Steve Bigboy, MA, LPC
he/him
Hello,
My name is Steve Bigboy. My personality and therapeutic style is often described by qualities of gentleness, openness, curiosity, and steadiness. My approach to therapy is often person-centered or humanistic, meaning that I have much trust in you as the client, as containing the wisdom for the way forward within you. My work is to help you identify the obstacles and obscurations to connecting with your innate wisdom, and then to help you relate to that intelligence as an ally in moving towards your path of healing and wellbeing.
I believe that each person is on a path moving towards some idea of wellbeing. However, wellbeing is an idea that may shift and change over the course of a person’s lifetime. The concepts of wellbeing, and the strategies to move towards it, make sense in the original contexts from which they emerged. Sometimes, important work can be to examine our ideas of wellbeing and see if they are still relevant to our current lived experience.
I believe the path to wellbeing is continually evolving in our bodily experience. We can check in with our bodies and see if our ideas are felt to be true or untrue through the datum of the felt-sense. The felt-sense is the direct bodily experience of energy that often underlies emotion. Unlike emotion, the felt-sene is often fuzzy and not yet defined, which makes it fertile ground to gather new insights. Rather than simply recognizing the readily defined concept of sadness, for example, the felt sense may be something like the unsettled empty pit that appears in the stomach, or however else it may show up for any individual. My belief is that the felt-sense can be engaged to gather information to learn a path forward towards wellbeing, which may otherwise be obscured by our outdated or oversimplified idea of wellbeing. To put this all more simply, I am interested in working with you to directly experience the reality of your nature, rather than trying to understand yourself through preconceived ideas alone. This is done by working with you to practice mindfulness of feelings in the body as they relate to any concern you may want to bring to therapy.
As much as I enjoy working with you to recognize the unique nuances that make you who you are, I also recognize the helpfulness in organizing this all into language. This is something that I would like to collaborate and negotiate with you around. I find excitement in working with the concepts of attachment styles, a way of typifying how people relate to others, as well as parts of themselves. This is based on the thinking that our early relationships to our parents and/or other caregivers has become the blueprint for how we come to relate to the people in our lives as adults. The idea of attachment styles can help provide people with a roadmap to arriving at secure attachment, which means being able to enjoy being with oneself and with others, and to be able to be able to experience suffering and beauty with a sense of choice. While I believe that the concepts that make up this model of attachment styles to be helpful for many people, I will also work with you to recognize where you may not fit neatly into any of these boxes. I will work with you to come up with a common language that communicates who you are, and what makes you who you are, considering both my professional training and the unique knowledge that only you can bring regarding yourself. Your wisdom and brilliance holds the way forward, and my job is to help you connect with your self with clarity and compassion.
A bit about me personally:
I am Native American and White. My tribe is Bad River Ojibwe. I grew up in Minneapolis, MN. I learned from an early age that I enjoyed studying the mind and helping people. I decided to pursue my bachelor’s in psychology and sociology, during which I did my independent study of world philosophies and found the most resonance with Eastern philosophies. Wanting to address the suffering in the world while also recognizing my preference for working with individuals, I decided to complete my Master’s in Buddhist Psychology and Contemplative Psychotherapy at Naropa University. My path of becoming a therapist has been one of great confidence regarding my preference for this career. I find much satisfaction getting to offer people the sense of feeling heard and understood through my practice of compassion and open mindedness. I also enjoy hiking, painting, being with loved ones, listening to world music, and occasionally writing poetry. I have undergone advanced training in Psychedelic Assisted Therapies, Focusing Oriented Therapy, EFT, and IFS.
Education and Trainings
B.S. Psychology and Sociology - North Dakota State University (Fargo, ND) 2015
MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling emphasis in Buddhist Psychology and Contemplative Psychotherapy- Naropa University (Boulder, CO) 2019
Focusing Oriented Therapy - Focusing International Institute, 2021
Post-Master’s certificate in Psychedelic Assisted Therapies - Naropa University, 2019
cost and insurance
Individual Psychotherapy - $140/session
I also accept the following insurances:
UnitedHealthcare UHC | UBH
Oscar Health
Oxford
Medicaid
Colorado Community Health Alliance
Blue Cross Blue Shield
Aetna
Anthem
Cigna
Quest Behavioral Health