Winter Park, Baldwin Park & Maitland, FL
About Laura Bowman
Laura Bowman has been a counselor in Winter Park, Baldwin Park and Maitland since 2012.
Sacred Portals for Change
Through watching herself and her clients evolve she has learned that there are some very sacred portals for change available to us all. The change that comes from stillness, movement, loss, clarity of purpose, creativity, relationships, and turning toward what we most want to avoid can all be doorways to personal evolution.
How I Work
The approaches I use fall into two broad groups. Internal Family Systems helps us understand where a pattern comes from and what it’s trying to protect. Cognitive and behavioral approaches help you step out of that pattern and respond in new ways. Most people benefit from a combination of both.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
Developed by Richard Schwartz, IFS is based on the idea that we’re made up of different parts: the critic, the perfectionist, the peacekeeper, the one who can’t slow down. Each of them developed to protect us. When life puts pressure on us, these parts can take over, along with the coping patterns that come with them. IFS helps you get to know these parts with curiosity rather than judgment, including the ones that feel uncomfortable. You do this from a calmer, more compassionate center that IFS calls the Self. It’s a gentle, respectful approach that can create change at a deep level.
Cognitive and Behavioral Approaches
I began my career in Applied Behavior Analysis, and behavioral tools remain a core part of how I work. Understanding a pattern is a start, but change usually comes from responding differently, and these approaches help you do that in a structured way.
Depending on what we’re working on, this may include:
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Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) for OCD and intrusive thoughts
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Inference-Based CBT (I-CBT) for obsessional doubt
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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for values and psychological flexibility
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DBT for emotion regulation and relationships
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Radically Open DBT (RO-DBT) for over-control and perfectionism
How these approaches come together depends on what you’re facing. You can see the specific areas I focus on and what the work looks like for each.
For more than 15 years, I’ve worked with adults who are thoughtful, capable, and often very good at holding things together. Over time, I’ve become increasingly interested not simply in why people struggle, but in what actually helps them change.
I believe insight matters, but insight alone is rarely enough. Most of us can become remarkably good at understanding our patterns while continuing to repeat them. Meaningful change often asks something more of us: the willingness to tolerate discomfort, uncertainty, and imperfection; to question old ways of protecting ourselves; and to begin behaving differently even before we feel completely ready.
My approach to therapy is warm, direct, collaborative, and practical. I don’t believe in forcing people into a single therapeutic model. I draw from evidence-based approaches including CBT, ACT, ERP, I-CBT, IFS, DBT, and RO-DBT, using different tools depending on the person and the work we are doing together.
I also don’t view therapy as an endless search for what is wrong with you. I’m much more interested in understanding how the patterns you developed once made sense, whether they still serve you, and what might become possible if you had greater flexibility in how you responded to your thoughts, emotions, relationships, and circumstances.
Ultimately, I see therapy as a place to become more honest about the life you are living, more intentional about the life you want, and more willing to do the sometimes uncomfortable work of closing the distance between the two.