Working with Kelli
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Helping you overcome the panic and fear of the moment.
Read more about anxiety therapy in Denver below…
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Supporting moms through the many changes and transitions that come with motherhood.
Read more below.
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Helping individuals adjust to the ever changing and demanding seasons of life in Denver.
Read more below.
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Vibrant spirituality is an essential part of wholeness and freedom. The very communities we learn to be free in can also be places of hurt and oppression.
Read more about faith sensitive therapy in Colorado below…
Working with Ryan
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Helping you put back the pieces of your life after traumatic events and relationships.
Read more about trauma treatment in Metro Denver below.
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Helping you through the pain and adjustment of life’s biggest losses.
Read more about grief counseling in in south Denver below...
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Vibrant spirituality is an essential part of wholeness and freedom. The very communities we learn to be free in can also be places of hurt and oppression.
Read more about faith sensitive therapy in Denver below…
Help with Anxiety
Do you feel like the more you try to satisfy your anxious thoughts and feelings the stronger they get? Strong anxiety can lead to panic attacks or you may experience physical symptoms like hyperventilation, or excess sweating. It may be more general like never feeling that you’re organized enough. To cope with the intensity, you may partially or fully shut down or ignore your emotions. When you add difficulty sleeping, it can become almost impossible to be present to others or find beauty in the moment. Anxiety seems to always be pulling you into the future, or making you worry about the past.
I want you to have a restored sense of control of your self, mind, and relationships. In the helping relationship of therapy, I offer a safe place to be as messy and stuck as you feel.
In our sessions we will learn and practice:
Emotion regulation, which means identifying and working with troubling emotions
Cognitive reframing, which means finding more authentic and empowering stories for the real struggles of life.
Creative problem-solving, applying evidence-based skills to your unique person and context.
There is no one-size-fits-all treatment for anxiety. But there are effective methods that when applied with care in nuance to your life, can strengthen and restore your ability to live an authentic and full life. I offer the time and attention to apply the general wisdom and proven methods of counseling to your specific reality.
Help with Trauma
Trauma presents itself and two main ways with 1 million different nuances. Maybe you have experienced a big event such as a sexual assault or a car wreck, shooting, maybe you’re the first responder and cannot shake the last call you went on. In these moments it’s clear that what you have experienced has changed you. You are experiencing flashbacks or nightmares, you are suffering trying to avoid places and people and things that bring the memory of those moments back.
Along with the big event experiences that our brains are so good at blocking pain we often repress memories and emotions from hard experiences in life that we do not know how to handle when they happened to us. This creates a deep emotional imprint that that often influences our emotions or behaviors from what can deal just outside of our conscious understanding but affects our relationships and prevents us from giving and receiving the love and belonging we need. We ask questions like what am I doing? Where did that come from? This is sometimes called small tea drama, but I prefer to call it developmental trauma.
The symptoms however can look very similar feeling helpless about the future having difficulty maintaining close relationships, experiencing feeling detached from friends and family, feeling emotionally numb or having difficulty experiencing positive emotions.
Are you always on guard even in relationships that you know should feel safe, do you have difficulty remembering certain scenes and stages of life, do you experience overwhelming shame or guilt, perhaps you’re prone to becoming irritable with aggressive outburst or experience trouble concentrating. These can be signs of big event or developmental trauma
It is believed that neurologically trauma role is to keep you safe with out hesitation, The brain wants to have immediate recall of certain negative experiences, when it felt like you were in significant danger. However, trauma becomes problematic when The automatic recall is triggered, but there is no real threat or it prevents you from responding to stressful situations in a new way.
I want to help you transform your worst moments, and your most negative forming relationships into a source of strength and power.
The process of transformation is hard work, and depending on the extent of the trauma is A significant investment of time but you have the choice to stay in the place you’re at or move forward through the difficulty. Moving forward in processing trauma with EMDR therapy (one of two evidence based trauma treatments) follows the following general sequence
We start with strengthening your sense of self and increasing your ability to feel safe and regulated in the counseling room, and inside your body.
Then we moved to the traumatic memory by connecting to images emotions thoughts and body sensations connected to the traumatic event.
We then move through the memory in small chunks, allowing the mind and body to re-experience the troubling moment or series of moments while keeping a foot in the safety of the counseling office and a foot in the past memory. This allows the traumatic memory to move from A part of the brain that when activated has no sense of time to the part of the brain where more long term memory is stored. I cannot change what has happened to you in the past, but together you can change the emotions, some of the meanings, and your overall relationship to your story
Finally we prepare you to encounter future events that May likely be difficult for you to navigate based on your trauma history, creating a toolbox for you to utilize as you continue on your journey.
I am a trauma therapist because of the hard work I get to witness clients do. To witness an individual strengthen their sense of self to the point where they can with stand and grow from the unspeakable evil they have encountered is one of the most amazing transformations one can see.
It is a true honor to walk with clients The long journey from victim of others to Victor in their own story, From wounded and hurting others to Healing wounded healer amazes me each time.
Help For Moms
For women going through pregnancy and postpartum, there are many new and drastic transitions happening, from your body, to your emotions, to caring for a newborn. Whether it is your first pregnancy, first child, or your sixth there are new challenges, struggles, and transitions each time. The process can be overwhelming no matter how many times you’ve done it, and your mental health can often be the last thing on the list. In a world that often minimizes women’s pain, and overlooks the sacrifices of mothers, it’s easy to ignore or try to over power your painful emotions.
Depression, anxiety, exhaustion, your physical recovery, and caring for a new life, are a few of the very common things you may be juggling. Many women find themselves barely surviving those first few weeks. This can lead to feeling like you have lost yourself in the process of becoming a mother. You do not have to do this alone!
Together we will:
Learn and embrace the changes your body has gone through.
Integrate coping skills for anxiety, depression, or other issues into your daily experience.
Reconnect with the full authentic you that includes but is not limited to your identity as a mother.
I want to help support you through the whirlwind of parenting. Together I can help you learn to manage what feels out of control, while exploring the new or changing role of motherhood.
Get the support you need! Schedule a free consultation today.
help with Faith and Spirtual development
When it comes to faith and therapy, it’s common for clients to fear one of two extremes, having faith forced into the room by the therapist, or on the other hand, the therapist forcing it out.
As practicing Christians who often provide clinical services in church and parachurch settings to pastors and other leaders, we know that faith and religious community can play a major role in who we are, and what we believe about ourselves and the world. In these communities, there is great power to give life, heal and create. But it seems like just as often that power is misused to destroy, confuse, coerce and control.
So weather you want nothing to do with faith and especially organized religion, you view active participation in a faith community as essential, or you are simply open to the role of spiritual realties but don’t identify with a particular group or set of beliefs, we understand the multi-faceted effects of faith and spirituality on your mental health. In the safe nonjudgmental space of counseling, we specialize in helping you integrate your spiritual experiences and religious beliefs into your identity.
We work toward wholeness and freedom via the spiritual parts of life by:
Utilizing scripture and teaching that you are consider sacred
Helping you apply philosophy and theology to your life that has helped believer and nonbeliever alike live meaningful life in light of life’s biggest questions.
Explore your story grounded in the existential reality of the following themes:
Freedom & Responsibility
Anxiety as a condition of living
The limits of relationship and the experience of loneliness
The reality of pain and death
We want to empower you to cultivate and pursue truth, beauty and freedom. Weather you are inside or outside a faith community, applying the lens of spirituality with existential psychology helps you: 1) Find and embrace the limitations and wonder of being fully human. 2) Learn to love and make meaning out of life’s many paradoxes 3) Heal from spiritual trauma and abuse. And 4) know who you are in relationship to God and your connection to the universe.
Explore integrating your faith spirituality into you mental health today.
Help with Life Transitions
It’s common when looking for a therapist to feel trapped between the pressures you are putting on yourself and the expectations of others. You might find it hard to balance work, with the needs of family, and maintaining other relationships.
Individuals face distinct pressures at home and at work. Whether internal or external pressure, it is unfortunately all too common for individuals to struggle with body image, an impossible drive for perfection, and the corrosive emotions of shame and guilt because they can never seem to get it all done. You may feel you are being asked to do the impossible in our culture of balancing the demands of work, family, church and community. This leads to a sense of disconnect with oneself and the challenge of making major adjustments and transitions from one stage of life to the next.
I, Kelli, want to create a safe place for you to understand and explore, with compassion and curiosity, all the good and all the difficult aspects of being yourself in today’s culture.
When we sit across from a one another, it has been estimated that we sit with three generations of genetic inheritance and trauma. Additionally, we sit with the stories told about who you are and what you should be. It is common for an individual to not have been exposed to positive thinking and expression of the aspects of who they are and their bodies. You have most likely inherited a script, and a way of talking about your body, that limits your ability to see and express goodness, truth, and freedom.
Together, we will work to unearth the various sources of the mini pressures you feel. I will invite you to create new stories about your identity. These stories are rooted in your true story. They are most likely already present, but easily overlooked. You are able to experience and live out strength, power and freedom. You are able to make hard choices that benefit all: yourself, your family, and community. And to do this in a way that doesn’t demand that you resent yourself, or aspects of yourself in the process.
Help with Grief
We used to think of grief as processed in stages, and though the stage model of grief has helped normalize the big emotions that come after death and loss, recent research has found that it is better to frame grief in the form of 4 tasks.
Except the reality of the loss.
Process the pain of the loss.
Adjust to life without the deceased.
Learn a new way of living without the deceased.
It is common to feel like a part of you dies with the death of a loved one. They knew and related to you in a way that no one else did. Lets witness the beauty and pain together so you don’t have to bury your pain alone.
Reach out today to explore a safe place for you to journey through your grief.
Do you feel cast into an empty sea without safety or security of a relationship that was a key source of stability and peace?
Our contemporary culture has no idea what to do with death and loss. Well-meaning friends are capable of saying the most infuriating things. It is common when we are grieving to choose not to share our pain because we don’t want to burden others. We are often left in the silence alone, feeling that if we are healed from the pain we would lose the memory of the deceased loved one. So instead of moving through the pain, we pack our schedules tight so the pain has no time to find us. But, pain ignored does not go away. It can become even more difficult to face.
I, Ryan, want to help you by bearing witness to your pain as well as witness to the beauty of the life and relationship you have with people you have lost.