Therapist Finds Niche Helping Couples, Individuals In Vienna

VIENNA, VA — When other children were playing on the playground, Laura Hammock, as a kid, was running an advice shop for kids "like Lucy on the Peanuts except for maybe a little bit nicer."

Fast forward to today, Hammock has put a dream of being a therapist into reality. After working as a product manager for technology products, being a stay-at-home mom and helping with her family's small business, she opened Lara Hammock Therapy & Couples Counseling in Vienna early in 2024. She sees clients in person and virtually.

"It's a privilege and an honor to be able to walk beside people as they grow and develop, do hard things and, and, part of my job is to just carry some of the burden as they're doing that," said Hammock.

Hammock, who has been practicing for four years and got her therapist license last fall, sees individual and couple clients. Her specialties are conflicts with couples, mood disorders like anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and ADHD, and trauma. As challenges to emotional health are part of regular life, she sees her role as helping people manage it.

"The symptoms of unhealthy emotional health are not as screamingly obvious as they are for physical health," said Hammock. "And my sense is, you know, we all have a way to process emotions. But sometimes we just get overloaded. There's too many stressful things happening in our lot lives. And we can always use some help doing that as well as some kind of tools to be able to keep up our emotional health."

With individuals, Hammock strives to provide an "emotionally safe environment" to explore different perspectives of how people feel about a life event. With couples, she takes a more hands-on coaching role to disrupt unhealthy patterns of how partners behave with the other.

"You have two different kinds of couples who've got couples who are conflict avoidant, and then couples who are high conflict," said Hammock. "And then sometimes you have a mixture, conflict-avoidant partner with a high-conflict partner. So in each of those different kinds of couples, I have to participate a little differently."

As a therapist, Hammock has noticed one recent trend has been a greater emphasis on mental health and emotional health. She believes it is healthy for people to have more conversations about topics like depression, anxiety and managing emotional health.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought mental health more to the forefront, as people have felt mental health impacts from the pandemic's isolation. She says some pockets of people were even more impacted than others when the pandemic shut things down — children, young adults and older adults. She says the human brain has neuroplasticity — the ability to adapt and change its response — but a lot needs to grow back from the pandemic.

"I think everything is a bit delayed right now for kids and young adults. And that is okay, right, like there's no race to the finish line or anything, but I do think that a little assistance is sometimes helpful," said Hammock. "And then I also think with couples, it was like a pressure cooker situation. For a lot of couples, things that might have taken years to kind of come to the surface all of a sudden came to the surface much more quickly during the pandemic. And I think we're still feeling some fallout from that."

For those continuing to work remotely, Hammock acknowledged the convenience factor of being able to take care of family and home tasks in between work. But she noted that it's important to pay attention to negative feelings like loneliness or disconnection or anxiety.

"All of that stuff is it's just better when you're seeing a lot of people," said Hammock. "Somehow we borrow other people's nervous system's strength and calm. And when we're isolated it's hard to, we have to do all of that on our own."

The timeline of how long people need therapy usually depends on each person. Hammock says people with a lot of trauma could need long-term guidance to rebuild emotional safety. Others may have no history of mental struggles like anxiety or depression but just need help dealing with stressors.

For couples, some may just be looking for ways to communicate better or may be stuck on an issue. Betrayals between partners tend to be longer-term cases.

"Really, it's up to the client as to when it is they feel kind of strong enough and feel like they can kind of independently do things on their own," said Hammock. "I'm certainly told clients that I think they're ready for graduation."

Hammock is happy to be offering therapy in Vienna due to the "small town feel right in the middle of a big metropolis." She enjoys the town's special events, such as the Madison High School homecoming parade that shuts down Maple Avenue. Her kids, now in college, grew up going to Vienna schools.

"I feel very fondly about Vienna, and it's also big enough and there's enough population here to support," said Hammock. "It feels small town, and yet there's enough to support me living and working here without having to worry too much about confidentiality issues."

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