Compassionate support for
real life and real change
Therapy for healing, growth & connection
Psychotherapy and relationship counseling in Charlotte, North Carolina. Laura Bass works with adults and couples who are trying to make sense of something difficult — a relationship under strain, a loss, a period of change, or a pattern that keeps repeating.
Who Laura works with
Reasons people get in touch
Laura sees adults, individually and as couples.
- Couple and relationship difficulties
- Infidelity and rebuilding trust
- Depression
- Anxiety
- Adjustment reactions
- Midlife issues
- Grief and loss
- Life transitions
- Shame
- Trauma
- Chronic illness
- Not on the list?It is still worth asking. Part of a first conversation is working out whether Laura is the right person for it.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Ways of working
Psychotherapy counseling
Ongoing individual work on the things that shape how you feel and how you relate to people.
Learn moreIndividual counseling
One-to-one sessions for adults, at whatever pace suits you.
Learn moreCouples counseling
For partners who want to communicate differently, or who are deciding what happens next.
Learn moreInfidelity counseling
Support after an affair, for one partner or both, without pressure toward a particular outcome.
Learn more
“The secret of attraction is to love yourself. Attractive people judge neither themselves nor others. They are open to gestures of love. They think about love, and express their love in every action.”
Deepak Chopra “Feeling grateful or appreciative of someone or something in your life actually attracts more of the things you appreciate and value into your life.”
Christiane Northrup
Holidays and winter
When the season is harder than it looks
If the holidays or the darker months are weighing on you, these pages are a place to start. They are general reading, and not a substitute for talking to someone.
Life Transitions
Grief does not run to a schedule
Why grief rarely follows the stages people expect, what the second year is often like, and when support is worth having.
Emotional Wellness
When low mood will not lift
The difference between a bad stretch and something more settled, why it is hard to judge from inside, and what helps.
Specialty Education
What to expect from psychotherapy
What the first psychotherapy session usually involves, how the work tends to go after that, and how to tell whether it is helping.
About Laura
How I work
My approach to psychotherapy is best described as holistic, humanistic and integrative, and it has emerged from a synergistic process between my studies and my life experiences.
I help you learn to navigate a world of too many demands and too little real connection — with God or Creator, with yourself, with others, and with the earth. My approach is customized to each individual, couple or family. For effective relationship counseling, I have found that working on all levels — mind, body, spirit and energy — can produce changes that are sustainable over the long term.
To function in a fast-paced world it is important to have tools to manage stress, so that you have the energy and vitality to pursue self-care and your own path. To be fully in the now, where you can self-actualize, it helps to identify and clear limiting thoughts and beliefs, and to clear energy blockages left by your experiences over the course of your life. Hardship can help us grow, as long as we learn what it has to teach and stop repeating the patterns that are not working.
I appreciate the benefit of talk therapy, but I also know that simply understanding why you feel or act a certain way does not always change an ingrained, unconscious pattern. That is why I offer other kinds of work as well. I am a Certified Emotion Code practitioner and trained in other forms of energy work. You, the client, choose what to include in your treatment plan — I simply offer the possibilities available to you.
Choosing a therapist is largely about whether you can talk to them. A first conversation is the fastest way to find out.
Recognition
Ann Brown Award
For significant contribution to mental health
What you can expect
Mind, body and spirit,
togetherIntegrative,
and yours to shapeNo promised outcomes.
No pressure to book.
Part of a first conversation is simply working out whether Laura is the right person for what you are carrying.
What happens next
Starting is three steps
Get in touch
Send a short message or call. A couple of sentences about what you are looking for is plenty — the detail belongs in a session, not a form.
Have a conversation
You describe what has brought you here and Laura describes how she works. It is a conversation about fit, not the first session of therapy.
Decide together
If it seems like a fit, you book. If it does not, Laura will say so and point you somewhere more useful. There is no obligation either way.
When one door closes, another opens. But we often look so regretfully upon the closed door that we don't see the one that has opened for us.
Mind, body and spirit
Spiritual healing
Laura works with the whole person. Alongside psychotherapy, she offers spiritual healing and Emotion Code work for people who want the body and spirit to be part of the work as well as the mind.
How much of this is part of your sessions is always your choice.
“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.”
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth “Your own words are the bricks and mortar of the dreams you want to realize. Your words are the greatest power you have. The words you choose and their use establish the life you experience.”
Sonia Choquette
Resource Center
Reading, while you decide
Plain-language writing on relationships, emotional wellbeing and finding the right kind of support. Educational, and not a substitute for talking to someone.
Relationship Health
Communication, conflict, trust and repair — in couples and in the other relationships that shape a life.
Read moreEmotional Wellness
Anxiety, low mood, shame and the day-to-day work of managing how you feel.
Read moreSpecialty Education
Explanations of specific approaches — what they are, what they are for, and what the evidence does and does not show.
Read moreLocal Resources
Support available in the Charlotte area and across North Carolina, including services this practice does not provide.
Read moreLife Transitions
Grief, career change, illness, separation, and the other points where life reorganises itself.
Read more
“To be nobody-but-yourself, in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
E. E. Cummings, A Poet's Advice to Students “Everyone has inside him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!”
Often attributed to Anne Frank “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
Mahatma Gandhi
Getting started
Take the next step
The first step is a conversation. You describe what has brought you here, Laura describes how she works, and between you it becomes clearer whether to carry on.
There is no obligation to book anything afterwards, and it is a reasonable thing to do even if you are not sure you want therapy yet.
Prefer to write rather than call? Use the form, or see the contact page for office details.