If you are in immediate danger, call 911. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. This website is not a crisis resource. One practical note: web pages leave traces in browser history. If someone monitors your devices, consider using a private browsing window or a safer device.
What if I'm not sure it counts as abuse?
Most survivors I have worked with asked this exact question, some of them years in. Abuse does not require bruises. Control of money, a monitored phone, punishment by silence, rules that kept changing, the sense that you were always one wrong word away from an explosion. These count. If you spent a relationship managing someone else's moods in order to stay safe, that is worth taking seriously in therapy, whatever label you do or do not put on it.
Why do I still miss them?
Because the relationship was not all bad, and your attachment system knows it. Abusive relationships often mix cruelty with real warmth, and that intermittent pattern creates a powerful bond. Missing someone who hurt you is not evidence that it wasn't abuse, and it is not a character flaw. It is grief, and grief gets room in this work: for the person you loved, for the future you had planned, for the version of yourself you were before.
What does therapy look like after abuse?
We go at your pace, and safety comes first: the practical kind and the felt kind. Early on, the work is often stabilization: sleeping again, quieting hypervigilance, getting a daily rhythm back. You will not be pushed to recount anything before you are ready. Healing does not require reliving.
Later, the work usually turns toward identity and relationship patterns: who you are outside the relationship, and how to recognize old patterns before they repeat in new ones. For some clients we eventually bring in EMDR to take the charge out of specific memories. For others, talking is the work.
What if I'm still in the relationship?
You can still come. Therapy is not contingent on leaving, and I will not pressure you toward a decision you have not made. Having one confidential hour a week that belongs only to you can matter enormously. What I will do is take your safety seriously, help you think clearly, and be honest with you about what I see.
Will anyone find out I'm in therapy?
What you tell me in session is confidential, with narrow exceptions required by Colorado law (imminent risk of serious harm, abuse of a child or an at-risk adult, a court order), and I will walk you through those plainly in our first meeting. Because I am private pay, no insurance company learns you are in therapy unless you request a superbill and file it yourself. If discretion matters to your safety, say so, and we will plan the practical details together: how I contact you, when, and whether to contact you between sessions at all.
How much does it cost? Do you take insurance?
Sessions are $180. I am private pay, and for weekly therapy I can provide a superbill for out-of-network mental health benefits, which often means 60 to 100% reimbursement once your deductible is met. I know cost is a real barrier, especially if money was part of how the abuse worked. Sliding scale options may be available. Please ask before ruling therapy out.
Where do sessions happen?
In person at 1330 N Logan St in Denver's Capitol Hill neighborhood, near Uptown and North Capitol Hill, or online anywhere in Colorado. Online matters here more than for most kinds of therapy: some of my clients left Denver to leave the relationship, and others simply feel safer doing this work from home.
When should I start?
Whenever you are ready, and not a day before. Some people reach out the week they leave; some come in years later when a new relationship brings old fears back up. There is no deadline on this. If you want to talk it through first, the 15-minute consultation is free and confidential, by phone or video, and you decide everything from there.