Ana Clements-Benedict, PsyD

Relationship & Attachment Issues

Most of what brings people to therapy has a relational thread running through it. Ana works with adults caught in patterns they can see but can’t seem to interrupt — the same argument in every relationship, the same distance from family, the same difficulty trusting that closeness will hold.

She also works with grief that isn’t about death. Losing a relationship you counted on, or the version of a parent you needed and never had, is a real loss — and it often goes unmourned because nothing about it looks like mourning. Attachment injuries from childhood, ruptures between adults, and the slow erosion of a partnership all belong here.

Ana spent a year of her doctoral training in a couples therapy seminar at the University of Denver and completed Gottman Method Level 1. She’s worked with partners navigating the identity shifts that come with new parenthood — figuring out who you are to each other now that you’re also somebody’s parents.

Much of this happens in the therapy relationship itself. Ana welcomes clients who can tell her they’re frustrated with her, or that something isn’t landing. Those moments are usable, not problems to smooth over. Clients often describe better relationships with the people in their lives, and a noticeably better one with themselves.

Mood & Anxiety

Relief from the symptom, and an answer to why it’s there

When a client says they have depression, Ana’s first question is whether that’s the problem or the evidence of one. Both parts matter to her: she takes the suffering seriously and wants it to ease, and she wants to understand what produced it.

This changes what treatment looks like. Sometimes it takes a couple of months to understand what’s actually wrong, and that isn’t a sign therapy is failing. That process is the treatment. Ana will say plainly that she’s a poor fit for someone who needs an answer in three sessions, and a good fit for someone willing to spend some time.

She works well with depression that has resisted explanation, with performance anxiety and perfectionism, and with people told their symptoms are purely chemical who never quite believed it. She trained for a year at a practice specializing in anxiety disorders, using acceptance-based and exposure-based approaches with adults and adolescents.

She’s also skilled with clients who understand themselves well on paper and can’t feel much of it — where thinking has become the way around emotion rather than the way into it. She’ll use concrete tools when they help: mindfulness, structure, skills for a feeling that gets too big to hold. She just won’t stop there if there’s more to find.

Men’s Mental Health

Two men show up in Ana’s office often. The first isn’t sure about therapy at all and came because someone asked him to. The second is here because his partner is exhausted from feeling shut out, and he doesn’t know how to give her what she’s asking for.

Ana is a good first therapist for a skeptic. She’ll meet you in an intellectual register, which for a lot of men is the door that opens first — thinking about something before feeling it is a reasonable place to start, not something to apologize for. She won’t ask you to emote on cue. She also worked in the corporate world before moving into psychology, and she knows the environments many of her male clients spend their days in.

She works with anger without treating it as a character flaw. Anger is frequently the one emotion that got through, and when it becomes the only available response, the question isn’t how to suppress it but what it’s protecting.

What men notice over time is less dramatic than they expect and more useful: more room between a feeling and a reaction, more capacity to be alone with themselves without staying in motion, and conversations at home that go somewhere new.

Personality Disorders & Complex Presentations

Some people have been through several therapists and left each one with the sense that they were too much, too intense, or too difficult. Others are on the receiving end of a personality that has shaped their entire life — a parent, a partner, a sibling — and have never had a name for what they lived through.

Ana works with both. Narcissistic presentations don’t rattle her, and she’s comfortable with adult children of narcissistic parents, a group that often struggles to find a therapist who will say plainly what happened to them.

Her training here runs deeper than most at this stage of a career: comprehensive DBT at a Linehan Board Certified clinic, a predoctoral internship at a psychiatric hospital treating severe and complex presentations, and specialized training in personality assessment. Her doctoral paper examined how object relations theory and DBT can be used together in individual therapy.

She’s direct about fit. Depending on severity, weekly individual therapy may not be the right level of care, and she’ll say so rather than let someone spend a year in something that was never going to be enough. When it is the right fit, what she offers is steadiness — the willingness to sit with what you can’t yet tolerate on your own.