“Love is the only force powerful enough to rewire the brain, repair broken bonds, and rewrite the story of trauma.” This assertion, bold and hopeful, encapsulates the life of Bryan Post, Executive Clinical Director and founder of LEAF Wraparound, and Bondify.ai. It’s a path etched less by choice than by a childhood divided, shadowed by pain and a lifelong pursuit of healing.
Bryan doesn’t recall a single turning point that led him into trauma-responsive care. What he remembers is a life lived in halves, one driven by instinct, the other clouded by unrest. Adopted as an infant into a caring home, Bryan was restless, bright, and always on edge, a “high-functioning mess,” as he puts it. His sister Kristi, also adopted, entered the world three months early after in-utero exposure to alcohol and drugs, her nervous system already wired for distress. Though raised under the same roof, their lives followed vastly different courses. Hers marked by fragility, his by friction.
What they shared was a household unprepared to decode their behavior. Their parents, loving but untrained, relied on discipline inherited through generations by yelling, hitting, and isolating their children. This wasn’t cruelty, but rather survival parenting, passed down by those who had never had access to the language of healing.
“These personal experiences became the foundation of my life’s work,” he says. “I don’t do this because I chose it. I do it because I was wired for it.” His philosophy rejects the sterile detachment of trauma-informed checklists. Instead, he calls for a deeper practice, trauma-responsiveness, rooted in empathy, grounded in neuroscience, and sharpened by lived truth.
Where Healing Actually Happens
LEAF Wraparound emerged from the belief that traditional behavioral health interventions often fall short of meeting the needs of individuals. He saw how systems focused on managing surface-level symptoms like aggression or withdrawal, while overlooking the deeper need for relational repair inside the home. As he puts it, “When we stop asking ‘What’s wrong with this child?’ and start asking ‘What happened to this child?’, healing begins.”
Inspired by California’s forward-thinking initiative for adoptive families and his own fractured beginnings, Bryan envisioned a program that would reimagine where and how healing begins. Instead of isolating the child as the problem, the model wraps the entire family in care. Bryan’s team steps directly into homes, into the mess, the noise, and the ache, bringing with them a steady presence, emotional literacy, and tools grounded in neuroscience and compassion.
Families are met where they are, without judgment, and guided with empathy toward attunement. The objective is to help caregivers find coherence in the chaos.
From Frontline to Framework
In the early days of LEAF, Bryan wore every hat. He drove to homes, attended IEP meetings, led parent circles, collaborated with caseworkers, and rarely took a day off. His calendar stretched across six, sometimes seven days a week, often twelve hours at a time. That immersive pace-built trust with families who had long felt abandoned by the system.
As LEAF matured, so did the infrastructure. A dependable team emerged of people who understood the original heartbeat of the mission and carried it forward without dilution. Today, Bryan’s focus has shifted from ground-level engagement to shaping the wider frame. He spends his time guiding senior staff, resolving policy hurdles with public agencies, and upholding the standard of care that has given LEAF its reputation.
Despite the administrative weight, his daily routine is held by intentionality. Each morning begins with prayer and a determination to lead from his highest, most loving, and grounded self. Between domestic operations and a demanding international speaking schedule, his message remains persistent: “If we want to create healing in children, we must first heal our adult fears.”
Moments That Endure
Bryan, recently named among “The Most Influential People in Healthcare to Watch, 2025,” has dedicated 25 years to serving families, particularly in their most profound states of despair. After thousands of cases and countless tipping points, he still feels like he’s only now shifting into sixth gear.
He recalls one of his kids, the name he affectionately gives to every child he’s worked with, who sent him a photo of his new car. They first met when the boy was thirteen, overwhelmed and over-medicated, with talk of placing him in a residential facility. Bryan disagreed, fought to keep him at home, and found allies in a group of county professionals who trusted LEAF’s model. Six years later, that young man is thriving in the school system and pursuing a career in real estate.
Stories like that aren’t rare in Bryan’s journey. While speaking in Houston, a mother approached him to share how a talk she heard two decades ago changed her parenting. Her son, once on unstable ground, now runs digital strategy for an NBA athlete.
Such testimonies confirm what Bryan has always believed, “Healing doesn’t happen through control—it happens through relationship. Always choose relationship.”
Fueling the Work from Within
While for many, endurance is about pushing through, Bryan regards it as staying aligned with what animates him. He sees himself not as a fixer or a force, but as a vessel for something deeper. When he is fully attuned, present, receptive, and grounded, his energy doesn’t deplete. It amplifies.
Though his calendar rarely includes a true day off, Bryan builds in pauses that keep him motivated. Stillness is intentional. Breathwork, time with loved ones, midday rest, and shared laughter are all part of the rhythm that allows him to give generously without burning out. He doesn’t aim for detachment. He allows himself to feel everything.
That emotional openness, he believes, is not a vulnerability but a compass. It helps him stay attuned to others and himself. When the weight of the work grows heavy, he turns to the same kind of community he urges others to cultivate, which offers steadiness, not just solutions.
Rewiring the System, Not Just the Child
Like a true ‘maverick in the field of social service,’ Bryan is not someone who sets out to follow convention. From the beginning, his work has consistently questioned the notion that transformation begins with the child alone. At LEAF, he reframed behavioral health as a shared emotional ecosystem, where sustainable change hinges on the internal state of the adults leading the household. His model introduced practical elements often missing from conventional programs, such as therapeutic massage, household regulation, nutritional reset, and stress reduction, integrated not as add-ons but as essential threads in daily life.
The focus is on helping parents access clarity and calm, creating the emotional climate in which children can steadily recover and grow. For Bryan, regulation is not a tactic but a relational practice.
Now, he’s translating that same ethos into technology. With Bondify.ai, Bryan is developing the first AI-powered platform tailored to adoptive and foster families. The app provides timely, emotionally aware guidance that helps interrupt reactive cycles before they become entrenched. It facilitates connection, peer learning, and everyday insight, bringing presence and perspective into the palm of a parent’s hand.
Unlearning the System’s Reflexes
One of the most pressing challenges Bryan sees in behavioral healthcare is a lack of self-reflection among the adults who wield them. Too often, children are misread and mislabeled, their distress met with medication, restraint, or abandonment. What is often interpreted as defiance is, in fact, the outward expression of unresolved pain.
Bryan believes the system reacts not from insight, but from fear left unexamined in clinicians, teachers, caseworkers, and caregivers alike. That apprehension clouds judgment and narrows empathy. Until the adults guiding children confront their histories, trauma continues to cycle forward in the very spaces meant to disrupt it.
To Bryan, significant reform begins with professionals doing their emotional excavation. Without that internal work, interventions risk becoming reflexes rather than responses. And for the children at the center of it all, the cost of that avoidance remains far too high.
Harmony Over Balance
There are no clean lines dividing Bryan Post’s work from his life. Instead, they run alongside each other, sometimes tangled, often synchronized, forming a pattern that has evolved over decades. He’s built companies, traveled the world, written books, and walked with thousands of families through their hardest moments. Yet, amid that scale of service, his own household has remained a grounding force.
Presence, not perfection, frames his approach to fatherhood. Raising seven children while growing a global movement has required compromise, candor, and a mutual understanding that legacy often asks for time. Still, what Bryan offers his family echoes what he teaches others, like availability, reflection, and a willingness to repair when things go off track.
Rather than drawing strict boundaries, he’s folded his personal world into his professional purpose. The dinner table, like the therapy room, is a space for connection. At the core of both is the belief that meaning is built not through balance, but through intentional overlap.
Culture Begins Where Ego Ends
In many organizations, culture is treated like a line object, measured in retreats, slogans, or wellness perks. But for Bryan, it begins with something subtler, in how a leader shows up when no one’s watching.
He believes in creating proximity, not hierarchy. He listens deeply, challenges gently, and invites his team into collective growth. He feels transformation can’t be expected from others unless it’s practiced first within oneself.
That clarity has helped him build strong, mission-aligned teams time and again. But Bryan is also candid about his limits. After two decades of founding and scaling social service ventures, he’s noticed a pattern. Once a company grows beyond forty employees, he feels his spark dim. Bryan has been a serial entrepreneur for twenty-five years. He flourishes in the messy, electric beginning of things, but loses interest in bureaucracy and internal politics that inevitably follow when a start-up grows into a small to medium-sized business.
What drives him is not structure, but purpose. And that purpose, he’s found, needs room to move.
A Different Kind of Training Ground
Trauma is no longer just a clinical label. Mental health professionals like Bryan see it as a story carried in the body that calls for presence over protocols. His hope for the next generation of caregivers is for both technical mastery and emotional depth. The kind that comes only from confronting their own histories before guiding others through theirs.
He believes true compassion requires excavation. To be a steady presence for someone else’s pain, one must first sit with their own. That personal reckoning sharpens empathy, softens judgment, and creates space for authentic connection.
“Behavior is the language of stress,” Bryan often says. “When we listen with empathy instead of judgment, we begin to truly understand.”
It’s a principle that underpins his entire idea that understanding starts not with intervention, but with relational sensitivity.
Bryan hopes that his work becomes more than a framework. He wants it to serve as a signal for others to lead with clarity, to build systems that weigh compassion as heavily as competence, and to design care models that acknowledge stress and fear as universal experiences. They are not clinical problems to be managed, but human conditions to be understood.
Advice for the Next Wave of Healing Professional
There’s a reason many therapists feel stuck, even with years of training. Understanding trauma in theory isn’t the same as knowing what to do when it walks into the room. What matters the most is how a person responds to the weight of another’s agony.
Bryan’s advice to aspiring professionals in his respective field, begins with such a simple yet effective shift, from trauma-informed to trauma-responsive. In his view, the former draws from the heart, the latter from the head.
However, technique alone isn’t enough. As Hippocrates said: “Physician (therapist, teacher, social worker, parent) Know Thyself.” Bryan reminds the aspirants to do the inner work first, everything else follows.
The veteran encourages them to treat trauma work not as a skillset, but as a sacred responsibility. Something that demands humility, presence, and emotional honesty. Trauma and relationships are emotional, not cognitive.
Bryan’s final piece of guidance to these aspirants: “Don’t hide behind degrees or diagnosis. Show up. Be human. That’s how you create impact.”
A Gentle Legacy of Love and Healing
Some changes don’t announce themselves with trumpets or banners. They unfold quietly across time, visible only in the way families hold each other, or in how a child grows up remembering love instead of fear. That’s the kind of legacy Bryan values most.
Over the years, the work has rippled across generations. Parents who once struggled to connect are now raising confident, emotionally receptive children. Some of the kids he supported decades ago are now adults starting families of their own, passing down new patterns instead of inherited pain.
That same commitment shows up in his own home. As a father of seven, Bryan sees his personal and professional lives as deeply meshed. His children are all successful, happy, and contributing to society in unique and positive ways, that mirrors the very principles he teaches. Love was never just the theory. It was the practice. When combined with understanding, it becomes resonant. And the legacy he hopes will long outlast him rests on a fierce devotion to children, families, and the healing force of compassion.
