Oleander Counseling & Consulting, Austin, TX (2026)

Leila Anderson, LMFT-S is a therapist, speaker, trainer, supervisor, & consultant with over a decade of experience specializing in treating spiritual trauma, complicated grief, and shame.

08/27/2025

Folks, this symposium is going to be really good. Come watch me get all this perfectionism talk out of my brain so I'm not just bringing it up with everyone in my life who will listen. 7 CEUs including 3 hours of Ethics!

07/04/2025

I’m honored to be speaking at the Fall Women’s Wellness Symposium this September!

My presentation, “More Than Enough: Healing the Cycle of Perfectionism in Women’s Wellness,” explores the quiet, persistent ways perfectionism weaves itself into our personal and professional lives, especially for women in caregiving and leadership roles. We’ll look at how cycles of shame and achievement can shape our sense of identity, and how we begin to interrupt those patterns with compassion, clarity, and care.

This conversation is both clinical and personal. As a therapist, supervisor, and someone who works closely with trauma, ethics, and leadership development, I’ve seen how healing begins when we stop asking women to be everything and start asking what systems are keeping them from being whole.

I’d love to see familiar faces there, so let me know if you can make it!

https://lnkd.in/gkesnbiw

Austin Oaks Hospital

03/27/2025

saw this WSJ headline today: “Dating is the only thing you can put 10,000 hours into and end up right where you started.” The thing is, that’s not exactly true.

We often spend 10,000 hours on things without improving beyond a certain point. Take driving, for example. If you started driving at 16, you’re now 36, and you drive 10 hours a week, that’s 10,400 hours spent behind the wheel. Are you significantly better now than you were at 18 or 24? Probably not.

That’s because you haven’t been practicing – you’ve just been doing it.

Relationships work the same way. We expect to get better at dating, marriage, and friendship just by doing them. But improvement comes from practice, not just repetition.

And maybe that dating relationship still won’t last. That’s hard. But you’re not ending up right where you started if you’ve spent that time learning how to be effective, attuned, empathetic, and boundaried. That growth carries into every future relationship.

If you want to get better at relationships, don’t wait until things go south to try couples therapy. Actually practice being in a relationship – set goals, get feedback, make adjustments, and measure your progress.

This is where relational therapy and coaching comes in – not as damage control, but as a way to build the skills you need from the start. When you know what you want, coaching helps you become the person who can get it.

03/15/2025

I’m turning 34 tomorrow. It’s not a big deal birthday, but it feels like the official start of being mid-30s instead of early-30s.

Because I’m a therapist, I often talk to people about things like unhappiness and not knowing who they really are. Something that seems to help with those experiences is more consciously remembering and engaging in experiences they love. Maybe that seems obvious, but in my experience, we often miss the obvious when we feel sad or lost.

Anyway, because I’ve been thinking about who I have been and who I want to be as a 34-year-old, here are 34 everyday life experiences that I really love, in no particular order.

1. Stepping into an airplane
2. Taste-testing recipes and finding that one missing ingredient to complete the taste
3. Pulling on pants that fit exactly right
4. Doodling all the way to the edge of the paper on every side
5. Taking that first sip of coffee when it’s exactly the right temperature
6. Finding the right words to say something and knowing that the person I am talking to felt that too
7. Exploring new places with my family, trying to embrace that tension between letting the experience be whatever it is and trying to make it special
8. Stepping into grass that’s dry when the ground underneath is still soft and slightly muddy from recent rain
9. Peeling the bark off of fallen sticks and having it come off perfectly all around
10. Being less than a mile away from the end of a trip
11. My baby in summer clothes looking so cool and comfortable
12. That moment when I’m baking and it seems like there’s not enough moisture for the crumbs to hang together but then suddenly they do
13. Reading something in a book that I’ve thought about before but never in that particular way
14. Cool misty rain when I don’t have anywhere to be and I can walk along slowly and get dusted with mist on only the very outside layer of my hoodie
15. Lying on my back on the cool floor when I’m hot
16. Chugging ice water until my chest hurts a little bit
17. When my kids say something truly interesting or funny, and I can’t even explain to them how much I like the humans they are
18. Lying in bed next to my husband and feeling myself sinking into the softness of the mattress and blankets
19. Seeing a new episode of my favorite podcasts pop up in my podcast app
20. Stepping in puddles and realizing my shoe soles are the exact right height for my socks not to get soaked
21. Finding that perfect move in a game and doing it
22. Hugs that feel like absorbing another person just for a second
23. Hearing the exact right song for the moment
24. Hearing a song that I normally wouldn’t like, but then I really listen to it and realize it’s wonderful
25. Staring at things until I see the negative space around them
26. Staring at things until I see the floating dust particles in front of them
27. Imagining backstories for inanimate objects
28. Pushing something heavy until it moves
29. Lining up my shoe treads perfectly
30. The compounding excitement of sharing good ideas with people who love them
31. Round numbers in unexpected places
32. The feeling of wind on my skin
33. Repairing bikes
34. Cleaning something until it feels like every nook and cranny is the cleanest it could be

There are other things - huge things, amazing things - that make me happy in life. But the process of pulling together just 34 small, happy things reminded me how many more than 34 there are. How many things I already do, whether or not I take the time to appreciate them.

I think 34 is going to be good.

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Austin, TX

Website

https://leilaanderson.dev/

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08/27/2025

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