Meet Dr. Samantha Awalt, Ph.D. — Licensed Psychologist in Lakewood, CO
You don’t need to arrive already sure of yourself.
Most people don’t come to therapy with a perfectly clear explanation of what’s wrong.
You may know something feels off and still wonder if you’re making too much of it. You may replay conversations, question your reactions, or understand something one moment and talk yourself out of it the next. You may be carrying something that looks manageable from the outside and feels much heavier from where you’re standing.
That’s often where we begin.
Althought Therapy is the private practice of Dr. Samantha Awalt, a licensed psychologist. Doctoral-level care, every session.
Same-week access
Hi, I’m Dr. Samantha Awalt
I’m Dr. Samantha Awalt, a licensed psychologist and the founder of Althought Therapy in Lakewood, Colorado.
My work is built around understanding what is happening beneath the surface — not so we can endlessly analyze your life, but because the right understanding changes what becomes possible next.
How I work
I listen. Really listen.
To what you’re telling me, and to everything around it: the detail you mention in passing, the thing you almost didn’t bring up, the way one story sounds a lot like another one from a few weeks ago.
I hold onto those. And when the moment is right, I’ll point us toward the places where I think there’s more to understand.
The conversation you keep replaying may not really be about whether you said the wrong thing.
The guilt you feel after setting a boundary may not mean the boundary was wrong.
The fact that you keep questioning yourself doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t know what you feel.
And what frustrates you now probably didn’t appear out of nowhere.
When you tell me what’s happening, I’m listening to the immediate problem — and to what it’s connected to.
- What happens to you when someone is disappointed?
- What do you automatically take responsibility for?
- When did staying quiet, getting things right, keeping someone happy, or anticipating what other people needed become useful?
- What changes when you’re tired, overwhelmed, becoming a parent, entering a new relationship, or moving into a different stage of your life?
Those connections matter.
Often, something that has felt confusing for years becomes much less mysterious once we can see the whole landscape.
My approach
Therapy with me has depth — and direction.
I primarily work from a psychodynamic, relational, and developmental perspective.
In everyday language, that means I care about how you became who you are.
We look at your relationships, your history, the roles you learned to occupy, what you came to expect from other people, and the ways you learned to protect yourself or stay connected. We also pay attention to who you are now — because something that once helped you may no longer fit the life or relationships you’re trying to build.
We’re shaped by childhood. We aren’t finished in childhood.
I see development as something that continues throughout life.
A new relationship changes us. Marriage changes us. Pregnancy and parenthood can reorganize identity in ways people don’t expect. Betrayal changes what feels safe. Loss changes us. Sometimes simply reaching a new stage of adulthood exposes questions, or ways of doing things, that worked perfectly well until they didn’t.
I’m interested in those transitions.
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Not only
what happened to you?
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But:
What did you learn from it?
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What did you have to become in response to it?
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How is that version of you functioning now?
That developmental lens informs nearly everything I do — whether I’m working with an individual trying to understand why they doubt themselves, a couple caught in the same conflict, or a parent trying to make sense of who they are becoming.
Not every difficult feeling needs to be fixed.
- Sometimes guilt is simply what it feels like to do something differently.
- Sometimes anxiety is pointing to uncertainty rather than danger.
- Sometimes anger makes sense.
- Sometimes you really do need to take responsibility.
- And sometimes you’ve been taking responsibility for things that were never entirely yours.
Part of my job is helping us tell the difference.
Understanding and change
Understanding matters. So does what changes.
Depth-oriented therapy sometimes gets mistaken for simply talking about the past.
That’s not how I work.
The past matters when it helps us understand what is happening in the room, in your relationships, and inside you now.
We may spend time understanding why a pattern developed.
We will also notice when you’re doing it again.
We may make a great deal of room for why something hurts.
We will also stay curious about what you do when it hurts.
And as our understanding gets clearer, I want your life to begin reflecting that understanding — in the decisions you make, what you tolerate, what you ask for, how you relate to people you love, and how reliably you can remain connected to your own experience.
I won’t rush you toward an answer because discomfort is hard to sit with.
What I will do is help you work out where you want to go, and stay with you while you get there.
Therapy should give us enough room to understand you deeply and enough traction for something to actually become different.
In the room
What it feels like to work together
I am very engaged in the room.
I will ask questions. I will remember details. I will tell you when I notice a pattern forming across seemingly unrelated parts of your life.
There will be times when I slow us down because something important just happened. There will be times when I offer another way of understanding something you’ve believed about yourself for a long time. And there will be times when the most useful thing I can do is stay with you in an experience before either of us tries to make it go away.
You do not have to perform therapy well.
You don’t need the perfect explanation. You don’t need to know what something means before you say it. And you don’t need to make your feelings convincing enough for me to take them seriously.
We can understand them together.
My hope is that you experience therapy as a place where you are deeply cared for without being handled delicately; taken seriously without everything becoming heavy; and understood well enough that we can be honest about what is helping you and what may need to change.
Background
My background
I’m Dr. Samantha Awalt, Ph.D. — a licensed psychologist in Colorado. I earned my Ph.D. in Psychology with a concentration in Neuroscience and Behavior.
My doctoral research focused on early life stress and the ways early experiences can shape development at a physiological level — including stress hormones, epigenetic processes, the brain, and our capacity to form and navigate relationships.
That work continues to shape how I understand people clinically.
Early experiences do not determine who we become, but they can leave meaningful traces: in how our bodies respond to stress, what feels safe or unsafe in relationships, what we expect from other people, and the strategies we develop to stay connected, protected, or in control.
That is part of why I am so interested in attachment, early relational wounds, family dynamics, and trauma. I think understanding those influences can help us make sense of patterns that otherwise feel irrational, overly intense, or difficult to change.
How my training informs my work
A developmental, psychodynamic lens for understanding how early life shapes adult patterns.
My training gives me more ways to understand what shaped you.
Early Relationships
The relationships we grow up in shape what feels safe, expected, and hard to name.
Development
Those experiences shape emotional development, the nervous system, and the ways we adapt.
Adult Patterns
Protective strategies often continue into adulthood — especially in relationships, identity, and self-trust.
Clinical Understanding
This helps me make confusing patterns more understandable, meaningful, and open to change.
Neuroscience & BehaviorPregnancy & Postpartum TrainingAttachmentDevelopment
Specialized training in pregnancy and postpartum mental health
I also completed the Maternal Mental Health Professional Certificate Training through Postpartum Support International and the Policy Center for Maternal Mental Health — focused training in the emotional and psychological side of pregnancy and the postpartum period. Alongside my doctoral research on early development, it shapes how I work with pregnancy, postpartum, and the transition into parenthood.
My academic background matters to the way I practice. I like understanding things deeply. I care about research, developmental science, psychological theory, and what we know about how human beings grow and relate.
But therapy isn’t an academic exercise.
All of that knowledge should ultimately help me understand you more accurately.
Not reduce you to a diagnosis.
Not fit you into a theory.
And not turn every human experience into pathology.
The theory gives me more ways to listen. The relationship tells us what actually matters.
Areas of focus
Areas I work with
My work most often includes:
- Anxiety, worry, and overthinking
- Chronic self-doubt
- Perfectionism
- People-pleasing and difficulty with boundaries
- Relationship patterns
- Couples therapy
- Premarital counseling
- Pregnancy and postpartum adjustment
- Parenting and the transition into parenthood
- Changing family dynamics
- Identity and major life transitions
- Burnout and emotional overwhelm
- Trauma
I have a particular interest in relationships and family development — including how becoming parents changes a couple, the psychological transition from one child to two, competing needs within families, attachment, and the ways our own histories become newly visible when we begin raising children.
Beyond the therapy room
I’m also a writer and educator at heart.
I love taking complicated psychological ideas and making them understandable without flattening them.
Increasingly, I’m developing writing, resources, and talks about relationships, parenting, anxiety, self-trust, development, and the ordinary experiences that can carry much more psychological meaning than we realize.
Questions like:
- Why do I keep talking myself out of what I feel?
- Why can people-pleasing make me feel lonely?
- Why can something I deeply wanted still involve grief?
- Why do I understand the pattern and still keep doing it?
Those are the kinds of questions I find endlessly interesting — in therapy, in research, and in the educational work I’m building outside of the therapy room.
Here in Lakewood
Althought Therapy is based in Lakewood, Colorado, and my own family is rooted here in the Green Mountain community.
I value being part of the community where I practice — raising my children here, being part of local schools and family spaces, and contributing beyond the walls of my office.
I work with adults and couples in person in Lakewood and virtually throughout Colorado.
If you’re wondering whether we’d work well together
You don’t need to know exactly what you need from therapy before you reach out.
That’s something we can figure out together.
Bring me the part you’re sure about, the part you’re questioning, the story you’ve told a hundred times, or the thing you can’t quite put into words yet.
We’ll start there.
Same-week appointments available · 720-984-1219