Our Approach

Three Main Pillars of Treatment

At Denver Wellness Counseling you will receive an individualized treatment plan based on your personal goals for therapy. No need to come to therapy with clear goals in mind! If you are unsure of your goals, we will spend the beginning of treatment exploring this topic together. Though treatment will vary by client, Denver Wellness Counseling has a 3 Pillar approach to conceptualizing client functioning and providing effective, meaningful interventions.  

1

Handling the Present Moment

We give clients tools to tolerate distress and cope with symptoms in the moment. Treatment may include building the following skills:

  • Coping and distress tolerance 

  • Relaxation, including grounding and mindfulness 

  • Positive Psychology, to gain greater access to positive emotion 

2

Earning Secure Attachment

The concept of attachment is ALL about relationships, including the relationship we have with the SELF. At Denver Wellness Counseling, we realize that as social beings, our wellness is related to both how we view ourselves and how we relate to others. How this may look in treatment is:

  • Learning about and understanding our attachment styles/patterns

  • Exploring our self-esteem, identifying our unique gifts, and building skills for self-compassion

  • If we had inconsistent or poor parenting - how to reparent ourselves by tuning into and meeting our own needs

  • Learning and implementing healthy relationship skills, such as setting boundaries and advocating for our needs  

  • Moving out of codependency 

3

Healing Old Wounds

  • Recognizing how our current triggers/symptoms may be related to past experiences

  • Emotional processing of past events that still hold power over us. This helps us shift out of old belief systems and change unhelpful patterns of responding to the world. This is primarily done through EMDR. Learn more about EMDR HERE

"Self love doesn't always look like warm baths and herbal tea. Sometimes self-love is sitting in the discomfort of bettering ourselves. When we make commitments to do that regularly, we are ingraining the belief that we are worth it.”

— KERRI STERRET, FOUNDER & THERAPIST

Counseling - Adults + Teens

Our therapists at Denver Wellness Counseling are committed to providing clients with a transformative experience.  Counseling at DWC is based on collaboration, where the therapist’s clinical expertise meets the client’s internal wisdom of healing.  More than just “talk therapy,” counseling is transformative when clients can make sense of their symptoms and build trust in their own capabilities to soothe and heal hurts, both past and present.

The counselor’s job is truly to guide and coach clients in their own innate capacities, so they leave therapy more empowered and less reliant on others to soothe/fix what hurts.   Therapy will look different for each client, but one generalized example of a course of therapy may look like the following:

  • Deep exploration of present-day symptoms and patterns.  Compassionately coming to understand why symptoms were, at one time, adaptive responses to the world.  Most “symptoms” developed to try to help or protect us at one time, though are likely not serving us in the present.  

  • Increasing self-compassion and developing the ability to comfort parts of self that hold hurt or protect us from perceived painful feelings (these may be parts of ourselves that we come to therapy feeling shame or anger towards).  

  • Skill building and resource development to manage triggers and decrease behaviors that foster isolation, disconnection, shame, or conflict.  

  • Identifying and making sense of how old experience are influencing present-day functioning (otherwise known as “history colored glasses”).  Identifying old, implicit learnings that keeps us stuck in the presents (ex. I’m unlovable if I’m not serving others;  the only way to feel safe is to exert control over my surroundings; etc).  

  • Healing old wounds to release their power over the present 

  • Integration of insights that come from healing old wounds.  Making small, daily commitments to oneself that represent new learnings about the self (ex. I am worthy;  I can set boundaries).  

  • Healthy termination of counseling.  Therapy is meant to pause occasionally and at some point conclude, as the client has been empowered to trust themselves and their abilities to manage what life throws at them.  And, of course, clients are always welcome back when life reveals a new focus for treatment.