For more than 20 years, Sue has been working closely with individuals, families and children, not only in the U.S. but all over the world. Her focus is on helping teens, young adults, and other adults (including parents) to move from distress and trauma to healthy functioning. Sue has been in private practice working with these groups for nearly 15 years.
Sue’s therapeutic techniques focus on allowing the mind and body to work together to heal and find balance. Sue helps you rediscover your voice, rebuild your innate resilience, transform your struggle and get back to yourself. She provides a warm, safe, welcoming, environment while providing actionable, results-oriented feedback and tools to her clients. As a trauma survivor herself, she understands the need to be gentle, non-judgmental and safe and easy to talk to. In addition to being warm and compassionate, Sue is direct and takes a compassionately directive approach, so your therapy will be goal-oriented and effective.
Sue is a Certified EMDR therapist, an EMDR Consultant-in-Training, and trained in CRM (Comprehensive Resource Model), and integrates somatic approaches with these modalities incorporating concepts and tools from CBT, DBT, ACT, attachment repair, parts work and IFS informed methodologies for treatment of mood disorders and the legacy of trauma that have impacted a person’s life or body.
Her work has evolved into a calling that she finds powerful and transformative, and she is deeply touched by the interactions with her clients. Sue engages with clients from a truly collaborative approach in which psychoeducation enables her clients’ inner wisdom to relearn (and rewire their own neurobiological circuitry) to guide their own treatment while she supports and holds space for the client’s innate healing process to evolve and thrive. She is humbled by the trusting dynamic she is able to create with her clients as they work towards healing. She feels an authentic connection with her clients and finds immense appreciation and joy witnessing her clients’ innate healing journey.
When not working, she enjoys being active by hiking and biking, snow-tubing, river tubing, snowshoeing, and being outdoors in the Colorado and New Mexico mountain ranges. She also dabbles in the arts with making pottery, and breaking glass (so much fun) and re-assembling them into mosaics, and in beginning drawing and painting and photography.
Sue sees laughter and nature as natural medicines for healing.
Experience
In 1992, she began as a volunteer teacher in Cape Town, South Africa during the transitional time of the country’s shift from Apartheid to democratization. She later acted as an advocate, humanitarian aid worker, trainer and manager for several international NGO’s and UN agencies focusing on the protection and rights of women, children and refugees throughout Africa and Europe. This global perspective has helped her become a fierce advocate for children and families from diverse ethnic, racial, religious, cultural and economic backgrounds. She works from a culturally competent lens and is always willing to learn or ask what she doesn’t know or understand to better understand you and your particular cultural, or religious or community background.
After her time abroad, she returned to Denver and pursued dual Masters degrees from the University of Denver, graduating in 1998 with a Master of Social Work, specializing in children and families, and a Masters in International Relations.
Sue began her professional counseling career as a child protection caseworker for the Denver Department of Human Services. This was followed by 9 years working in the Denver Public School system as a school social worker supporting and teaching parenting classes to teen mothers and as a school social worker.
Her experience also includes work as a milieu counselor in residential treatment centers and as an integrated behavioral therapist in two Denver area pediatricians’ offices and as a home-based mental health therapist for local nonprofits. This deepened her expertise working with children struggling with a range of behavioral, emotional, familial, and mental health issues and with their parents to support them.