About Four Winds Counseling Center
Why You Haven’t Made the Call Yet
Therapy can definitely be daunting. It implies you have a need, and a need implies you need help.
Both of these are uncomfortable for a person with a history of trauma. If a need of yours was ever answered with punishment or silence, you learned early to stop having them out loud.
It takes bravery and courage to reach out. To start talking about things you have never talked about with a perfect stranger is just that, strange.
What makes it that hard has very little to do with therapy and almost everything to do with what came before it.
This Part of Your Week Asks Nothing of You
Wherever you take the call, it usually starts with a door closing. The house has gone quiet, or the building has emptied out, or you’re in your car because it’s the only place all day nobody can reach you.
Then we’re on, and it’s the two of us. Nothing in here needs keeping up, and there’s nobody who has to be reassured, which is usually where somebody stops performing and starts talking.
This is where you get to tell your story. You do not need to defend yourself, your thoughts, your experience, or your choices.
It is a certain period of the day or week where you can just be.
What Your Over-Functioning Is Protecting
You can be entirely capable in your adult life and still be running on instructions written by a much younger version of you. Much of therapy is about integrating and healing the wounded child into the competent adult who is over-functioning as an adult.
The over-functioning started out as a solution. Handling everything yourself meant nobody had to be told anything was wrong, and it worked, which is why it’s still in place.
My approach to that work is gentle and slow. We start with what you can talk about, and as you gain confidence in both me and the process, we move to harder topics and subjects. The pace is set by you.
What all of it is finally for is freedom of voice, freedom of choice, and freedom of self that had to stay hidden and trapped because of trauma. Voice comes first, because the other two run through it.
What I Still Have to Earn From You
I believe the wound happened in relationship and therefore needs to heal in relationship. Healing can’t happen in isolation, and it can’t happen without trust and vulnerability.
Trust invites vulnerability. Vulnerability invites healing.
These elements are crucial and critical in the therapeutic process. They are also not just handed to me. I earn them.
You’ll know whether I’ve earned them by what happens after you tell me the first hard thing. Watch whether anything in how I treat you shifts afterward.
About Melissa Hunt, MA, LPC, LMHC
It is natural for a client to want to know a little about their therapist. Through the years I have been asked how I understand so much about pain and the human experience.
The simple answer is that I am human as well and am not immune to the human experience.
The complex answer is that I too have had extensive therapy to place my past properly, heal my wounded little girl, and learn to rule my own life on my own terms, with my own voice. Therapists need therapists, but my journey of therapy started long before I became a therapist.
I hold a BA in Psychology as well as a BA in Child Development from Stephens College in Missouri, and an MA in Counseling from Reformed Theological Seminary in Florida. I am licensed in both the state of Florida as well as the state of Colorado, and I reside in Colorado.
It is important for the inquirer to know that I no longer practice, nor endorse religion or religious thought processes in my sessions. I am very aware of, as well as a victim too, what those thought processes do to someone healing from complex and severe childhood abuse and trauma.
In my free time, if I am not playing ball with my miniature poodle, she is with me on the trail hiking, running, and mountain biking. I am an avid outdoors person who loves being in the mountains doing all of the above as well as various forms of skiing and camping. In the words of John Muir: the mountains are calling and I must go.
Take the Ten Minutes First
Take the free 10-minute consultation before anything else gets decided.
Bring me whatever is going on, in whatever order it comes out. I’ll tell you plainly what working on it together would involve.
My number is (720) 608-4782. Email reaches me at mhunt@fourwindscounselingcenter.com.
Rule Your Own Life
Ten minutes on the phone will tell you most of what you need to know about whether I'm the right person for this.
There's no script for that call, so ask me anything you want.
Call me: (720) 608-4782. Or write to me at mhunt@fourwindscounselingcenter.com.