Trauma therapy for women who have spent years living by someone else's rules and are ready to find their voice
Telehealth Sessions in Colorado and Florida
You run the meeting. At work you're the steady one, the person handed the crisis nobody else wants to touch.
Then you walk into your own kitchen and something in you goes quiet.
You've watched yourself do it a hundred times. The sentence forms, you know it's fair, and you swallow it anyway, because the days after are always worse than the silence.
Nobody in your life knows this happens. That's the part that gets lonely.
Anne* left her city, her job, and her closest friends to build a life with the man she was going to marry. He ended it, and then he explained to her, patiently, why it was her fault.
She's still in the house they picked out. The accounts are joined, and she hasn't been on her own since she was a teenager.
Most days she talks herself out of leaving. The part she doesn't say out loud is that some piece of her thinks he was right about her.
Mikala* grew up inside a religion that decided everything: who she would marry, what she could wear, what she was allowed to learn, when she was allowed to speak.
She left it. Her husband came from the same world, and she still catches herself editing the truth before she says it to him.
At work, she waits for someone to find out she was educated in a place that doesn't appear on any transcript. In meetings, she has a good answer ready and lets somebody else give it.
Sarah* has been married a long time to a man who has never once spoken to her as an equal.
They've done the counseling and the weekend retreats. She came home from each one hopeful for about a month.
Leaving has never felt like a real option. Her life was too intertwined after all these years.
Aubrey* met someone who moved fast. Within a few weeks, she was living an hour and a half up a mountain road, and the list of people she still talked to got shorter every month.
By the end of that first year, the list was one name long.
*The starred names and stories throughout this page are fictionalized composites of real clients I've supported.
None of these women came to me thinking of herself in trouble. Not initially anyway. They came in because they were filled with a sense of dis-ease.
Every one of them could run a department, calm a room, and get everybody else through a hard week.
Somewhere early, in a childhood house or a church or a first job that punished honesty, each of them learned that her voice cost more than it was worth. So she stopped using it.
Being voiceless made sense at the time. You didn't get in anyone's way or take up any space. Being quiet was rewarded. But no one asked you if you agreed to that. It was understood.
Therapy is like a river. It's calm sometimes and raging other times, and you don't get to pick which stretch you're on when you put in.
There will be a week that feels like going over a waterfall. There will be a month of rough water, the kind that takes everything you have just to stay upright.
Then you'll come around a bend into an eddy, and it'll feel like the lazy river at a hotel pool, and you'll rest there as long as you need to.
I know that water. I've run it myself, and I've sat beside a lot of women while they ran theirs.
She got buried under a lot of years and a lot of other people's rules.
Buried is not the same as gone.
Digging is slow, and it's the work I know how to do.
Call me for a 15-Minute Consultation: (720) 279-4631
My private practice has been in Florida and Colorado for decades, and almost all of my work is with women who are living out of childhood trauma and abuse that nobody ever helped them finish.
You can find meaning in pain. You can make sense out of what feels senseless.
I've had to do that myself, so I'm not asking you for anything I haven't done.
Together, we look backward as much as we move forward, because the past is what gives the present its framework. Looking into your own rear view mirror is not easy; I know that first hand, and it's also freeing.
There's no protocol here, and I won't hand you a timeline. I let the work naturally evolve at the pace you can take.
My instrument is the relationship. I show up, stay curious, and make the connections most people can't make about their own lives while they're inside them.
I give journaling and reflection between sessions, held loosely. If something I hand you sets you off, that becomes the next session, and nothing about it counts as a failure.
Deep trauma work is slow. Most of the women I work with are with me a year or longer, some for several, and that's depth rather than dependency.
Anne* could barely get out of bed when we started. Once we found her father in the story, and what she'd been accepting from men ever since because of what he believed about her, something loosened.
She called off the engagement and left that town. She has her own place, a job she's good at and knows she's good at, and a life that doesn't depend on anybody staying.
Mikala* was raised to believe women are seen and not heard. The shame of herself caught up with her before it lifted. Latent grief for time gone by and lost experiences came to fruition. Now she gives her own answers in meetings. Now she addresses her husband authentically. Now, she keeps getting promoted. Healing came with time.
Sarah* got underneath the ambivalence to the truth she'd never said out loud: she did not want to leave her husband. That turned the question into what she could change so she could live inside it. She came back from some time on her own and told him she would never let him speak to her that way again.
Aubrey* stopped answering. Not just her friends. Me, too.
She was gone a year and a half, and I didn't know whether she was coming back. Then she did, with almost nothing left, and we started over very slowly.
We're still going. The patterns run back to her father, the things she loves are coming back one at a time, and there's no date on the calendar for when this is finished.
They say some version of one sentence: I want to find my voice.
Work stops and starts. If yours does, I'll be here when you're ready to pick it back up.
Asking for help is the hardest part of any of this. I know that, and I don't take it lightly when somebody does it.
Fifteen minutes on the phone will tell you most of what you need to know about whether I'm the right person for this.
There's no script for that call, so ask me anything you want.
Call me: (720) 279-4631. Or write to me at mhunt@fourwindscounselingcenter.com.
