Chronic stress and adjustment therapy in Boulder, CO

Chronic stress is what happens when the pressure never really lets up. It can look like a lot of things. Being on edge and scanning for the next problem even when nothing is wrong. Sleep that won't come, or comes and doesn't help. Feeling wired and exhausted at the same time. Going numb, snapping at people you love, or moving through the week on autopilot because slowing down somehow feels worse. Sometimes it traces back to one thing that changed. More often it's an accumulation: a semester, a season, a family situation, a stretch of months where too much was asked of you and nothing let up.

Adjustment is its close cousin. A move, a breakup, leaving home, a loss, a diagnosis, a change you actually chose and still weren't ready for. Your circumstances shifted and your system hasn't caught up yet. That isn't weakness and it isn't overreacting. Adjustment struggles are especially common in the years between about 15 and 30, when the changes come fast and the ground keeps shifting.

Here's something I say a lot: it doesn't have to be a catastrophe to count. What overwhelms you depends on the whole of your life and your experience, and nobody else gets to decide whether yours was "bad enough." If it overwhelmed your ability to cope, it counts. You don't have to justify it or rank it against anyone else's.

How CBT for chronic stress actually works

I use cognitive behavioral therapy, which is practical and well suited to this. We start by getting specific about what's actually driving the load, because "everything" is true but not workable. From there the work usually runs on two tracks: real skills for bringing your body back down out of alarm, and a harder look at the thinking that keeps the pressure on. The "if I stop I'll fall behind," the "everyone else is handling this fine," the "I should be able to do this." A lot of chronic stress is held in place by rules you never agreed to out loud.

For adjustment and big transitions the work is similar in spirit: making sense of what's changed, building coping that fits your actual life, and getting your footing back.

When it's trauma

Sometimes what's underneath is more than stress. Nightmares. Steering hard around anything that reminds you of what happened. Feeling suddenly flooded by something that seems too big for the moment. About 1 in 15 U.S. adults will have PTSD at some point in their lives, and far more people carry the effects of trauma without ever meeting the full criteria for a diagnosis (National Institute of Mental Health). Trauma is relative, too. If it overwhelmed you, it counts, whether or not it fits an official definition.

For trauma specifically I often draw on cognitive processing therapy, or CPT, which is a form of CBT built for exactly this. But here's the most important part, and I mean it: we don't start by making you relive anything. We start by building safety and steadiness, so you have real tools to manage the hard feelings before we go anywhere near the difficult material.

When and if we do turn toward what happened, we go at your pace, and you never have to tell a story you're not ready to tell. A lot of trauma work isn't actually about reciting details anyway. It's about the beliefs the trauma left behind, the "it was my fault," the "I'm not safe," the "I should have known," and gently testing whether those are really true. You stay in the driver's seat the whole way.

What our first steps look like

We start with a free 15-minute consult, a low-key conversation with zero pressure to explain anything you don't want to. If it feels like a fit, the next step is usually a longer evaluation so we understand what you're dealing with and where it makes sense to begin (which, again, is almost always with coping and safety first). From there we meet weekly or every other week, in person in Boulder or online.

Who I work with

I work with teens running on empty from school, sport, and everything stacked on top of it, and with college students and young adults dealing with relentless pressure or a major transition that's hit harder than they expected. If you're a parent worried about your kid after a hard stretch or a frightening event, we can talk about how to help.