Our Staff

Laura J. Halford, SUDP, LMHC

Founder/Director/Clinical Supervisor
Substance Use Disorder Professional
Licensed Mental Health Counselor
First Responders
Veterans
Couples Therapist
EMDR Therapist
Direct Cell: 425-477-9074

Laura is a highly-skilled, deeply compassionate therapist whose approach is warm, supportive, and inquisitive. She brings 32 years of both inpatient and outpatient chemical dependency treatment experience to her work, including time in her career at the esteemed Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage, California.

Laura brings a holistic approach to mental health and recovery utilizing EMDR, CBT, DBT, Gottman Method Relationship Therapy and Family Systems counseling. She is a third-generation therapist, mentored by her late grandfather, a psychiatrist whose practice in Orange County and Hemet, California exposed her to the healing effects of meditation, nutrition, and group therapy as a basis for healing. Her father was a devoted social worker in community mental health in Southern California and Spokane, Washington, and recently retired after many years of work as an elementary school counselor. A Navy Reserve veteran, Laura has extensive experience supporting recovery for first responders and military personnel, both active and veteran. As a business owner she is driven and visionary, enabling her to develop an acute and intuitive sense about people and trends while balancing her own family obligations that include raising a newly-driving teenaged boy.

Through years of counseling executives, high-profile individuals, and others of significant responsibility, she has developed a pragmatic, humorous, collaborative, and direct approach, working to get to the root of problem-sustaining behavior and thinking in order to drive more effective methodologies in work and home life. Drawing from Napoleon Hill’s 17 success principles, she maintains a “keep it simple” approach to managing complex problems. She also invests time in training therapists in mindful wellness and life balance as she supervises those gaining their credentials.

Laura began her family work at Ryther Child Center in 1990 with adolescents and their families. While working at Ryther, she learned of the importance of family involvement in all aspects of counseling. The lessons learned early on with teens and their families formed the basis for her belief that families are a vital resource that need to be included in an individual’s counseling and treatment.

In 1993, Laura went on to work at Central Youth and Family Services in Seattle, conducting in-home family and adolescent counseling. At Therapeutic Health Services, she counseled and supervised people detoxing from methadone by facilitating mindfulness and meditation groups, counseled people with chronic mental illness, and later developed a young adult treatment program at the Bellevue branch. She worked as a counselor for five years with Lake Washington Schools before beginning a private practice in 2004 when she graduated from Bastyr’s Leadership Institute of Seattle in applied behavior science. Her post-graduate work has included studying Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Gottman Method Relationship Counseling, and PTSD with veterans and others recovering from trauma, and she is currently working to complete training to enhance her work with couples seeking a collaborative divorce.

Laura founded Eastside Center for Family in 2011, a family-based treatment and counseling clinic for all ages. The clinic emphasizes wellness within entrepreneurial, high tech, and executive family systems, requiring an understanding of the need to maintain high productivity without losing the heart and soul of one’s self or the family unit. She believes in unifying families by providing multiple counseling services under one roof. In her current professional studies, she continues to research and learn about trauma effects and the healing power of appreciative inquiry, and values greatly a philosophy of mindfulness, compassion, and empathy in all counseling work.