Julia Conley, LSW

About Julia

I was headed toward teaching first. I liked working with teenagers, especially watching them come into who they are, and then the curriculum model started to feel tight and suffocating to me. Here’s how you teach it, and if a kid doesn’t learn it, that lands on the kid rather than the rubric. I couldn’t get comfortable with that.

During COVID I moved to Durango to guide in the wilderness, largely because I needed to live in a new town. I was carrying a lot of anxiety at the time and things weren’t working the way I’d been doing them. What I found out there was people arriving in the middle of a crisis and then changing, through learning skills and through reconnecting with people their own age in ways they never had before. Watching that happen was the most amazing thing, and it taught me something about myself too, that presence and energy are things you can actually give someone. I guided for two and a half years. Eventually I wanted to be home on weekends and more rooted in Durango, so I found a social work program built for this region, with real attention to rural practice and to meeting the needs of Indigenous communities.

Living here changes how I work. When a client tells me about a hike, or an event they’re going to this weekend, or something that happened at a particular school, I know what that means on a level I wouldn’t otherwise. I also did case management in town for a year and a half, so when someone keeps hitting the same roadblock and needs a connection to a resource, there’s usually a person I can call who already knows me.

Most of my hours outside work go to long distance running, which I find calming. That isn’t relatable to everyone, so I don’t always bring it up. I grew up in Connecticut, and I still get a bit of imposter syndrome living here, so having something that ties me to these mountains makes me feel like I belong to the place. The rest is a close group of friends I cook for, camp with, and barge in on to talk about the day. That sense of being interwoven, that none of us is doing this alone, is a lot of what I do outside the office.

Julia’s Approach to Care

First and foremost I’m building comfort between us. I want you to trust me and I want to trust you, and that takes time and can’t be forced. Everything else we do rests on it.

From there I work from acceptance and commitment therapy. Put simply, it’s learning how to carry your thoughts and go live the life you want anyway. We’ll go through what you value and what your goals are, and build skills for sitting with the big emotions that sidetrack us, including how to say thanks, mind, I’ve got it from here and set something down in a different way. I weave in DBT where tangible skills would help, and my supervision has brought a lot of CBT into the mix.

I do my best work with people who’ve just had something large happen and are working out what life looks like now. Often they come in saying they don’t know who they are after the event, or who they are beyond their trauma, and we re-piece that together in session while reconnecting to the strengths that were always theirs. I like the identity questions that come with your twenties, the how do I want to be an adult in this world ones. And I like relationship work, though there’s both a benefit and a curse to only ever getting one side of the story. Session can be a calm place to replay it, talk it through, and pick up skills for handling conflict and the day to day.

You’ll know therapy is working when you first let yourself believe it could. It isn’t a pill or one dramatic change. It’s closer to sport: sessions are practice, life is the game, and you won’t always get it right out there. Progress feels incremental, and it helps to give yourself room to count the small victories. The biggest one is awareness. Once you start noticing the patterns, or can simply name what you’re feeling, you’re somewhere very different from where you started. We live in a world that wants data and graphs, and knowing yourself better is harder to chart, but it’s where the potential sits. A line I picked up at an ACT conference has stayed with me for exactly this reason: you’re not broken, you’re stuck.

One thing I wish people would stop apologizing for is going off on tangents or bringing up random parts of their life. I’ll hold the thread of all of it. Whatever came out was meant to come out. And I should say I bring a lightness with me, some humor and the occasional bit of sarcasm, never imposed on anyone. Bring yours too.

Julia’s education and experience

I’m completing a Master of Social Work through the University of Denver’s Four Corners Program, a curriculum built for this region with coursework in rural practice and in meeting the needs of Indigenous communities. Before that I spent two and a half years as a wilderness guide with Open Sky Wilderness Therapy, working with adolescents and young adults, and a year and a half doing case management in La Plata County. I work from acceptance and commitment therapy, with DBT and CBT alongside it.

Julia’s license information

Credential: LSW #0009927623
State: Colorado