After this, Ladas attended Smith College, graduating cum laude in 1943 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science.
Ladas' career as a licensed psychologist and body psychotherapist would not only encompass psychotherapy, but also ultimately included efforts to educate on the topics of childbirth, breastfeeding, and sexuality.
As an undergraduate, Ladas served as an intern from 1943 to 1944 with the Fair Employment Practices Commission in Washington, D.C, where she was successful in upgrading the positions of Black workers at the Patent Office.
Critical of traditional talk therapy, Ladas became a follower of the Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Reich, a developer of psychosexual theories centered on the orgasm, due to his incorporation of the body into methods of psyschotherapy.
In 1956, she helped Reich's student Alexander Lowen found the Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis, which focuses on the bodily underpinnings of mental health.
Reich's work inspired Ladas to study infants and breastfeeding, for which she travelled to France to learn about the Lamaze technique of childbirth, whereby women are encouraged to move around and use controlled breathing and relaxation as tools to begin labor.
Then, partially during her doctoral studies, she was a staff member of the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) school in New York City from 1967 to 1973.
In the 1970s, Dr. Ladas served on the boards of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, in Allentown, PA, and the International Institute of Bioenergetic Analysis, based in Barcelona, Spain.