Menu

Get to Know Amanda Leno with Thrive Counseling Services, LLC

Member Spotlight

Thrive Counseling Services, LLC
AmandaLeno

How many years have you been in business? 15

What product or service do you offer? Thrive Counseling Services is a Gilbert-based mental health practice offering individual, couples, family, and child therapy, as well as psychiatry and medication management. Our clinicians are trained in EMDR, CBT, Internal Family Systems, DBT, EFT Couples Therapy, Gottman Method, Prepare and Enrich, and many more. We specialize in trauma and PTSD, anxiety and depression, relationship concerns, child therapy, and perinatal and postpartum mental health. We also offer intensive programs for clients who want something more than a weekly hour. We see clients in-office and by telehealth across Arizona, seven days a week, and we work with several major insurance plans for med management services.

What makes your business different, competitive, or unique? Two things. First, access: we're open seven days a week, 7am to 8pm, because the people who most need therapy are often the ones who can't leave work at 2pm on a Tuesday. Second, depth of options. Most practices offer one path: a weekly session. We offer a range of options, from traditional talk therapy to EMDR to multi-hour intensives, so clients who've felt stuck in traditional therapy have somewhere else to go. Every clinician here is trained in something specific and advanced rather than a little of everything. That means we can usually match a client to the right person on the first try.

What is the nicest thing a customer has ever said about your business? The compliment I hear most often, and the one that means the most, is some version of: "This is the first place I've felt like I could say the whole thing out loud." Not that we fixed anything, but that they finally felt safe enough to stop editing themselves. Clients also tell us they were braced for judgment and weren't. In this field, that's the whole job. If someone walks out feeling less alone with what they carried in, everything else we do has room to work.

How has your business found value in your membership with the Gilbert Chamber? The Chamber has given me something running a private practice usually doesn't: other business owners to talk to. Mental health work can be isolating, and the people at Chamber events understand the operational side, the hiring, growth, burnout, etc., in a way my clinical peers don't always. I've built real referral relationships through it and found opportunities to serve the community I've practiced in for years. It's been one of the better investments I've made.

What motivates you professionally? Watching someone get their life back. I've been doing this work for over seventeen years, and what still gets me is the session when a client realizes they're not broken and that they're responding reasonably to something hard that happened to them. That shift changes everything downstream. I'm also motivated by the gap between how many people need care and how many can actually get it, which is why we've pushed for extended hours, telehealth, and newer modalities. Building a practice means I'm no longer only helping the people on my own caseload. That multiplication is worth the administrative headaches.

What do you consider to be your greatest success? Building a team I trust completely. Early on, the practice was me. My hours, my caseload, my ceiling. The real success was growing into a group of clinicians I'd refer my own family to, each with genuine specialization, who've made Thrive something that no longer depends on me being in the room. Professionally, becoming certified in perinatal mental health and psychedelic-assisted therapy has let me serve clients I couldn't have helped before. But the honest answer is the team. Watching a client I'd have had to turn away receive excellent care from someone down the hall is what I'm proudest of.

Who do you look up to or admire? My clients, without hesitation. People imagine therapists as the ones with answers, but I spend my days watching people do things that take far more courage than anything I do. Someone walks into a room with a stranger and says the thing they've never said to anyone. A couple sits down and risks hearing something they can't unhear. A new mom admits she isn't okay, even though everyone keeps telling her this should be the happiest time of her life. Nobody applauds any of it. They just do it, come back the next week, and do it again. That's the bravest thing I've seen.

When you're not working, where in Gilbert do you spend your time? Mostly wherever my kids need me to be. That could be at gymnastics, piano lessons, swimming, and whatever dance class is happening that season. We're also a family that loves live theater, so a good number of our weekends are spent at musicals. Gilbert is a genuinely good place to raise a family, and much of my community has come from other parents in those same lobbies and waiting rooms. In this season, my husband and I get most of our time together in the margins of all that, such as in the car, on the sidelines, and especially when we travel. Planning our next international trip is how we both actually unplug.

Get to Know Amanda Leno with Thrive Counseling Services, LLC