Conditions We Treat
PTSD and trauma treatment in Colorado, for a nervous system that never got the all clear.
Trauma-informed outpatient care for post-traumatic stress and the substance use that so often grows around it, at six Colorado offices and online. The first conversation is free, confidential, and commits you to nothing.
Understanding Trauma
The danger ended. Your body is still working from the old information.
Trauma is not measured by what happened. It is measured by what stayed. Most people who live through something terrible do not develop post-traumatic stress disorder, and the ones who do are not the ones who handled it badly. The National Institute of Mental Health puts it plainly: people who have PTSD may continue to feel stressed or frightened, even though they are not in danger. The threat ended. The alarm did not get the message.
The events behind it are ordinary in the worst sense of the word. Childhood trauma, sexual assault, physical or verbal threats, serious illness, a car wreck, a natural disaster, the sudden loss of someone. NIMH also notes that exposure to previous traumatic experiences, particularly during childhood, raises the risk, along with getting hurt or seeing people hurt, feeling horror or helplessness, having little support afterward, and a personal or family history of mental illness or substance use.
It is more common than the silence around it suggests. NIMH estimates that 3.6 percent of U.S. adults had PTSD in the past year, with a lifetime prevalence of 6.8 percent, higher among women (5.2 percent) than men (1.8 percent), and among those with past-year PTSD an estimated 36.6 percent had serious impairment. That last figure is the one worth sitting with. This is not a mild condition that a third of people are quietly carrying.
What makes it treatable is that PTSD is not a permanent rewiring. It is a memory the brain never finished filing, which is why it keeps arriving in the present tense instead of the past. That is a specific problem with specific treatments, and it responds to them.
Signs And Symptoms
What post-traumatic stress looks like from the inside.
NIMH sorts these into four groups, and diagnosis in an adult requires all four to be present for at least 1 month: at least one re-experiencing symptom, at least one avoidance symptom, at least two arousal and reactivity symptoms, and at least two cognition and mood symptoms. Symptoms usually begin within three months of the event, but they can surface years later.
It arrives in the present tense
Re-experiencing: flashbacks that come with the physical symptoms too, a racing heart or sweating, plus recurring memories, dreams, and distressing thoughts you did not go looking for.
The map of places you no longer go
Avoidance: staying away from places, events, or objects that are reminders, and steering clear of the thoughts and feelings attached to what happened. It works, briefly, and it shrinks the map every year.
Never quite off duty
Arousal and reactivity: easily startled, tense or on guard, trouble concentrating, and difficulty falling or staying asleep. Rest requires believing you are safe, which is the exact thing in question.
A shorter fuse than you used to have
Also arousal and reactivity: irritability, angry or aggressive outbursts, and risky, reckless, or destructive behavior. This is the cluster that usually costs people relationships before anyone names the cause.
A story that turned against you
Cognition and mood: trouble remembering key features of the event, negative thoughts about yourself or the world, exaggerated blame aimed at yourself or others, and ongoing fear, anger, guilt, or shame.
Feeling less of everything
Also cognition and mood: loss of interest in things you used to care about, feelings of social isolation, and real difficulty feeling positive emotions. Numbness is a symptom, not a personality change.
Co-occurring Substance Use
Which do we treat first, the trauma or the drinking?
It is the most common question at intake, and the premise of it is the problem.
There is a reason this page sits inside our addiction treatment section rather than off in a separate mental health corner. Alcohol works. So does everything else people reach for. It quiets the hypervigilance, it shuts down the intrusive replay, and for a few hours it delivers the off switch that treatment takes months to build. Nobody should feel stupid for having found it.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse describes the pattern without moralizing: physically or emotionally traumatized people are at much higher risk for drug use and substance use disorders, and people with PTSD may use substances in an attempt to reduce their anxiety and to avoid dealing with trauma and its consequences. NIDA also reports that roughly 1 in 5 veterans with PTSD has a co-occurring substance use disorder, and notes that when the two conditions travel together, treatment outcomes are worse.
Which brings up the question almost everyone asks at intake: which one do we deal with first. The honest answer is that the sequential version tends to fail in both directions. Take the substance away and you have removed the only thing that was holding the trauma symptoms down, without putting anything in its place, which is a well-worn route back to using. Work on the trauma while the drinking or using continues and the processing gets chemically erased between sessions. So we build one plan, with one clinical team, that holds both. Stabilization comes first, because trauma work needs a floor to stand on, but stabilization is the beginning of the trauma work rather than a waiting room outside it. Our dual diagnosis page covers how that runs week to week, and alcohol addiction covers the pairing we see most often.
In Their Words
Redpoint has always felt like a safe and comfortable place.
How We Treat It
Stabilize first, then process. In that order, on purpose.
Redpoint has described its treatment teams as trauma informed for years, and it is worth saying what that actually means rather than leaving it as a phrase. It means the program assumes trauma is in the room. Nobody is required to disclose their history to a group in order to be allowed in. Nobody is pushed into a detailed account of what happened before they have the skills to leave the room intact afterward. Control over pace stays with you, because taking it away is the thing the trauma already did.
The clinical work runs in a sequence that trauma treatment has largely converged on. First, stabilization: sleep, safety, substance use, the grounding and regulation skills that make the rest survivable. Our EMDR clinicians call this phase resourcing and preparation, and skipping it is the single most common way trauma treatment goes wrong. Then the processing itself, aimed at the memory rather than at managing around it forever.
For that second phase, the American Psychological Association's clinical practice guideline strongly recommends cognitive behavioral therapy, cognitive processing therapy and prolonged exposure, and conditionally recommends EMDR, cognitive therapy and narrative exposure therapy. Two of those are ours: cognitive behavioral therapy, and EMDR delivered by clinicians trained in the practice. Where a different protocol is the better fit for you, we will say so at assessment and help you find it rather than sell you the one we happen to run.
Care here is medically informed, led by a board-certified psychiatrist, so if medication belongs in your plan it can be evaluated and managed alongside the therapy. It is never a condition of starting. Post-traumatic stress rarely arrives on its own, so the assessment looks at the whole picture rather than the one condition you called about. See depression, anxiety, or the broader mental health page.
- Trauma-informed groups
- Individual therapy
- EMDR with trained clinicians
- Grounding and regulation skills
- Medication support when it fits
Levels Of Care
How much structure this needs to start.
What decides this is how much of your week the symptoms are currently taking, not how severe you think your history has to be before you are allowed to ask. Most people move between these rather than picking one and staying there.
Find out what your plan covers before you decide anything.
Trauma treatment is a covered behavioral health benefit under most plans, but deductibles and levels of care change the number a lot. We check your benefits at no charge and tell you what we find, including the parts your plan will not pay for.
Accepted insurance
Employer and EAP partners
Don’t see your plan? Call us and we will check it, including out-of-network benefits.
Clinical Approaches
Which therapy does what, for this.
Where We Treat It
Six Colorado offices, and online for everywhere else.
Trauma is treated at every Redpoint location, and every office runs an evening group so treatment does not have to cost you a job. If the nearest one does not run the level you need, we will tell you plainly and point you at the one that does.
Common Questions
PTSD and trauma treatment questions, answered.
What if what happened to me was not "bad enough"?
How do I know if this is PTSD or just a hard memory?
Will I have to talk about what happened in a group?
Should I get sober first and deal with the trauma later?
Do you offer EMDR?
Is medication part of PTSD treatment?
Does insurance cover trauma treatment in Colorado?
What if I am in crisis right now?
Tell us what has been going on.
One conversation, free and confidential, with a clinician who has heard this before. Nothing you say obligates you to start treatment, and there is no version of your history that we will decide is too much.