Healing from PTSD, complex trauma, and the wounds that have shaped your life — with depth, precision, and genuine clinical experience
Trauma therapy in Fort Collins at Mindful Transitions is built around a simple but profound understanding — trauma is not a weakness, a character flaw, or something you should be over by now. It is a biological and psychological event that changes the nervous system, the brain, and the way you experience yourself and the world.
My name is John Kinnaird. I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker and Certified EMDR Level II Therapist with more than 30 years of clinical experience — including nearly two decades of specialized trauma treatment. I began my clinical career in 1996 working with adult and adolescent survivors of physical and sexual abuse. Trauma treatment has been at the center of my clinical work ever since.
What I offer is not just symptom management. It is genuine healing — the kind that addresses both the presenting symptoms and the deeper roots from which they grow.
What Trauma Actually Does
Trauma changes things at a fundamental level. When an experience overwhelms the nervous system’s capacity to process it — whether a single catastrophic event or years of repeated difficult experiences — the brain stores that memory differently. It remains raw, unintegrated, and emotionally charged in a way that ordinary memories do not.
The result is that the past does not stay in the past. It lives in the present — in anxiety that arrives without warning, in emotional reactions that feel disproportionate, in relationships that keep following the same painful patterns, in a body that carries tension and vigilance long after the danger has passed.
Furthermore trauma is profoundly underdiagnosed. Many people living with its effects have never connected their current struggles to their history. They know something is wrong. They do not always know why.
Types of Trauma I Work With
Trauma takes many forms. At Mindful Transitions I work with adults navigating a wide range of traumatic experiences:
Single Incident Trauma and PTSD Car accidents, medical trauma, assault, sudden loss, and other overwhelming single events that the nervous system was unable to fully process. Single incident trauma often responds well to EMDR and can resolve relatively quickly with the right treatment.
Childhood Trauma and Adverse Childhood Experiences Physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. Neglect. Growing up in a household shaped by addiction, mental illness, or domestic violence. The chronic unpredictability of an unsafe early environment. Childhood trauma leaves its mark not just in memories but in the personality itself — shaping attachment patterns, self-perception, emotional regulation, and the fundamental sense of whether the world is safe.
Complex PTSD and cPTSD Complex PTSD develops in response to prolonged, repeated trauma — particularly in childhood or in abusive relationships. Unlike single incident PTSD, cPTSD shapes the developing personality at a foundational level. It affects how a person relates to themselves, to others, and to their own emotions in ways that can be difficult to recognize as trauma-related. Symptoms often include chronic shame, emotional dysregulation, difficulty trusting, identity confusion, and a deep sense of being fundamentally different or damaged.
Narcissistic Abuse and Emotional Trauma Prolonged exposure to narcissistic abuse — from a parent, partner, or other significant relationship — creates a distinctive and often poorly understood set of wounds. The self-doubt, the hypervigilance, the difficulty trusting your own perceptions, and the chronic sense of not being enough are not character weaknesses. They are the predictable psychological consequences of sustained emotional abuse.
Military and First Responder Trauma The experiences of combat, military service, first responder work, and law enforcement carry their own particular forms of trauma — compounded by cultures that actively discourage seeking help. I work with veterans and first responders with deep respect for both the experiences they carry and the strength it takes to address them.
Grief and Loss as Trauma Sudden or violent loss, complicated grief, and the trauma of losing someone to suicide carry dimensions that ordinary grief support does not always reach. When loss is traumatic — overwhelming rather than painful — it requires trauma treatment alongside grief work.
My Approach to Trauma Therapy
Trauma treatment at Mindful Transitions is genuinely integrative — drawing on multiple evidence-based approaches tailored to what each person specifically needs.
EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing EMDR therapy is the foundation of my trauma treatment approach. It is one of the most extensively researched and effective treatments for trauma available — recommended by the World Health Organization, the American Psychiatric Association, and the Department of Veterans Affairs as a first-line treatment for PTSD.
EMDR works by engaging the brain’s natural healing process to reprocess traumatic memories so they lose their emotional charge. Importantly it does not require you to speak in detail about traumatic events. Many clients find this one of the most significant advantages of EMDR — the healing happens at the neurological level rather than through repeated verbal recounting of painful experiences.
Depth Psychology and the Meaning of Trauma Alongside EMDR I draw on Jungian and psychoanalytic depth psychology to help clients understand what their traumatic experience means — not just what happened but how it has shaped their identity, their relationships, and their deepest beliefs about themselves and the world. This depth of understanding creates change that goes beyond symptom reduction to something more fundamental.
Somatic and Mindfulness-Based Approaches Trauma lives in the body as much as the mind. Mindfulness-based approaches help clients develop the capacity to be present with difficult bodily experience without being overwhelmed — building the nervous system’s window of tolerance and creating the foundation for deeper trauma processing.
DBT Skills for Trauma Dialectical Behavioral Therapy skills — distress tolerance, emotional regulation, mindfulness — provide the practical tools that help trauma survivors manage the intensity of their emotional experience while deeper healing work proceeds. These skills are particularly important in the treatment of complex PTSD where emotional dysregulation is a central feature.
What Trauma Therapy Looks Like at Mindful Transitions
Sessions are 55 minutes. Trauma therapy never begins with processing — we spend the early sessions building safety, establishing trust, and ensuring you have the stabilization skills needed to engage with traumatic material safely and effectively.
The pace of trauma therapy is always determined by you. I follow your nervous system — not a protocol or a timeline. Some people move quickly through trauma processing once stabilization is established. Others need more time. Both are entirely appropriate and respected.
Furthermore trauma therapy at Mindful Transitions is not just about reducing symptoms. It is about helping you develop a genuinely different relationship with your history — one in which the past is understood, integrated, and no longer running the present.
My office is located in Fort Collins; conveniently accessible to clients traveling from Loveland, Greeley, Windsor, and the surrounding Northern Colorado area. I also offer telehealth sessions online throughout Colorado. If distance has kept you from reaching out, telehealth makes access simple and convenient.
You Do Not Have to Keep Carrying This
Trauma is not a life sentence. The nervous system has a remarkable capacity for healing when it receives the right support — and the brain can genuinely change through effective trauma treatment.
If you have been carrying the weight of difficult experiences — whether you recognize them as trauma or simply as something that has always been hard — I invite you to reach out.
I offer a free 15-minute consultation to answer your questions and explore whether trauma therapy in Fort Collins at Mindful Transitions is the right fit for you.
— John Kinnaird LCSW, EMDR Level II, CHt.