Mara Rogers, LPCC (Lakewood)

Professional Certifications & Education

Mara’s clinical approach is rooted in advanced psychological training and a “values-centered” framework designed to help clients move from existential confusion toward clarity and purpose.

Core Credentials

• Licensed Professional Counselor Candidate (LPCC): State of Colorado.
• M.A. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling: Palo Alto University, a nationally recognized institution for psychology and counseling training.
• Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT): Certified.

Clinical Training & Theoretical Frameworks

• Humanistic & Existential Therapy: Focused on helping clients find meaning, purpose, and authentic choice in their lives.
• LGBTQIA+ & BIPOC Affirming Care: Specialized training in providing culturally responsive and identity-affirming therapy.
• Addiction & Recovery Models: Experienced in supporting individuals navigating the complexities of substance use and behavioral addictions.

Experience

Mara’s background blends clinical work with the thoughtful, insight-focused pace of private practice. She brings both practical skill and emotional attunement to the room, especially for clients navigating trauma, anxiety, and big life transitions.

Grounded in Evidence-Based Care: Mara earned her Master’s degree from Palo Alto University, where her training emphasized evidence-based practice and a strong foundation in complex clinical presentations, including trauma-related concerns and disabilities. She brings that rigor into therapy in a way that still feels warm, collaborative, and human.

Inpatient and Crisis Experience: Mara began her career in a youth inpatient setting, supporting clients and families during intense moments. That early experience shaped her calm, steady presence and her ability to stay grounded when emotions feel big, urgent, or overwhelming.

Whole-Person Perspective: After several years in outpatient case management, Mara developed a strong understanding of how mental health connects to real-life stressors, resources, systems, and support networks. She helps clients not only process what is happening internally, but also build practical structures that support sustainable change.

Relational Clarity: Mara works with individuals and couples to slow things down and get clear on what is happening beneath the surface. She helps clients identify the needs, values, and patterns that are often unspoken, so conversations feel less stuck and more honest, connected, and workable.

Who Mara Works With

Mara’s clients often share something in common. They are deep thinkers who have spent a lifetime turning that capacity outward without ever quite learning to turn it inward. They arrive carrying something heavy, often anxiety that bleeds into depression, a sense of disconnection, or the feeling of being stuck without knowing why. Many are guarded at first. Many do not feel they deserve to feel better.

Mara tends to see the potential underneath before her clients can. She does not stop believing in it, and she does not stop saying so.

She has a particular understanding of religious trauma, including the grief, identity questions, and complicated faith deconstruction that can follow leaving a high-control religion or navigating spiritual abuse.

She works with adults, teens, and couples navigating:

Trauma and PTSD
Relationship conflict, emotional safety, and communication breakdown
Anxiety and depression
Disconnection from self and difficulty experiencing joy
Life transitions and questions of meaning, identity, and purpose
Religious trauma and spiritual questioning
LGBTQIA+ affirming care
Self-esteem, codependency, and limiting beliefs
Addiction and recovery

How Mara Works: EMDR, Gottman Method, and an Existential Lens

Mara brings an uncommon combination to her work at our Lakewood office. Each approach addresses a different layer of the same problem, and she moves between them based on what a client actually needs in a given season.

EMDR for Trauma Recovery

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is one of the most extensively researched approaches available for trauma and PTSD. Mara uses it to help clients reconnect with parts of themselves that have gone unhealed, reaching material that talk therapy alone often cannot. As she describes it, EMDR helps people get curious about their own healing. Part of the work is building enough safety to tap into those parts and reconnect with them on different terms.

The Gottman Method for Couples

Most couples arrive with emotional safety at the root of the problem, whatever the presenting argument happens to be. Mara takes time to understand each couple’s specific dynamic, then helps them see precisely where communication is breaking down and what genuine reconnection would actually require. Because she also works in trauma, she can often trace a current relational pattern back to the older wound that shaped it.

An Existential and Humanistic Lens

Mara has also been integrating existential therapy into her work, particularly for clients who understand their patterns intellectually but are struggling to find meaning or direction underneath them. Sometimes the most useful question is not why do I feel this way but what do I actually want my life to stand for.

When clients arrive feeling stuck, Mara helps them slow down and see the larger structure underneath: the patterns, beliefs, and values working together to produce their current experience. She guides clients through the mental model of their world first, so they can see it clearly, and then works with them carefully and collaboratively to change it

Mara In Her own Words

“There is always a place here for you to be seen, for who you truly are and for what you are experiencing, and for it to be held in a compassionate space. I will be honest with you. I will challenge you at the right moments and I will stay with you through the difficulty. And I will never stop believing in what is possible for you, even when you cannot see it yet.”

Mara Rogers provides individual, couples, and teen therapy at Self Care Impact Counseling in Lakewood, Colorado. She specializes in trauma recovery using EMDR, couples work using the Gottman Method, and therapy for people who are ready to understand themselves and their lives at a deeper level. Mara welcomes LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC clients.

“Most people come to me because they are tired of feeling disconnected from themselves, and from the joy they know should be there but somehow is not.”

The Challenge: Feeling Disconnected

Maybe anxiety is running the show, showing up as exhaustion, overworking, or a low hum of dread you cannot quite name. Maybe something from the past is still quietly shaping how you see yourself and what you believe you deserve. Maybe you understand your own patterns intellectually, you have read the books and done the reading, but something still feels stuck and you are not sure why.

The Solution: An Intellectually Nurturing Space

Clients describe sessions with Mara as intellectually nurturing. She goes at your pace and stays attuned to your values and to who you have shown her you are. She uses humor when it fits and sits in the difficulty when it does not.

She will name the thing in the room when it matters, gently and honestly, at a moment you are actually ready to hear it. Sometimes that means pointing out something you have been quietly avoiding. Sometimes it means staying with you long enough that something you have carried for years finally becomes clear. She is not interested in a clinical version of you. She is interested in you.

The Result: Reconnection and Alignment

As you reconnect with what matters most, you can begin making choices that feel true to you rather than automatic. Mara works from a mind, body, and spirit perspective, on the premise that a great deal of what feels wrong stems from misalignment across those areas. The work is to identify strengths you may not be giving yourself credit for and build a path toward change that holds up in everyday life.