fiddleheads:
young ferns that unfurl as they grow
As we meander our way through life, there are times that are harder to endure than others. When you encounter these challenges, you deserve someone by your side.
My approach is nonjudgmental and deeply compassionate. I respect the ways your body, nervous system, narratives, and emotional life have made sense of the world — with all its wonder and violence — and your place in it.
“At Fiddlehead Therapy, I listen, explore, ask questions, and support you in reconnecting with yourself, your wisdom, and your joy.”
— Laurie Gutierrez Ganberg, LICSW, PMH-C (she/her)
Fiddlehead Therapy Areas of Practice
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![A young white plus size woman with a berry colored short sleeve shirt and blond braided pigtails. She looks up off of a trail with blurred forest background.]()
A Secure Body Relationship.
Unlearn diet culture and heal from weight stigma and fat phobia to create a secure relationship with your body — one where you can trust your body’s cues, meet your needs, and find joy & pleasure in the body you have right now. We work from a Health at Every Size® foundation and we know that your body is not a problem. Even if this feels daunting now, we can help.
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![A young, fat, Latinx or Latina woman with long curly brown hair sits on a blue couch smiling.]()
Emotional Wellness.
Maybe you want to be better able to regulate your mood and anxiety, or to use the coping skills you’ve already learned. Or it feels like your emotional resiliency is zapped and it’s harder to tolerate stressors. We approach mental health with a non-pathologizing framework and partner with you to understand your goals and help you meet them.
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![A white woman and nonbinary person of color smile together while looking at baby clothes in a crib.]()
Growing Your Family.
Family building, pregnancy, birth, postpartum, and early parenting is exciting and can involve unexpected challenges, loss, and transitions when it comes to bodies, identity, relationships, and roles. And at least one in five pregnant, postpartum, and post-adoption individuals experience mood and anxiety complications. We have advanced training and experience supporting new and expectant parents of all genders.
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![A man smiles and looks at his baby while sitting on the floor.]()
Bonding & Parenting.
Regardless of whether you are a birthing or non-birthing parent, bonding can sometimes feel like a mystery. When parenting isn’t anything like you imagined, you deserve experienced care to help you grow in confidence, process the experience, and find joy in parenting your child.
Your own early childhood often influences your parenting so even if you’ve previously felt settled with them, these early experiences can re-arise when you are contemplating parenthood and in the day to day of parenting. Therapy can help you make sense of your beliefs and experiences affecting parenthood; understand attachment; and find acceptance in being “good enough.”
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![A nonbinary person with brown and dyed blue short hair looks at the camera with a septum piercing and red headphones around their neck.]()
Healing Trauma.
Repeated experiences of abuse, neglect, discrimination, oppression, childhood wounds, disrespect from medical providers, surgeries, accidents…these can all be called trauma. When you’ve experienced trauma it can affect your beliefs, your body and nervous system, your emotions, and your relationships. Ongoing violence, war, and the pandemic further stress your systems. We utilize somatic (body-based) interventions like EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing therapy) and narrative strategies to support your healing.
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![A fat mother wearing a white top and blue flowered scarf feeds her young daughter food sitting at a kitchen table.]()
Raising Resilient Kids in a Fat-Phobic World.
You want to do better for the next generation: disentangling weight and health, recognizing the beauty of body diversity, defining fat as a neutral description. Raising kids to have a secure relationship with their bodies and fighting weight stigma creates more justice in the world. And sometimes it can feel incredibly isolating. Let us support you in this powerful work.
“Remembering ourselves, becoming embodied again, is slow work — it is compassionate instead of perfectionistic, communal instead of individualistic, process oriented instead of achievement oriented, and mutual instead of hierarchical.”
— The Wisdom of Your Body by Hillary L. McBride, PhD
Fiddlehead Therapy welcomes all of you
We provide mental health care that strives to be accessible and trauma-informed. We are grounded in values of anti-racism and anti-oppression & work from fat liberation, disability justice, LGBTQIA+ affirming, and neurodiversity frameworks. Therapy and supervision are offered via telehealth for adults in Washington state and in-person in Mountlake Terrace, WA at the Terrace View Counseling Collaborative.
Services for therapists with Laurie Gutierrez Ganberg, LICSW, PMH-C
As a Washington state approved supervisor, I provide supervision for licensure for associate social workers (LSWAICs), mental health counselors (LMHCAs), and marriage and family therapists (LMFTAs). I also offer consultation and trainings for therapists and multidisciplinary professionals in perinatal mental health, private practice building, weight stigma and fat liberation. Supervision groups are also offered regularly throughout the year.
Acknowledgments & Commitments
Fiddlehead Therapy acknowledges, with humility, that we meet on land that is within the ancestral territory of the suq ̀ʷabš “People of Clear Salt Water” (Suquamish People) and the Snohomish people and their successors, the Tulalip Tribes. Many of people we work with also reside on the land of the dxʷdəwʔabš (Duwamish People). We respect that Coast Salish tribes continue to live here, as they have for thousands of years, protecting the land and waters of their ancestors for future generations. We respect their sovereignty, their right to self-determination, and honor their sacred spiritual connection with the land and water.
We strive to be honest about our roles as white settlers and social workers, acknowledging the traumatic history of genocide and forced removal of Indigenous people from this area and the forced removal of children from Native families, as well as our ongoing participation in colonial and white supremacist systems. We recognize the traumatic legacy of slavery and stolen labor upon which this country and its institutions were built. We honor the many QTBIPOC (queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) healers, teachers, artists, and leaders from whom we’ve learned and grown. We commit to an ongoing practice of critically interrogating these histories and our current participation in oppressive systems. We commit to taking action to repair harm, honor and protect this land, and work for a more just future for our collective humanity.
“No amount of psychological therapy or group training can effectively address racism in this country, unless we also begin to dismantle the structures of racism.”