Today we’d like to introduce you to Maura McBreen.
Hi Maura, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I think my story probably starts long before I knew I would become a therapist. As kids, we sold sweet corn to raise money for college. At the time, I don’t think I understood all of what that was teaching me. We learned how to work hard, how to show up, and how to delay gratification-to put effort into something now because you believed it was building toward something later.
I carried that with me into school, then college, and eventually into my master’s program. I knew I wanted to work with people, although I wasn’t entirely sure what that would look like. What drew me to therapy was actually pretty simple: I loved the idea that I could sit across from another human being and play some small role in helping their life feel better.
More than 12 years into this work, I think I understand that differently now.
I’ve learned that the relationship really is the vehicle for change. There are incredible techniques, interventions, and ways we can understand the brain and trauma, but there is something about genuine human connection that cannot be replaced. People need a place where they feel safe enough to do difficult work, and that safety is built through relationship.
I sometimes think about therapy like building a house. Before you can build anything, you have to choose the lot. You have to decide, “This ground feels safe. This feels stable. I think I can build here.”
The relationship is that foundation.
And then we start building. But building isn’t always pretty. Sometimes you’re standing there looking at studs and wondering how this is ever going to become the thing you imagined. We make mistakes. We repair. We learn to trust. We keep working even when progress is difficult to see.
I think one of the most meaningful parts of what I do is being able to hold that vision for someone when they can’t quite see it themselves yet. Through the safety and connection of the relationship, I can help them keep building toward the life, relationships, or version of themselves that they came hoping was possible.
In a funny way, maybe it all comes back to that sweet corn.
When you plant a seed, you don’t actually know what it’s going to encounter. There will be weather you can’t control, seasons that aren’t ideal, and conditions you couldn’t have predicted. That seed has to find its way through all of it to grow into what it has the potential to become.
The farmer can’t make that happen. They can’t force a seed to grow. What they can do is pay attention to the conditions around it. They prepare the ground. They provide what they can. They protect and tend to it. And when conditions change, they respond.
I think that’s a lot like how I’ve come to understand my role with people.
I’m not the one doing their growing. They are. My responsibility is to help create an environment where that growth feels possible. To provide a relationship that is safe, steady, and strong enough for someone to work through adversity, uncertainty, mistakes, repair, and change.
Maybe I’m still working with sweet corn after all these years. I’m just the farmer now.
And I think that’s one of the most meaningful parts of what I do: I get to tend to the conditions while another person does the incredibly hard work of becoming.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
There have certainly been struggles along the way. One of the biggest things I’ve had to learn in this work is how to deeply care about someone’s story without carrying it as though it were my own. I had to learn not to take another person’s choices personally, and instead honor that their journey belongs to them. I can walk alongside someone, challenge them, support them, and care tremendously about what happens to them, but ultimately, their life is theirs.
Professionally, one of my biggest turning points came when I realized how difficult it was for me to practice under the umbrella of insurance companies. I struggled with having an outside entity influence decisions about someone’s care when they had never met that person. Rules could change, payments could be taken back, and there were requirements around diagnosis and treatment that didn’t always align with how I believed people deserved to be cared for.
Eventually, I had to decide whether I was willing to take the risk of doing things differently.
Opening my own private-pay practice was a huge leap of faith. I didn’t know if it would work. I didn’t know if I was good enough to build something people would choose to invest in when there were other options available. And this wasn’t just a professional risk. I had a family to help support. There was a very real question of, “Can I actually make this work and still help feed my family?”
Six years later, there are still challenges. Owning a business hasn’t meant arriving at some point where everything suddenly feels certain. If anything, it has required me to become more comfortable with uncertainty.
I’ve learned to delegate when someone else can do something better than I can. I’ve learned to trust other people’s expertise, to ask questions when I don’t understand something, and to recognize that I don’t have to know how to do every part of this on my own.
Mostly, I’ve learned to trust the process.
And I think there’s an interesting parallel between that and the work I do with people. I ask people every day to step into uncertainty. To trust before they know exactly how something will turn out. To let go of what they can’t control. To ask for help. To keep building when all they can see are the studs and they can’t yet imagine the finished house.
I’ve had to learn how to do those things, too.
Maybe that’s another reason the sweet corn metaphor means something to me. Growth has never meant having perfect conditions. It’s learning how to respond when the conditions aren’t what you expected and continuing to tend to what you’re building anyway.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, practice owner, and consultant specializing in trauma, relationships, and operational resilience. My work includes individuals, children,couples and families, with a particular passion for law enforcement, first responders, dispatchers, corrections professionals, legal teams, and others who work in high-stress professions.
What sets me apart is probably less about a technique and more about who I am in the room. The person you meet in my office is the same person you would meet outside of it. I don’t believe I am better than, or above, the people I work with. I sometimes describe myself as the “rent-a-friend”,someone who genuinely cares about you, remembers your story, will sit beside you in the hard things, and will also challenge you when you need it. I may have the training of ART and EMDR, but the relationship is the greatest facilitator.
That authenticity builds trust. You aren’t a number or a file I pull up before you walk through the door. I hold your story in my mind because remembering you is part of caring about you. And I believe that kind of genuine human relationship is where meaningful change begins.
Networking and finding a mentor can have such a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
My advice is to ask questions and build genuine relationships. I have always trusted word of mouth, and I actually do very little traditional advertising. Much of my practice and consulting work has grown because someone trusted the work I did, shared my name with someone else, and that relationship opened another door.
I also believe in reaching out. If there is an agency or organization I think I could serve, I introduce myself and explain what I do. I don’t approach it as trying to sell something; I approach it as starting a relationship and seeing if there is a need I can help meet. If I don’t fit their needs, I work to help them navigate the system to where they find a fit.
For me, networking has been less about collecting contacts and much more about building trust. Do good work, care about people, ask questions, and trust that meaningful relationships have a way of creating opportunities you couldn’t necessarily have planned for.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.woundedhaven.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MFtherapy20/
