About Becky
On becoming
a therapist.
Twenty years working with trauma — in advocacy centers, classrooms, and now in private practice with adults ready to understand how their earliest experiences continue to shape them.
Becky Bethards, LCSW
My name is Becky Bethards, and I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with over twenty years of experience working with trauma. I grew up in Montana — shaped by wide open landscapes and endless sky. I am curious by nature, deeply feeling, and drawn to the complexity of what it means to be human.
I studied Psychology at Iowa State University and went on to earn my Master of Social Work from Colorado State University. I was drawn to social work for its values — the belief in meeting people exactly where they are, in the importance of community, and in the power of surrounding someone with the right people and the right support. Those values have never left me. They are at the center of how I work.
Before becoming a therapist, I worked in prevention education and children’s theater — experiences that taught me how much can be communicated beyond words, and how early experiences of being seen and heard shape a child’s entire sense of self. That understanding led me to CornerHouse, a child advocacy center in Minneapolis, and then to the Denver Children’s Advocacy Center, where I spent years providing trauma therapy, conducting forensic interviews, and collaborating with multidisciplinary teams in child protection and the criminal justice system. I also taught Child and Adolescent Trauma at the University of Denver’s Graduate School of Social Work.
Those years — with children, with families, with the youngest and most vulnerable — gave me a profound understanding of how attachment and early development shape the brain, the nervous system, and the person we become. Becoming a mother deepened this understanding in ways I didn’t anticipate. Watching attachment unfold in real time, navigating the particular joys and challenges of raising children who move through the world differently, has made me a more humble, more attuned, and more compassionate therapist.
Now, in private practice, I bring all of that into my work with adults who are ready to understand how their early experiences continue to shape their lives, and to begin to move toward greater freedom.
The thread running through all of it has always been the same: a deep belief in the human capacity to heal, and a conviction that healing becomes possible when we learn to turn toward ourselves with curiosity instead of judgment.
My approach
Trauma doesn’t live only in our thoughts.
It lives in the body, in our nervous system’s learned patterns of protection, and in the way we relate — to others and to ourselves. This is what drew me to therapies that work with all of these dimensions together.
Attachment is at the foundation of how I understand people. Our earliest relationships — the ones that taught us whether the world was safe, whether our needs would be met, whether we were worthy of love — shape everything that comes after. These attachment experiences, and the ways they were interrupted or wounded, or not there at all, leave imprints that travel with us into adulthood, showing up in how we relate, how we protect ourselves, and how we feel inside our own skin. And yet beneath all of that — beneath every protective part, every old wound, every adapted self — there is something whole. Something that was never actually broken. Much of this work is about finding our way back to that.
I work with a developmental lens, which means I am always curious about what happened at particular moments in a person’s life — what a child needed at each stage of development, and whether those needs were met.
IFS, in particular, has become central to how I understand people. The idea that we are each made up of many parts — some protective, some wounded, some still carrying old pain — and that beneath all of them lives something whole and wise, feels deeply true to me. Much of my work is about helping people reconnect with that wholeness.
I integrate Internal Family Systems (IFS), EMDR, and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy — approaches that allow us to gently explore the parts of ourselves that developed in response to difficult experiences, while also helping the nervous system find greater safety and regulation. Rather than asking you to simply talk about what happened, this work invites the whole of you into the room.
My training in Reiki has also deepened this work in ways that are harder to name but no less real. It has sharpened my attunement — to energy, to what is present beneath the surface, to the quiet wisdom the body holds.
Outside the room
Tending to ourselves
is part of the practice.
For me, that looks like daily walks — less exercise, more moving meditation. I’m drawn to trees, to water, to flowers, to the particular stillness of watching a bird. I ski and hike when I can, and I try to spend as much time as possible in landscapes that remind me how good it feels to simply be a body in the world.
These aren’t incidental to the work. The capacity to slow down, to notice, to be present with what is — that is something I practice in and out of the therapy room. I think it makes me a better therapist. And I think it keeps me honest about how much we all need it.
“Again and again, I have witnessed the resilience of the human spirit — the remarkable capacity people have to heal, even after painful or overwhelming experiences.”Becky Bethards, LCSW
Get in touch
Ready to begin?
I’m glad you’re here. Whether you have questions or are ready to get started, feel free to reach out.