Welcome! I’m glad you’re here.

I’m Lauren Doran (pronounced like the band, Duran Duran!) a licensed marriage and family therapist supporting individual adults 18+ and couples via telehealth for clients residing in Washington state.

You don't need to have the words for it yet.

Maybe there's a "before and after" in your story — a moment, a loss, a diagnosis — that changed everything, and you're still finding your footing on the other side. Old wounds keep running the show, showing up in your body before your mind even catches up. The pressure to be perfect has worn you down, or you carry a quiet shame that no amount of achievement seems to touch. Grief is still asking to be felt, all the way through.

Wherever you're starting from, it's enough to know something needs to shift.

Or perhaps you and your partner keep having the same argument, just in different clothes — and no matter how it starts, it seems to end the same way. Maybe the conflict has quieted, but so has the connection, and you're not sure how to find your way back to each other through the changes life brings — a new baby, a career shift, a loss. Whether you're navigating the early stages of building a life together or finding your footing after years as partners, you don't need to have it all figured out — just a willingness to learn how to repair and curiosity to keep showing up and turning toward one another as you both continue to grow and change.

People who choose to work with me are interested in more than symptom relief and quick fixes. They want to do deep work and come curious to get to know different parts of themselves and their partners. They want to really discover how to attune to themselves and one another in ways that were not modeled to them.

I would be honored to meet you where you are at this moment and use my skills and experience to support you toward greater integration, connection, and hopefulness.

I believe therapy involves two essential ingredients:

courage and compassion.

Courage

Courage to risk believing that change is possible when you feel stuck, exhausted, or the future feels too uncertain to face.

Courage to turn inward with curiosity toward the parts of yourself you've avoided, feel disconnected from, or learned to criticize and hide.

Courage to allow another person to truly witness you—to risk being seen, known, and accepted.

Courage to turn toward memories, relationships, and experiences that evoke fear, grief, disappointment, anger, or betrayal—so they can be acknowledged, processed, and carried differently.

Courage to examine the protective strategies that once helped you survive but may now be keeping you disconnected from yourself and the people you love.

Courage to try again—for the first time or what feels like the hundredth—when you feel discouraged or defeated, angry or afraid.

Courage to reclaim your voice and reconnect with your agency.

Compassion

Compassion for ourselves and others—for our complexity, our imperfections, and our full humanity.

Compassion for the younger versions of ourselves who did the best they could with the knowledge, resources, and support they had, while creating space for new stories, new choices, and new ways of being.

Compassion for the parts of us that react, criticize, protect, or withdraw in ways we don't yet fully understand.

Compassion for the moments we have acted out of fear, failed to live in alignment with our values, hurt someone we love, or remained silent when we wish we had spoken.

Compassion as an antidote to shame.

How I Can Help

My Approach

I am a trauma-informed experiential therapist. This means that as we work together, I prioritize your feelings of safety, consent, and attune to what your nervous system is signaling to you as we process together. We will get to know your window of tolerance and identify internal and external resources to support you within and between sessions.

I work with you to develop a relationship with different parts of yourself/your partner and understand your protective stances that were/are adaptive while making connections with beliefs and actions that match your present context. While we work to develop insights and explore the past, I am highly attuned to what is happening in session between us and use therapy to support emotionally corrective experiences and update beliefs to spur new action. I believe that change occurs through updated experience of being with oneself and others.

While I focus on supporting adults and couples at this time, I have experience working with children as young as 3 years old, teens and their parents. I view each person's story through a systemic and developmental lens, recognizing that our earliest relationships, life experiences, and environments continue to shape how we think, feel, and relate throughout adulthood. My experience working with clients across the lifespan has deepened this perspective and informs my work with every individual and couple I see.

Some particular issues clients have worked on with me include complex grief and loss, sexual trauma, religious trauma, family of origin/attachment trauma, communication and relationship challenges, understanding accepting themselves as a neurodiverse/gifted/2e person, transitioning through divorce, new parenthood, and preparing to launch to college.

Specific theoretical models I integrate and form the foundation of how I practice and see change include Internal Family Systems, Emotionally Focused Therapy, Narrative Therapy, and Bowen Family Systems.