Strengths-Based Therapy
Empowerment Therapy for Women in Colorado
You’re competent at work, you hold things together for other people, and somewhere along the way you stopped counting yourself as one of the people worth holding together. Empowerment therapy starts from what you already do well.
Boulder • Denver • Fort Collins • Broomfield • Longmont • Online
Schedule a Therapist Match CallClinically reviewed by Amy Lowe, MSW, LCSW, LAC, Director of Clinical Teams • Last reviewed September 4, 2026
The Method
What is Empowerment Therapy?
Empowerment therapy is an approach more than a protocol. It starts from the position that you already have working strategies, sound judgment, and a record of handling difficult things. A large part of the therapy is getting those back in view and back in use. The approach grew out of feminist therapy and strengths-based practice. What sets it apart is that you hold the authority in the room.
Empowerment therapy also starts from an honest premise: some of what makes your life harder is not a distortion in how you see things. Workplaces, families, and institutions really can be unequal, unfair, or set up to favor some people over others, and this approach names that plainly instead of treating it as something to think your way past. Its job from there is narrower and more useful: finding what is actually still yours to decide inside a difficult reality, and then doing it.
Colorado Women’s Center is designed for women, so you won’t spend your first session explaining context that should already be understood. Empowerment therapy for women is one of the approaches you’ll find among our therapy methods. Most women use it combined with others, so a session might use cognitive behavioral tools or client-centered work while keeping that starting point. It also takes seriously that some of what is wearing you down is not a personal failing. Sorting out what is yours to change from what belongs to a situation is part of the work.
You are not starting from nothing. You are starting from everything you have already survived.
Kendra Miguez, Founder
Our Promise to You
We Guarantee Our Therapist Matching
This approach depends on you disagreeing with your therapist sometimes and saying so out loud. That’s much harder with someone whose manner doesn’t suit you. If the first match isn’t right, tell us and we’ll match you with another at no additional cost.
Request a Free ConsultationWhat This Works On
What Empowerment Therapy Helps With
Empowerment therapy for women covers a wide range. None of it has to reach a crisis before it’s worth bringing in. These are what women bring to it at Colorado Women’s Center.
Low Self-Esteem
You learned how to see yourself somewhere, which means it can be revised. Self-esteem therapy for women in this approach works from evidence you already have about yourself, not from affirmations.
Body Image
You talk to yourself about your appearance in a way that quietly decides what you’ll try, wear, and turn down. Body image therapy works on that running commentary and where it came from, which is usually somewhere outside you.
Work and Life Out of Balance
You keep meeting everyone’s needs and rescheduling your own. Work-life balance therapy looks at what you’re protecting when you say yes, and what it would take to say no without preparing a case first.
Anxiety and Depression
Both make it hard to remember you have handled difficult things before. Part of the work is rebuilding access to that record, so decisions stop feeling like they’re being made from a standing start.
Life Transitions
A divorce, a move, a quiet house, or a new title unsettles your sense of who you are, even when you chose it. This work is about finding footing on the other side instead of returning to who you were.
A Career That Has Stalled
Get overlooked long enough and it starts to feel like information about you instead of about the room. Sessions work on the gap between what you’re being told about your worth at work and what is true.
Speaking Up in Relationships
You know what you want and then say a smaller version of it out loud. The work goes at why the smaller version feels safer, and at what changes when you stop editing yourself first.
Deciding What You Actually Want
Sometimes the obstacle is that nobody has asked you what you want in a long time, including you. Sessions make room for that question and then get concrete about what follows from the answer.
After Trauma
After trauma, the sense that you get a say in what happens is often the first thing gone. This approach puts pace, direction, and what gets discussed back under your control, which is usually what has to change first.
Our Approach
How This Work Runs at Colorado Women’s Center
The starting point is the method here, which makes where the work begins matter. Here is the order it goes in.
Start With a Match Call
You begin with a Wellness Coordinator. She asks what you’re looking for and what would make a therapist a good fit for you. Then she matches you on that, on which office suits you, and on therapist specialty and experience.
Start From What Already Works
The first sessions go looking for evidence. You look at what you have already handled, what you do well under pressure, and where your judgment turned out to be sound. That is not a warm-up before the real work. It is the material the rest of the work is built from.
Sort Out What Is Yours to Change
Some of what is wearing on you is yours to change and some of it belongs to a workplace, a family, or a situation that would exhaust anyone. Naming the difference stops you spending effort in the wrong place. From there you and your therapist set goals you chose, and revisit them as you go.
Five Offices or Online
You can do this work in Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins, Broomfield, or Longmont, or over secure video from anywhere in Colorado. Sessions run seven days a week, 8am to 8pm.
Methods We Offer
- Empowerment Therapy
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
- EMDR
- Somatic Therapy
- Mindfulness-Based Approaches
- Family Systems Therapy
Common Questions
Questions Women Ask Us About This Work
Is Empowerment Therapy a specific method?
It is a starting point more than a protocol. Empowerment therapy draws on feminist therapy and strengths-based practice. At Colorado Women’s Center it is usually delivered alongside methods like CBT or client-centered work instead of as a separate manual. What makes it distinct is where the therapy begins, which is with your competence.
Do I need to be in crisis to start?
No. Many of the women doing this work are functioning well by any outside measure and are worn thin underneath it. Wanting more say over your own life is a sufficient reason to come in. Nothing about this requires a diagnosis or a breaking point first.
What if the problem is not me?
Then it gets named as that. Some of what wears women down is a workplace, a family arrangement, or a situation that would exhaust anyone in it. This approach does not treat those as things to adjust your attitude about. The work separates what you can change from what you cannot, and that distinction usually lands as a relief.
Will my therapist tell me what to do?
No, and that is fairly central to the approach. Your therapist will ask questions, say what she notices, and disagree with you where it is useful. The decisions stay yours. If you would rather have someone hand you a plan, say so on the Match Call so you get matched with a therapist whose style fits that.
Does this work online?
Yes. Most of it is conversation and decisions, so video suits it well. Colorado Women’s Center runs sessions over secure video anywhere in the state, which matters for women outside the Front Range and for weeks that won’t allow the drive. Our online therapy page has the details.
How long does it take?
That’s decided between you and your therapist rather than set in advance. It depends on what you’re bringing in and what you want out of it. Your therapist builds a plan with you early on and revisits it with you as things change.
How soon can I start?
Match Calls are usually available within 48 hours, often within 24. Most clients are with a therapist within about a week, depending on their own availability. Offices are open seven days a week, 8am to 8pm, and online sessions run the same hours. Call 720.810.2355 or use the form on this page.
Related Methods
Approaches This Work Draws On
This is a starting point more than a standalone protocol, so it almost always arrives combined with something else. These two are the most common.
Client-Centered Therapy
The closest relative. Carl Rogers put the client’s own direction at the center of the work, which is the same starting position.
Client-centered therapy →
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Often used inside this work, for the specific thoughts that keep contradicting the evidence you have about yourself.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) →
