Vickie’s Professional Background 2009-2026:

(please note: this is lengthy, and is part biography, part CV, sharing with you my personal and professional journey in this field. This is intended to offer clinicians essential information about who I am, what I am about, my professional experience, and my mission so you can decide if I will be a good fit in supporting you with your Clinical and Professional goals)

2009-2012:

I entered the field of health and human services in 2009, having spent two years post undergrad floating and uncertain about what my future held. Having earned a B.S. in Psychology from Colorado State University in 2007, I was still very much “figuring life out.”

I began working as a case manager at Ariel Clinical Services in Grand Junction, CO, serving adults with developmental disabilities and children in foster care, as well as supporting their families, host home providers, and day program staff to create stable and healthy environments for these kids and adults to thrive. I cherished this work, caring deeply for everyone I served, and cutting my teeth in this field, immersed in direct care and offering training and community care coordination. It was here I realized I was drawn to do more in the way of counseling and helping others on a deeper level. I decided to enroll at Adams State University’s Master of Arts Program for Clinical Mental Health Counseling.

2013-2015:

I moved back to Fort Collins, CO and after a brief stint working at Spoons Soup and Salads in Old Town, began working as floor staff at Mountain Crest’s Residential Treatment Center (RTC) serving “at-risk” and incarcerated teens receiving mental health and addiction treatment and attending the small on-site school at the hospital. After a year, I was promoted to Assistant Manager on the unit, and participated in developing curriculum and leading interdisciplinary teams, running groups, and supporting kids dealing with the heaviest and darkest of human experiences very early in their lives. It was heartbreaking at times, and was the most sacred honor to be there to help these amazing young people find their way to healing, empowerment, and creating new circumstances for themselves.

Embedded in the work I would do from then on, would be an awareness that childhood trauma is at the core of so many of society’s ills. Understanding intimately how systems and structures of oppression disenfranchise and disempower the most vulnerable and set us up for failure before we even have a chance. Between residential treatment and their return home, I worked with families to support them in navigating long-standing intergenerational trauma and the patterns perpetuated as they were handed to their children. The immense compassion and respect I have for these families cannot be understated. They needed more than I could ever give them and taught me more than I ever taught them. I felt both helpless and all-the-more motivated to find ways to help heal our communities through integrated health. The RTC closed due to budget cuts in 2015, just as I was finishing my Masters. Seeing the last kids off as the unit closed was the end of one of the most meaningful chapters in my life and the bedrock for my work as a counselor moving forward. I will forever be grateful to those I served, their families, and my colleagues.

2015-2018:

Chronic pain and illness has been my clinical specialty since 2015 when I began working as a Behavioral Health Consultant within the Integrated Care team at North Range Behavioral Health and Sunrise Community Health in Greeley, CO. Integrated care looks at the whole person, taking into account all facets of life from a bio-psycho-social perspective. It also focuses on promoting health and wellness and prevention, not just treatment of illness after the fact. Working side-by-side with primary care providers and psychiatrists in this role early in my counseling career, I was able to act as a bridge between the two worlds to help patients find long-lasting transformation in their mental and physical health for holistic wellness.

I came into this role at height of the opioid epidemic when the FDA and CDC were forcing prescribers to limit opioid doses, resulting in chaos, fear, and desperation for those who had relied on these medications for pain relief. In response, I participated in leading the development of a holistic pain management program for our community, alongside the medical director and primary care providers at Sunrise, and a few of my colleagues on the integrated care team. This program included weekly group therapy, teaching people alternate ways to manage stress and lifestyle to find relief while stepping down from high doses, individual counseling to those interested in doing trauma work and more directly addressing the role of mental health in their pain experiences, and helping people connect to supportive resources in the community to increase stability and wellbeing.

At the same time, on the other side of the coin, there was an abundance of people suffering with physical and psychological dependence on opioids who needed detox and intensive outpatient treatment to enter recovery. To meet this need, I helped with the expansion and development of the Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) program for opioid and alcohol addiction on the North end of Greeley at the NRBH main center, coordinating with and acting as lead therapist for that program for two years until transitioning to private practice. With this came additional complexity in treatment, not only helping people come off and stay off opioids out of necessity due to addiction, but also having to find ways to manage pain, working to heal on multiple fronts. Along with colleagues, I spoke on a panel at the Colorado Behavioral Health Conference in Breckenridge in 2017 to share our work with colleagues across the state with the hope of informing development of similar recovery programs founded on an integrated holistic approach. This work was very meaningful to me and I knew there were so many people out there who needed a new kind of support, inspired to be a part of this emerging integrated health revolution.

2018-2023:

After leaving NRBH in 2018, I became co-owner of Polaris Partners Counseling and Consulting in Fort Collins from 2018 through 2022, helping expand and grow this group practice to reach and meet the the needs of our community, as well as started and co-owned the Fort Collins Humanly Franchise to support other colleagues in private practice to bring their work to the community and grow their practices.

All the while, I have built and grown my own full-time practice around chronic pain and illness, offering individual and group counseling. I have spoken to colleagues at therapist networking events about best practices in working with chronic conditions from a holistic, integrated, compassionate, and trauma-informed approach. I am also currently developing a training program and courses for colleagues to learn in more detail how to get into this work, as there is a high need for mental health professionals who understand the complexities of chronic conditions, and can more effectively meet the needs of those they serve. In 2022, I stepped away as co-owner of Polaris Partners, and in 2023, stepped away as co-owner of Humanly Fort Collins in order to devote my time, energy, and attention to chronic pain and illness work, education and clinical consultation, and also to prepare for the birth of my daughter in 2024.

2023-present

Turning this corner into a whole new life as a mom, educator, and consultant, I unlocked another level of breadth and depth in my clinical practice, as well.  This next chapter is all about building community and sharing my gifts and experience with others who want to also step into this work. Passionate about contributing to the greater good, efforts in building clinical consulting and community support will help us achieve future goals of community funded mutual aid, offering the highest trauma treatment and quality care to those who cannot afford or access it, especially those raising children, to help create a system that supports us all across the lifespan. I seek to be a vessel to serve to the utmost.

As a cisgender, queer, white woman from a low-working class family, with a history of mental health challenges including addiction, I am constantly tuning into my privileged and marginalized identities and seeking ways to grow through conditioned white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist ideals, participating humbly and whole-heartedly in decolonizing therapy and tearing down barriers to care, shifting the paradigm of mental health care to center communal, natural, and ancient embodied healing practices.

Personal Passion:

My passion for working with chronic pain and illness has deep roots in my personal life. I have an intimate understanding of what it is to suffer when wrapped up in a complex web of mental and physical illnesses. Personally, I live with psoriatic arthritis, POTS, TMJ, and chronic low back and hip pain. I also have a history of trauma, mental health challenges including , and substance abuse. I grew up witnessing my father suffering from extreme symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis and poor general health for many years, leading to a devastating massive heart attack and death at age 56. Others in my family also experienced poor health and addictions and I saw up-close and personal how mental, emotional, and physical health are all interconnected. I have experienced, to some extent, what it is to be up against societal and cultural challenges to health and have experienced the socio-economic barriers to wellness including history of personal and inherited trauma, food insecurity, inability to engage in healthy behaviors, and lack of access to quality healthcare. I have no doubt my own mental and physical health challenges are related to the emotional and mental stress and pressures of the familial and societal cultures I exist within. I am now actively working to break generational cycles of poor health within my own life and by walking alongside family members in their mission to do the same. This isn’t just a personal fight, this is an awareness that the environment we exist within will not change for us. The toll on human and environmental health is not a flaw, it is a feature, and we have to rebel and push back to change these structures and systems if they are to change.

Make no mistake, I recognize illness and disease is a combination of genetic inheritance AND very real environmental, systemic, and epigenetic factors that serve to bring about and also exacerbate the effects of disease. Please see my blog for more on this, discussing the scientific basis for these assertions, and my work in healthcare innovation emphasizing a focus on whole-health.