About Me

Heidi Wood, MSW, LCSW

I am a licensed clinical social worker. I specialize in mental health therapy, parenting, and anti-racism. I earned my Master’s Degree from Smith College School for Social Work in 2006 and have many years of experience working with children, adolescents, and adults. Since 1995, the School for Social Work at Smith College has been committed to becoming an anti-racism institution and actively works towards this goal through their curriculum and community. My professional education is rooted in this commitment and since childhood, my personal development has been tied to the concept of equity. When I became a parent and moved from Arizona to Georgia, all that theory became reality.

Our little family moved in with my parents and we gave ourselves a year to learn and reflect before deciding where to settle. My husband and I thought about where we had been raised – in white communities with very few interactions with people of color – and made a commitment to offer our daughter something different. She was two years old when we moved into a house in a Black neighborhood in Atlanta. And just like that, my ideals were put to the test.

I was bombarded by my own conditioning, by the decades of brainwashing – nurtured and supported in a bubble of whiteness – that had methodically seeped into my brain. I made a choice to re-examine myself on an even deeper level than before. I questioned everything: my thoughts, feelings and behaviors, my beliefs about what defined a “safe neighborhood” and a “good school,” what it meant to parent a white child in a racist society, what it really meant to be an ally, how obliviously I had participated in systemic racism, and how my well-being had been affected by such a long separation from people of color.

This has not been an easy road. Luckily, I’ve had lots of support. My parents have been doing anti-racism work since the ‘90s. I found and participated in a race conscious parenting group for white parents. I was embraced by a very diverse and loving religious community. My neighbors turned out to be some of the best people I have ever met. And we sent our daughter to a preschool that teaches a curriculum centered around social justice. She’s about to start kindergarten at our neighborhood public school, and she’ll probably be the only white kid in her class. I’m going to have to keep learning, through more books and more training and more dialogue and more relationships and more action, as I attempt to raise a white girl to be a white woman who does not wield power through fear.

In partnership with Meta Commerse of Story Medicine, I’ve been facilitating anti-racism workshops with white people for the past year. While I enjoy that work very much, I’m especially passionate about engaging white folks one-on-one using my clinical skills to help them through the deeper layers of bias and white supremacy. I have already been doing this in my regular therapy practice and have had good feedback about its effectiveness.

I’m a practicing therapist at Atlanta CBT, working with people who struggle with anxiety, depression, self-esteem, grief, family relationships, and parenting challenges. I’ve come to realize that my passions for mental health, healthy families, and anti-racism work complement each other. This has also been made clear to me by numerous people of color, who have been urging me to do this work for quite some time, and their urgency moved me to create Brave Little Steps.

Brave Little Steps is a place where my professional training and my personal experiences combine to offer a unique service to white people who are ready to examine their own conditioning regarding race and racism and are committed to justice. I offer an opportunity for individual guidance on the path of personal growth and parenting. I hope to help white people develop new capacities, thoughts, and behaviors to use as tools for disrupting injustice and building authentic cross-racial relationships and equitable systems.