About Tia Young

Your role in therapy

I work best with clients who want to be in therapy and come prepared with what they want to work on each session.

We’ll start each session by asking what you want to talk about.

I don’t provide worksheets, homework assignments, or assign readings.

Some clients take notes so they can review what we talked about in session or bring notes to remind themselves what they want to talk about while we’re meeting.

The more specific examples you have of something you are struggling with, the better I will be able to help you shift your thoughts or approach.

My approach as a therapist in denver, co

I want to help you change the way that you automatically think or react, which involves retraining your brain through repeated experiences.

At first, I will ask a lot of questions in order to get to know you because it helps me start to put together a story of your life that brought you to this point.

In early sessions, I will do more listening and less talking.

Some therapists say they are non-judgmental. But let’s be honest, you’re paying me to judge what’s going on. And help you figure out how to do life differently. So I will start to give you ideas about how to do just that.

If you have tried them before, think they are stupid, or think they won’t work for you, it’s important to tell me that. You go home and try them and they don’t work, I need to know that. If you go home and don’t try them, I need to know that. Some of my ideas suck. Some are great… for someone else.

We need to find the ideas that are great for you.

My style as a therapist in denver, co

I do my best to start and end our sessions on time because it’s important to me to be reliable and predictable. Also, I’m an introvert, so it’s super important for me to get a bit of alone time in between clients.

Honesty is super important to me, which I why I don’t work with affairs and do work with clients engaged in ethical non-monogamy.

Consent is also super important to me, so I don’t want you to just go along with things because you think I’m in charge. I work for you. Please tell me if you don’t like something or it’s not helpful.

I may interrupt you at times or be very direct, which isn’t always comfortable.

I tend to cuss because sometimes a cuss word conveys emotion much better than something more proper and socially acceptable.

We talk about some heavy shit and it can get to be too much at times. My job is to help make sure we don’t get to that point, so I may be sarcastic, irreverent, and make jokes.

I’m not always the same from session to session because my style varies as I get to know what works best for you and what you need that day.

My experiences as a client and how this influenced the theories I use as a therapist in denver, co

I’ve been in therapy off and on since I was 8 years old and some therapists were great while others were just terrible. I’ve fired a lot of therapists.

Traditional talk therapy only got me so far.

It helped with basic skills for depression and anxiety. Helped me figure out I needed a better job rather than better people skills.

It did not help with my childhood trauma, abusive relationships, and chronic illness.

I began seeking alternative therapy modalities and eventually got my graduate degree in Somatic Psychology. People ask if I have specific certifications and I don’t. But that’s because I learned the basics of a lot of somatic techniques.

Grad school further inspired my love of neuropsychology, which I still geek out about in my spare time. Neuropsychology helped me to know that willpower alone is not enough. I also learned to work with the way that my body and brain process the world around me.

I always felt like I was just slapping Band-Aids on things and figuring out how to better fake being a healthy person. Until I met Michael Sieck.

I spent years with Michael doing therapy and post-grad training. I learned about the subtle things that happen when we are very young that shape how we interact with the world and the people around us. Some of the ways we are shaped are good and some are bad. We looked at how those experiences are typically held in the body, shaping the ways that people move and what they believe about themselves and others.

It suddenly made sense why I was fucked up in the ways that I was. And the experiences I needed to have in order to heal.

I also credit this with my superpower of being able to tell what someone’s early developmental experiences were like based on listening to how they describe things and how they move while describing them.

Some facts about me that might matter to you when picking your therapist in colorado:

• Preferred name is Tia and pronouns are she/her.
• Wanted to be a therapist since I was in 8th  grade.
• Been in the mental health field since 2001 doing a variety of jobs in a shit ton of places.
• A lot of my experience has been with domestic violence, sexual assault, child abuse, and grief. I am very familiar with the fucked-up things humans do to other humans, especially those they claim to love.
• Approach my life and work from an anti-oppression framework, which includes adults, children, animals, and the planet. Do my best to be conscious and inclusive, but I still get it wrong  some of the time and take steps to educate myself when I do.
• Recognize how often we are damaged by our communities and how much our communities can be a part of our healing.
• Continue to work on my privilege as a white, middle class, English-speaking, cisgender, person born in the USA.
• Child free by choice. Value my role as an auntie to my biological and adopted nieces and nephews as well as my close friends’ children. Support women’s right to choose to have children or not by whatever methods they feel are appropriate.
• Raised in a super judgy Southern Baptist church and am no longer Christian or Pagan. My partner is atheist.
• Come from a military family that stayed in one place. My partner is former military and also comes from a military family.
• Pansexual. I am currently monogamous, but have had ethically non-monogamous relationships. I geek out about good sex and kink.
• Sex positive and body positive. Sex work is legitimate work. Even if you aren’t asexual and/or aromantic, you don’t need sex or an intimate relationship to have a fulfilling life. Friendships and other relationships are just as important  as intimate partnerships. You do not exist in this world to be visually appealing to other people.
• Registered as an independent voter and am super liberal, if you hadn’t already figured that out from the rest of this.
• Neurodivergent, introvert, external processor, and kinesthetic learner.
• Highly sensitive person with significant sensory sensitivities.
• Zebra. I have rare diseases amongst other chronic illnesses that cause chronic pain, so I need to take care of my body during our sessions in order to ensure that it doesn’t distract my attention from you. It also means I have a lot of medical appointments and will be taking time off for surgeries and procedures.
• Don’t love phone calls unless they are scheduled ahead of time. Love texting and it’s the quickest way to get a hold of me. I can typically respond to a text in a free minute or two in between clients. I’d rather somebody send me a text rather than leave a voicemail. Email is the slowest way to get a hold of me. I typically check emails once a day. Rarely check it on days when I’m not seeing clients.
• Have semi-colon tattoos on the inside of my wrists for suicide awareness.