Therapist for Anxiety, Attachment Wounds + Relationship Trauma in Peoria, AZ
Heather Colton-Pritt, LAC
Serving Adults + Teens (14+) | In-Person Sessions | Peoria, Arizona
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from understanding yourself well and still feeling stuck. You may know your patterns, understand where they came from, and still find yourself responding in familiar ways when something hits a familiar place. Relational wounds can follow you into new relationships and familiar environments, showing up as: overthinking, second-guessing, accommodating, shutting down, or questioning your own instincts. The patterns that once helped you feel safe may continue to show up even when you no longer need them in the same way.
A lot of the people I work with carry something that looks fine from the outside. A stable relationship, a decent life, a good enough handle on things. And still, something underneath has not moved. Maybe you find yourself losing your voice in relationships, putting other people’s needs ahead of your own, struggling to trust yourself, or feeling like you should be further along by now. Therapy with me can be a place to slow these patterns down, understand what is beneath them, and begin finding new ways of thinking, responding, and relating that feel more authentic to who you are.
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Therapy for adults + teens
* Therapy for adults + teens
The adults + teens I work with in Peoria, AZ
You have probably already spent a lot of time trying to understand yourself. You can trace the patterns. You know where they came from. And you are still showing up in the same places, with the same responses, wondering why knowing has not been enough to change anything.
If any of this sounds familiar:
You left a relationship that made you feel small, confused, or like you were always the problem. You are still not entirely sure what was real. You are in a better place now and you still feel that familiar tightening in your chest when your partner gets quiet. You do not understand why you cannot just be okay.
You are the one who holds everything together for everyone else and you have no idea what you actually need. You learned so early that being agreeable was the way to stay safe that at some point it stopped feeling like a choice. You have had the thought recently, maybe more than once: I do not actually know who I am outside of what other people need from me.
You watch your friends move forward and feel, privately and with a lot of shame, like you are the only one still stuck. You cannot name exactly what you are grieving. You just know something feels unfinished.
You process the world differently. You think in clear rules and struggle when others do not. You have always had to translate yourself to be understood. You have been told you are too intense, too sensitive, too much, and you have started to believe it.
You understand your history. You are tired of that understanding not being enough to change how it feels in your body right now.
"Insight can help us understand where we have been. Healing can help us discover where we want to go. Creating space for that shift is at the heart of why I do this work."
— Heather Colton-Pritt, LAC
How I Work and Where EMDR Fits In
A lot of the people I work with come in already knowing what is wrong. They can name the patterns. They understand where they came from. What they do not have yet is a felt sense of something different. A new experience in their body, in a relationship, in how they respond when the familiar thing gets activated.
That is what I am trying to create. Not more insight, though we will develop that too. A different experience of yourself, in real time, that starts to give your nervous system something new to work with.
My approach is existential and values-based at its core. I am interested in who you actually are underneath what you have learned to perform, what you genuinely value when you are not managing someone else's expectations, and whether you are living in a way that feels like going through motions rather than making actual choices. That is where I tend to find the most movement.
I draw from:
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): building psychological flexibility and helping you orient toward your values rather than away from discomfort
EMDR: processing the relational and traumatic experiences that are still active in the nervous system, even when the original situation is long over
Person-centered approaches: you are always the expert on your own life, and I bring curiosity and presence rather than a predetermined roadmap
Existential framing: helping clients find meaning, clarify values, and move toward a life that feels like theirs
What It Feels Like to Work With Me
My clients are often people who have spent a long time trying to think their way through what they're feeling. They understand their patterns intellectually, but the emotional responses are still there. That's because some things don't shift through insight alone. They live deeper.
I show up with genuine curiosity, steady presence, and the directness to name what I notice — without judgment and without rushing you. Every session is shaped around where you are, not a script.
Explore my specialties
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Attachment + Relationships
Patterns showing up in your relationships now were learned somewhere earlier. Sometimes in childhood, or in a relationship that redefined what you thought you could trust. I work with adults carrying the relational past into the present, including those still recovering from relationships where they lost trust in their own perceptions.
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Anxiety + Chronic Stress
I work specifically with anxiety that is relational in its roots: the kind that emerged from environments where you learned to stay alert, accommodate, or disappear to stay safe. The anxiety that looks like people-pleasing, overthinking, or the inability to rest even when things are okay. We will get into where that wiring came from.
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Trauma + PTSD
Including relational trauma: the kind that does not come from a single event but from an accumulation of experiences within relationships that were supposed to be safe. I work with the presentations that often go unrecognized: the hypervigilance, the self-doubt, the difficulty trusting your own reality. The ones that do not look like what people picture when they hear the word trauma.
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Grief, Loss + Life Transitions
Including the grief that does not have a death at its center. The loss of a relationship, a version of yourself, a future you had planned. The grief of realizing something was not what you thought it was. I hold space for the losses that others do not always recognize, and for the ones that do not have a clear name or a socially acceptable timeline.
These areas are connected. Relational trauma rarely stays in one lane, and neither does healing.
Training & Qualifications | Serving Peoria
I hold a Master of Science in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and am a Licensed Associate Counselor (LAC) in Arizona. I am also NBCC Board Certified. My integrative approach draws from person-centered therapy, ACT, existential therapy, EMDR, and mindfulness-based approaches, tailored to each client rather than applied as a fixed protocol.
I work with adults and adolescents (14+). My areas of focus include relational and attachment trauma, anxiety, people-pleasing patterns, and clients navigating the aftermath of emotionally confusing relationships. I have completed my EMDR training through Inside Out's required certification pathway.
A little more about me
Outside the therapy room, I value the same things I bring into it: genuine connection, honest conversation, and authenticity.
I went into this work because I am genuinely interested in people, in what shapes them, what holds them back, and what becomes possible when they stop running from the things they have been carrying. I am not here to be neutral. I am here to be present.
I have a faith background and I am comfortable holding space for the spiritual dimension of a client's experience. I will not prescribe a framework, but if your values and beliefs are part of how you understand your life, they are welcome in the room.
If you are someone who has felt like therapy was not quite built for you, or who has tried it before and found it too surface-level, I hope something here felt different.
Further reading
ANXIETY + NERVOUS SYSTEM
You Are Not Too Sensitive. Your Nervous System Learned to Stay Ready.
Being told you are too sensitive is one of the most common things people bring into a first session. Here is what is actually happening in the nervous system — and why willpower alone has not been able to change it.
MENTAL HEALTH + CULTURE
Therapy Is Everywhere on Social Media. Here Is What It Is Getting Wrong.
There is a gap between recognizing yourself in a post and actually shifting the pattern running in the background for years. Here is what that gap is and what closes it.
RELATIONSHIPS + ATTACHMENT
Why You Keep Ending Up in the Same Relationship Patterns
You understand the pattern. You have probably traced it back to something in your history. And still, the next relationship or the next conflict shows you the same version of yourself you were trying to leave behind.
Ready to take the next step?
If something on this page resonated, I would love to connect. Reach out and let's figure out if we're a good fit. No pressure, just a conversation.
Common Questions About Working With Me
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Because understanding a pattern and being free of it are two genuinely different things. Most of the relational and anxiety patterns people carry were not formed through conscious decision. They formed through experience, often before there was language to hold them. Which means they do not respond to reasoning the way a problem you thought your way into does. EMDR and the nervous system level work I do addresses the experience that created the pattern, not just the interpretation of it. That is usually what finally moves something.
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You do not need a formal category to bring it in. If a relationship left you doubting your own perceptions, feeling like you were constantly managing someone else's reactions, or questioning your own worth in ways that did not fully resolve when the relationship ended, that is worth working with. I am not interested in whether it fits a clinical label. I am interested in what it is still costing you.
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EMDR is a therapy approach that works with how traumatic or overwhelming experiences are stored in the nervous system. For relational trauma specifically, it is useful because the experiences that shaped your attachment patterns and relational responses are often stored somatically and implicitly, not as clear narratives. EMDR helps the nervous system process and integrate those experiences rather than just understand them. You can read more about how it works at EMDRIA.org.
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Yes. I naturally attract clients who describe themselves as thinking in black and white, who have always felt like they try harder than others to navigate social situations, or who have noticed that their nervous system and their relationships are more connected than they expected. I do not require a diagnosis to work with this experience. I am interested in understanding how you actually work, not in fitting you into a predetermined model.
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That is a completely reasonable place to be. A consultation is a low-stakes way to find out if this feels like the right fit before you commit to anything. You do not need to have it figured out before you reach out. That is part of what the conversation is for.