Lynn Louise Wonders

A long career of forging connections and facilitating human growth.

Lynn Louise Wonders has spent more than three decades studying, practicing, teaching, and writing about the ways people grow, heal, connect, and change.

Long before mindfulness became a familiar word in mental health, Lynn was teaching meditation and mind-body practices and exploring the relationship between awareness, emotional well-being, and the way we move through our lives. When she later became a psychotherapist, those worlds came together. Since 2002, she has worked with children, adults, couples, and families, building a career centered not on a single technique or population, but on a larger question: What actually helps people feel more connected to themselves and to one another?

That question has taken her work in many directions.

Lynn is a Licensed Professional Counselor, Certified Professional Counselor Supervisor, and Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor. She has specialized extensively in child and family therapy, play therapy, relationships, parenting, divorce and family transition, and mindfulness-based approaches to mental health. Her clinical work has included supporting families navigating high-conflict divorce and custody cases, work that eventually led to her book When Parents Are at War: A Child Therapist’s Guide to Navigating High Conflict Divorce & Custody Cases.

She is also a teacher by nature. Lynn has provided continuing education, consultation, supervision, and professional mentoring to therapists since 2010 and has taught professionals around the country through conferences, workshops, online programs, and intensive training. Over the years, she has become particularly interested in helping other therapists not simply collect techniques, but become more grounded, creative, present, and intentional in the work they do.

That pursuit ultimately led Lynn to develop Mindfulness-Based Play Therapy®, an integrative approach bringing mindfulness, neurobiology, therapeutic presence, developmental understanding, and established play-therapy traditions together. She later founded the Mindfulness-Based Therapy Training Institute®, where she serves as Director and Faculty Chair and works alongside other experienced clinicians and educators to provide advanced professional training.

Lynn’s work as an author has grown alongside her clinical and teaching careers. She has written therapeutic books for children, including the Miss Piper’s Playroom series; authored The Midlife Self-Discovery Workbook; co-edited Nature-Based Play and Expressive Therapies: Interventions for Working with Children, Teens, and Families and Play Therapy Treatment Planning with Children and Families; and authored the 2025 Routledge text Mindfulness-Based Play Therapy: A Transtheoretical and Neurobiological Approach to Psychotherapy with Children and Families. She has also written professional articles, book chapters, training materials, and resources for therapists, parents, and families.

Her interest in human development has never stopped at the therapy-room door. Lynn has created programs for preschool social-emotional development, trained parents and educators, mentored clinicians building their own careers, and worked with adults navigating relationships, transition, purpose, and reinvention. She is a certified Martha Beck Wayfinder Life Coach and a Jack Canfield Certified Trainer and Success Coach, and her additional training includes Gottman relationship therapy, Synergetic Play Therapy®, AutPlay® Therapy, and Pure Presence®. She is also a longtime yoga and meditation instructor.

Today, Lynn is continuing that exploration academically as a doctoral student at Saybrook University, where her studies in psychology, consciousness, spirituality, and integrative health include research at the intersection of mindfulness and mental health.

But credentials alone don’t explain Lynn’s work very well.

At the center of everything she has built is a belief that human beings cannot be reduced to diagnoses, problems, roles, or isolated pieces. Children exist within families. Adults carry the children they once were. Relationships affect health. Bodies affect emotions. Work affects identity. Creativity matters. Play matters. Presence matters. And growth does not stop when a person leaves childhood, finishes therapy, earns a degree, reaches midlife, or becomes the professional who is supposed to have all the answers.

That idea is what connects the different parts of Lynn’s work. Whether she is sitting with a therapy client, teaching a clinician, writing a book, developing a new therapeutic model, helping a parent understand a child, or encouraging someone to rethink the direction of a life or career, she is doing essentially the same thing she has been doing for decades: helping people become more aware of where they are, more connected to who they are, and more able to move intentionally toward what comes next.

And that, more than any string of letters after her name, is the work of Lynn Louise Wonders.