no toxic fragrances, and a nervous system card deck I’m already obsessed with. Everything inside feels intentional and calming, no chemical load.

When it comes to products for self care, our bodies have to process everything we put on on it as well as everything we breathe. Clean, low-tox products give your system a little more support during a season that’s already asking a lot of you.

If you’re craving steadier, quieter, healthier inputs right now, this kind of care really does make a difference.

What are your favorite Holiday Season self-care items?