Experiential and Present-Focused
Gestalt Therapy for Women in Colorado
You can describe the thing in detail, accurately, for the tenth time, and it stays exactly where it is. Gestalt therapy has you say it out loud in the room instead, to the person who isn’t there, and something usually moves.
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 7, 2026
The Method
What is Gestalt Therapy?
Gestalt therapy is an experiential approach that works in the present tense. Instead of reporting on what happened, you bring it into the room and do something with it. Your therapist tracks what your voice, your posture, and your breathing are doing as you go. Fritz Perls, Laura Perls, and Paul Goodman set the approach out in the early 1950s.
Colorado Women’s Center is designed for women, so you won’t spend your first session explaining context that should already be understood. Gestalt therapy for women is one of the approaches you’ll find among our therapy methods. Its central idea is unfinished business, meaning the conversations and feelings that never completed and go on shaping things from a distance. The word gestalt is German for a whole that amounts to more than its parts, which is what the work is after.
Worked on in the room, in the present tense.
Our Promise to You
We Guarantee Our Therapist Matching
This work asks you to try things in front of another person, which is a great deal to ask of someone you don’t quite trust yet. You want to be sure of her before you start. 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 Gestalt Therapy for Women Helps With
Women reach for this work where having the explanation hasn’t been enough on its own. 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
That critical voice usually turns out to belong to somebody, and you can speak to it directly. Self-esteem therapy for women in this approach works on where the voice came from and what happens when you answer it back.
Grief That Has Nowhere to Go
This method turns on unfinished business, and grief is where that shows most plainly. Grief therapy for women can use the empty chair for the conversation you never got to have.
Trauma and Feeling Cut Off
After trauma you can end up at a distance from your own body and feelings. Trauma and PTSD therapy using Gestalt works on closing that, at whatever pace you and your therapist set.
Anxiety and Depression
Anxiety leans forward into what might happen and depression leans back into what already did. Working in the present tense is how this approach gets at both.
Stress That Is Telling You Something
Stress usually points at a need you have left unattended too long. Sessions go after what the stress is asking for.
Life Transitions
A move or an ending tends to bring up feelings about the last one, and the one before that. Gestalt is good at surfacing what got left half-finished, which is often why it feels heavier than it should.
The Same Patterns With People
How you are with your therapist tends to be how you are elsewhere, and Gestalt uses that directly. What happens between the two of you in the room becomes something you can both look at.
Parts of You That Contradict
The part that wants to leave and the part that wants to stay are both yours. This approach gives each one a turn to speak instead of making you decide which one is the real you.
Losing Yourself in the Roles
You are a daughter, a manager, a mother, a partner. When the roles have taken up all the room, sessions work on what is left when you set them down.
Our Approach
How Gestalt Therapy Runs at Colorado Women’s Center
You spend less time reporting on your week and more time working with what is already in the room. Here is what that looks like.
Start With a Match Call
You begin with a Wellness Coordinator. She asks what you’re looking for, including whether you want an experiential approach instead of a structured one. Then she matches you on that, on which office suits you, and on therapist specialty.
Work in the Present Tense
Your therapist keeps bringing things back to now. She will ask what you are feeling as you say this, what just shifted in your voice, what happened in your shoulders on that particular word. What is alive in the room is usually the same thing that is alive outside it.
Try It Instead of Describing It
Gestalt uses experiments. The best known is the empty chair, where you speak to somebody who isn’t there and then take their seat and answer. Most are much smaller than that, like repeating a sentence you hurried past. You agree to each one before it happens.
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
- Gestalt Therapy
- Transpersonal Psychology
- Somatic Therapy
- Client-Centered Therapy
- Mindfulness-Based Approaches
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
- EMDR
- Family Systems Therapy
Common Questions
Gestalt Questions Women Ask Us
What actually happens in a Gestalt session?
Much of it looks like ordinary conversation, with one difference. Your therapist keeps pulling attention to what is happening right now, in your voice and your posture as much as in your words. From time to time she’ll suggest trying something instead of continuing to talk about it. What she suggests depends on what you brought in that day.
Will I have to do the empty chair?
Only if you want to. It is the technique Gestalt is known for, and it is useful for a conversation that never happened or never finished. It is also one option among many. Your therapist will offer it instead of springing it on you, and plenty of good Gestalt work never uses it at all.
Is Gestalt therapy the same as Gestalt psychology?
No, though they are related. Gestalt psychology is a school of research into how perception organizes what we see into wholes. Gestalt therapy borrowed that idea and applied it to a person’s experience of herself. What Colorado Women’s Center offers is the therapy, not the research tradition it took its name from.
What if I am not the expressive type?
Then your therapist works with that instead of around it. Reserve is information in this approach, not an obstacle to it, and noticing what happens when you hold something back is often the useful part. Nobody is going to push you into being someone you are not for the sake of the method.
Does Gestalt therapy work online?
Yes. Video gives a close view of face and voice, which is much of what a Gestalt therapist is attending to. Experiments including the empty chair carry over to a room at home. Sessions run over secure video anywhere in Colorado. 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 from the work. 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 That Sit Close to Gestalt
This approach shares its roots with several others offered here. These two overlap with it most directly.
Transpersonal Psychology
Shares the humanistic roots and carries further into meaning and the parts of experience that sit outside ordinary explanation.
Transpersonal psychology →
Somatic Therapy
Attends to the same signals Gestalt watches for, the held breath and the braced shoulder, and treats the body as the way in.
Somatic therapy →
