Hannah Smith, MA, LMHC, CGP
Neuroscience & Group Therapy
Hannah Smith, MA, LMHC, CGP, is a Washington-based licensed mental health counselor, Certified Group Psychotherapist, author, consultant, and clinical educator. She founded Potential Finders Network, where her work combines neuroscience-informed care, Interpersonal Neurobiology, group process, trauma-responsive practice, and individualized skill development. Her teaching is designed to help clinicians understand complex brain and nervous-system concepts without losing sight of relationships, culture, identity, environment, and the client’s lived experience.
Hannah is especially known for translating technical information into practical language that therapists can use in assessment, psychoeducation, case conceptualization, and treatment planning. Her programs address anxiety, trauma, stress, emotional regulation, neurodivergence, group psychotherapy, chronic pain, interpersonal functioning, and the integration of cognitive and somatic interventions. Rather than presenting neuroscience as a collection of impressive terms, she focuses on how clinicians can use it carefully to reduce shame, increase engagement, and support realistic behavioral change.
Her professional perspective is informed by clinical practice, consultation, training, writing, and work with individuals and groups in the United States and abroad. She brings a whole-person orientation to professional education, emphasizing that meaningful change is affected by the interaction among thoughts, emotions, physical states, relationships, social context, personal values, and access to support.
Professional Background
Hannah is the founder of Potential Finders Network, a Washington-based practice and consultation organization offering clinical and nonclinical services, group-based learning, professional training, and personal or organizational development. The organization describes its approach as individualized, inclusive, neuroscience-informed, and grounded in Interpersonal Neurobiology. Its current areas of emphasis include neurodivergence, trauma integration, Pain Reprocessing Therapy, interpersonal development, team functioning, and sustainable change.
Her educational background includes graduate study in special education and counseling psychology, along with undergraduate study in the sciences. This combination supports a teaching style that connects biological and psychological concepts with concrete clinical applications. Current professional profiles also document certification in Interpersonal Neurobiology through the Mindsight Institute and specialized work in group psychotherapy.
Hannah holds the Certified Group Psychotherapist credential. The American Group Psychotherapy Association explains that the CGP designation recognizes mental health professionals who meet established education, training, supervised-experience, and professional-practice standards in group psychotherapy. This credential is especially relevant to Hannah’s work because her programs examine both the technical structure of effective groups and the relational processes that emerge among members in real time.
Her current clinical profile describes work with adults, couples, and groups and identifies chronic pain, stress, anxiety, neurodivergence, trauma-related concerns, life transitions, and interpersonal difficulties among her areas of practice. Her listed approaches include cognitive, somatic, attachment-based, mindfulness-based, motivational, narrative, solution-focused, culturally responsive, and trauma-focused methods. These approaches are presented within an individualized framework rather than as a standardized protocol for every client.
Hannah is also the author of Lasting Change: Overcoming the Grip of Anxiety, Depression, & Trauma with “User-Friendly” Neuroscience. Published by Redemption Press, the book offers accessible explanations of neuroscience alongside practical, whole-person applications. It reflects a recurring theme in her clinical education: clients and clinicians may benefit from understanding how learned patterns, emotional responses, physical states, and relationships interact, but neuroscience should remain a tool for understanding rather than a substitute for comprehensive assessment.
Areas of Expertise
Interpersonal Neurobiology and Practical Neuroscience. Hannah’s work uses Interpersonal Neurobiology as an interdisciplinary framework for understanding how the brain, body, mind, relationships, and environment influence one another. Her teaching helps clinicians communicate concepts such as neuroplasticity, threat activation, memory, attachment, regulation, and integration in language that is understandable and clinically useful. Clinical Events’ guide to neuroscience in the therapy room provides related context for using brain science without reducing complex human experiences to biology alone.
Anxiety, Panic, and Stress. Hannah teaches clinicians to view anxiety as an interaction among threat prediction, physiological activation, learned associations, attention, avoidance, interpretation, and environmental demands. Neuroscience-informed psychoeducation can reduce shame by helping clients understand why an alarm response may continue even when they intellectually recognize that they are safe. Clinical Events’ article on the amygdala and anxiety offers complementary background on fear learning and regulation.
Trauma-Informed, Cognitive, and Somatic Integration. Her training emphasizes the value of addressing both meaning and bodily experience. Clients may understand a traumatic event cognitively while still experiencing tension, shutdown, hypervigilance, pain, intrusive reactions, or difficulty remaining present. Hannah’s integrative approach encourages careful pacing, consent, grounding, cognitive work, and nervous-system awareness. Clinical Events’ overview of evidence-based trauma treatment can help clinicians place integrative strategies alongside established approaches such as CPT, EMDR, and DBT.
Group Psychotherapy. Hannah’s CGP credential and training work reflect specialized attention to group structure, cohesion, safety, purpose, member selection, facilitation, interpersonal learning, conflict, feedback, and termination. She helps clinicians understand that a therapy group is not simply individual therapy delivered to several people at once. Group processes can reveal relational patterns, reduce isolation, support accountability, and create opportunities to practice new ways of communicating and connecting.
Neurodivergent-Affirming Practice. Her current education and clinical work include autism, ADHD, neurodivergence, masking, stress, emotional regulation, and the effects of environments that do not fit an individual’s needs. Hannah’s approach emphasizes individualized support, strengths, accessibility, sensory and executive-function needs, communication preferences, and collaborative goals rather than assuming that difference must always be normalized or eliminated.
Chronic Pain and Pain Reprocessing. Hannah’s current clinical profile identifies chronic pain as a principal specialty and lists Pain Reprocessing Therapy among her approaches. Her work in this area considers how pain, threat learning, attention, fear, stress, emotion, and daily functioning may interact. Ethical practice requires appropriate medical assessment and coordination while helping clients develop skills that reduce fear, avoidance, and disability when clinically appropriate.
Clinical Training, Consultation, and Psychoeducation. Hannah provides education for mental health professionals and other audiences seeking practical, whole-person approaches to change. Her teaching style combines scientific concepts, client-friendly explanation, experiential learning, and realistic application. The goal is not merely to increase familiarity with neuroscience vocabulary, but to strengthen clinical reasoning, communication, treatment engagement, and the thoughtful integration of cognitive, somatic, relational, and group-based interventions.
Authored Publications
- Lasting Change: Overcoming the Grip of Anxiety, Depression, & Trauma with “User-Friendly” Neuroscience