Therapy for Young Adults
in the Denver Metro area & online throughout Colorado
Counseling that targets shifts in relationships with parents, managing school or career stress, navigating romantic relationships, self-discovery related to values and identity, and mental health concerns.
Young adulthood is a time of immense transition. You may be navigating changes in your relationships with parents and family, losing and making friends, and entering, maintaining, or leaving romantic relationships. At the same time, you may be overwhelmed with school or career pressures or dealing with mental health concerns such as anxiety, depression, or past trauma. And as if that weren’t enough, you may also be in an exciting but exhausting process of understanding, revising, or establishing personal values and identity.
In my experience with young adult clients, I’ve noticed two themes—two primary tasks you have to accomplish to move freely into the rest of adulthood. The first task is establishing an adult identity, which is a rather vague way of saying you have to learn how to support yourself financially, file your own taxes, navigate health insurance, handle car maintenance, and all those other fun parts of adulting, while simultaneously deciding what life means and what your purpose is on this planet. But that’s the easy part. The second task is renegotiating your relationship with your parents—and this is the tricky one.
Your first years “out of the house” (even if you’re still living at home) are often the first time you’ve had enough independence and emotional distance to start to evaluate your parents as plain old people. You may see their faults with new clarity or suddenly recognize the presence of trauma in your childhood. You may feel a complicated mixture of gratitude, frustration, need, love, and resentment for your parents. You may feel like they don’t understand that you’re not a kid anymore, but you don’t know how to set boundaries that will convince them to treat you like an adult. Therapy can be the perfect place to process all of this and start to differentiate from your family-of-origin.
Having a safe place to process all of these transitions can make a huge difference in your mental and emotional health during this period of your life. Establishing interpersonal boundaries, developing healthy daily rhythms, and forming meaningful relationships are crucial right now. You are suddenly free to make choices about who you want to be and the life you want to live, but that freedom can bring anxiety or confusion with it. Since we live in a culture with neither initiation rites for the passage into adulthood nor structures for mentorship or multigenerational community, therapy can fill the gap as you come into your own.
If you are a young adult interested in therapy, please contact me to schedule a free consultation.
Relevant resources on my blog:
