In Pursuit of Complexity and Nuance
Where diligent curiosity and cultivated compassion evolve your personal narrative.
Photo by Mary Beth Koeth
Allison Cohan LCSW
After years of training on both coasts, Allison moved from Los Angeles, California to Denver, Colorado in 2017, where she offers in-person private practice services to clients in Denver and remote sessions for clients in California and across Colorado.
Her rich academic foundation and experience in leading treatment environments have shaped her into a practitioner whose care blends intellectual precision with profound empathy, resulting in a therapeutic experience that can be as transformative as it is supportive.
The Distance Between You and Your Story
The most meaningful work occurs in the space between your identity and your struggles. Often when we begin the work, this distance feels nonexistent. We are merged, over-identified with our problems, self-pathologized and stuck.
Using narrative therapy, existential perspectives, and embodied practices such as EMDR, we’ll examine the old stories that shape your experience, thoughtfully editing and reconstructing narratives that no longer serve you.
Cognitive & Somatic Specialties
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In the words of Joan Didion, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Narrative Therapy listens for the cracks in those stories, the fault lines where identity can shift, however slightly, under the weight of a kinder interpretation. Less about fixing what’s broken than unearthing the subtle, but impactful, alternate plot lines buried beneath pathology.
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Our sense of self is shaped through relationships, and much of our distress arises when these bonds are strained, ruptured, or withheld. In the therapy room, this lens pays close attention to these patterns-especially as they surface between client and therapist-offering a space where old dynamics can be recognized, named, and gradually rewritten.
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An existential approach doesn’t rush to fix or reframe; it invites a practice of deep listening for what is operational beneath our words. Our reckoning with freedom, mortality, or the fear that nothing matters. The work resists temptation to offer answers to the truly unanswerable and stands instead in that unsteady terrain, helping us find meaning not in spite of uncertainty, but within it.
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Internal Family Systems begins with a radically gentle premise: that every part within us, even the ones we fear or resent, hold a story, a purpose, a wound. In therapy, the task isn’t to silence or exile these parts, but to meet them with curiosity so that the Self, (the part of us that holds access to calm, clarity, and curiosity) can step in and lead with compassion. When the Self leads-unburdened, present-it creates space for each part to be seen without judgment, allowing protective roles to organically soften and wounded parts to release pain they’ve carried alone for too long.
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EMDR works on the premise that trauma isn’t just remembered, it’s relived, stored in the body and nervous system like a scene caught on loop. When the bilateral stimulation begins, it's not about erasing the memory but helping our system to refile it in a truly organized way within both mind and body- ultimately, allowing us more access to ease.
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Allison does not provide, administer, or advocate for the use of controlled or illegal substances. However, she offers valuable educational and psychological support to those who are exploring the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics.
Services
Individual Therapy
Individual therapy begins by creating a subtle and intentional distance between you and the stories you carry, allowing space for curiosity, compassion, and meaningful reflection. Here, we learn to untangle ourselves from the old stories that detour us into anxiety, depression, self-doubt etc., ultimately arriving into a landscape of greater clarity and possibility.
Couples Therapy
Couples therapy offers an opportunity toward dismantling patterns of blame and embracing collaboration. Together, we’ll bridge gaps in communication and cultivate a deeper mutual understanding of the life you are co-creating. Couples therapy offers guidance towards a more expansive version of your relationship with ample wingspan to support your individual evolutions.
Therapy for Creatives
Andrea Gibson wrote, "we have to create. It is the only thing louder than destruction."
Creation is not the exclusive territory of those who call themselves artists. It is one of the most human things we do, a way of making meaning from what breaks us, of turning suffering into something that can be witnessed, held, shared. Whether you paint, write, cook, parent, or simply try to keep living with intention, you are already making something from the raw material of your life.
For those who do claim the artist's identity, who feel their inner life with particular intensity, carry the weight of unfinished work and untranslated visions, this space is built with you in mind. The struggles that follow creative people into therapy are real and specific: the inner critic speaking in your own voice, the paralysis that arrives alongside the most meaningful projects, the grief of feeling perpetually adjacent to the work you most want to make etc. Together we explore and what lives beneath those patterns.
Psychedelic Preparation & Integration
Psychedelic experiences can offer profound, lasting change but require educated preparation and diligent integration. With intention, depth and mindful care, we will translate the symbolic, ephemeral insights from your journey into meaningful changes in your daily reality. I do not condone illegal drug use, facilitate psychedelic experiences or refer to guides who do. For clients exploring these areas outside of my practice, I offer valuable assessment and education from a harm-reduction perspective.