We Recover Loudly – Personal Recovery and Mental Health Stories · Shell Righini

S2 Episode 014 - Laura Louise Green - From Running on Empty to a Healthy Pour

·1 hr 7 min·12 clips

Shell opens the chat in a loose, lived-in way. Laura Louise Green explains that Healthy Poor is built around improving mental health and well-being at work, and she traces that focus back to her work as a psychotherapist and organizational consultant. The shift makes sense. Once Laura kept seeing the same damage show up across workplaces, she stopped wanting to treat only the person in front of her and started looking at the whole room. That is the main turn. The conversation keeps asking what responsibility looks like when somebody has been hurt, why awareness does not always lead to change, and why some people double down the moment they realize they need to do the hard work. Shell stays with it. She and Laura talk through how recovery shows up in real life, including the frustrating pattern of almost seeing the issue and then circling right back to it. There is no neat moral here. Laura is clear that a person may not be responsible for what happened to them, but they still have to decide what they do next, which means actually tending to the wound instead of avoiding it. The episode gets especially pointed when the conversation turns to chefs and yelling. Laura treats that not as a quirky personality trait but as a sign that something has gone sideways, whether that is workplace trauma or habits learned in the environment. The focus then widens again. Laura argues that workplaces need better systems, not just better coping, and she keeps coming back to practical things like onboarding, expectations, and the structure people meet on day one. That part lands hard. It is one thing to tell people to manage stress, and another to build a place where stress is not the operating system. Shell keeps the tone open and human. The conversation can wander, but it wanders the way real recovery conversations do, with detours, corrections, and the occasional laugh at how absurd the whole setup can be. By the end, the point is plain. Healing is not just personal grit, because the places people work either help recovery hold or keep knocking the floor out from under it.

As heard by us

A blunt take on recovery, workplace harm, and the systems that keep both going.

Laura Louise Green joins Shell on We Recover Loudly for a conversation about Healthy Poor, the Chicago organization she founded to improve workplace mental health and well-being.

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Why you'd press play

When work is the thing you need to recover from.

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