Stephanie Small has been a psychotherapist since 2004. Over the years she practiced several modalities of therapy but never felt she was helping her patients to enact true change in their lives until she opened a clinic in the Boulder County area.
“I feel there is more than needed than simply being a supportive presence,” Small said.
Small runs a holistic psychotherapy clinic, Las Lobas del Corazón, that sees patients mostly online. Her clinic also offers group workshops.
In her clinic, Small’s team uses a holistic approach to several issues including people’s relationship with food and their bodies, identity issues, staying in frustrating relationships, low or inconsistent self-esteem, grief and loss, traumas, anxiety and depression and climate grief.
Several years ago, Small began learning from an indigenous tribe. During her time with the tribe she learned how to work with people’s feelings, how important a person’s connection to the earth is and how to use that connection to create balance, she said.
“That completely shifted my approach to healing,” Small said.
The clinic offers a session that addresses how people work through their trauma. Small recognizes that trauma lives within the body and changes a person’s nervous system. Small and her team work together to rewire the nervous system to regulate a person’s body.
Small uses functional nutrition for mental health by using supplements and nutrition to stabilize biochemistry, she said.
Small is dedicated to making a change in the world. As a therapist, she has seen people who were unable to pay for mental health help. In her practice, she worked for years to establish an infrastructure that supports Medicaid patients and those who need to pay out of pocket. She also accepts Kaiser insurance.
“At the end of the day, a lot of how we feel so out of balance is not due to some internal experience … it is due to these systems that we are embedded in. One of the really destructive systems that we are embedded in is capitalism … The fact that in order to access the best care, you need to have money, there are so many inequalities embedded in the system … But what I can do is grow an alternative that’s supportive,” Small said.
