Therapists in Boulder, Colorado

I am a therapist for adults whose memory does not stay where they put it. My clients are usually managing a lot successfully while contending with material that arrives uninvited and at inconvenient moments.

Last month a client grinned mid-session and told me the skill we had drilled actually worked at the worst possible moment. I live for that.

There is a stubborn myth that therapy means years of talking before anything changes. In my experience, feeling less on edge can begin to shift within weeks when the work is focused and honest.

People assume therapy means endlessly excavating your past. Often it simply means telling the truth about your present to someone equipped to help you change it.

Here is what I tell every new client in our first hour: a racing mind is not a character flaw. It is a pattern that got practiced, which means something else can be practiced instead.

After all my years of doing this work, one lesson stands above the rest: nobody is ever really angry about the dishes. There is always something older and quieter underneath.

The myth I would most like to put down is that you have to be in crisis to deserve an hour of this. Most of the people I sit with are not in crisis at all.

After years of doing this work, here is what I know: people are almost never broken in the way they believe they are. More often, an old solution has simply outlived its usefulness.

I am a therapist for adults in the middle of something significant who have found that competence is not carrying them as far as it usually does. Most of my clients have handled harder logistics with less difficulty and cannot account for why this one is different.

A first session with me is quieter than you might expect. You talk, I ask a few questions, and somewhere in the middle you notice you have stopped rehearsing and started just saying it.

I believe the single most important variable in this work is whether the person feels they are steering. Everything else follows from that, and where it is absent almost nothing useful happens regardless of how good the technique is.

The person who usually finds me is holding several things at once and has stopped being able to tell which one is causing the trouble. A change at work, an ageing parent, a household rearranged around a relocation, and a general sense that none of it is quite landing.

I am a therapist for adults who behave in ways they do not endorse the moment someone starts to matter to them. My clients are usually thoughtful and self-aware everywhere else, and reliably bewildered by their own conduct in this one area.

My view of this work is straightforward: the goal is not to feel better about the loss, it is to be able to carry it without it costing you your entire life. Those are different objectives and confusing them causes a lot of unnecessary suffering.

I believe this work succeeds when both people stop arguing about who is right and start looking at what the two of them do together. The content of the argument is rarely the problem.

What I would want every new client to understand is that the size of the change has very little to do with how hard it hits. Small, sensible, entirely chosen adjustments regularly floor people, while enormous upheavals are sometimes absorbed without much trouble at all.

The person who usually finds me has recently become the subject of other people's admiration and is finding it unbearable. They made a large change, everybody called it brave, and now there is no acceptable way to say that it has been a lot harder than advertised.

I am a therapist for adults who keep arriving at the same painful point with different people and have started to suspect the common factor is them. That suspicion is usually half right and a lot less damning than they fear.

Most people reach out to me not at some dramatic bottom but on an unremarkable afternoon, when they suddenly notice how many hours the food rules have quietly eaten. My clients are adults caught in disordered eating that has outlasted every promise to just eat normally.

Nobody calls me on their best day. They call after the third missed dinner, the second snapped apology, the week the inbox finally won.

A stubborn notion floats around that therapy is only for the moment life has fully fallen apart. In my experience the reverse is closer to true, and most people wait far too long before letting themselves sit with what is quietly not working.

A moment I never tire of: someone describes their new circumstances in ordinary, unremarkable terms and then stops, because they have just noticed they were not bracing while they said it. The bracing stopped some weeks ago and nobody informed them.

Most people contact me after an incident they did not like: a reaction that was louder than they intended, or a moment when they heard someone else's voice emerge from their own mouth. That is usually the trigger, though rarely the actual problem.