Transformative counseling for healing and personal growth.
Empowering Emotional Wellness Services
Transformative counseling for healing and personal growth.
About Crystal Valley Wellness
Michelle Skagen, LCSW
I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker with a deep commitment to social justice, emotional well-being, and helping people connect with their inner strengths, especially during transitions, healing, and change. I’m also a mother to a young adult and teenager, which continuously shapes my understanding of human development and the complexity of family life.
Before becoming a therapist, I spent many years as an educator. As a middle school teacher, I helped design integrated, social justice-oriented curriculum grounded in social emotional learning and community building that deepened students’ academic experiences , where they learned empathy, accountability, and respect for themselves and others.
After I left teaching to raise my small children, I worked as an educator for Girls’ Leadership Institute. These parent daughter workshops and summer camps focused on building emotional literacy and relational safety, which are foundational to lifelong well-being.
My leadership work continued through the World Leadership School, where I served as an instructor for students from independent schools who participated in cultural immersion programs. The curriculum focused on community building and discovering inner leadership in the context of real-world challenges by observing community leaders and narrative storytelling.
Through these experiences, along with my own reflections on trauma during a teen travel experience and the profound lessons of parenting, I realized my calling was to reconnect with social justice through clinical work. I pursued my master’s degree in social work at the University of Denver while working full-time for a local non-profit to build a homelessness response system across a three-county region. This work gave me an understanding of how trauma, adverse childhood experiences, unidentified learning disabilities, mental health conditions, brain injuries, and systemic inequities create significant barriers to housing stability and overall wellness.
I later transitioned into clinical practice, where I have provided individual therapy to a wide range of clients navigating anxiety, depression, PTSD, personality disorders, substance use disorders, major life transitions, aging, caregiver stress, parenting challenges, divorce and co-parenting, and relationship concerns.
My therapeutic approach is integrative and tailored to each client. I draw from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, Person-Centered Therapy, Narrative Therapy, Solution-Focused Therapy, and Mindfulness. I also offer Brainspotting, a trauma-informed modality that integrates EMDR and Somatic Therapy to support healing, interoceptive awareness, and nervous system regulation.
At the heart of my work is the belief that a strong, attuned therapeutic relationship is the foundation for growth and healing. My priority is to create a space where clients feel safe, respected, and deeply understood so they may realize their highest potential within the realities of their lives.