Meet Andrew

I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota and moved to Colorado for the mountains. I have been here ever since.

My path into this work started earlier than graduate school. In 1998 I began working with at-risk youth, starting at a working ranch and group home for boys in South Dakota. That place was formative. Hard, meaningful, grounding work. It eventually brought me to Colorado, where I joined a faith-based agency serving youth and families in Fort Collins. 

The clinicians I worked alongside there were extraordinary. Watching them changed what I thought was possible in this field and set me on the path to graduate school.

I completed my MSW at Colorado State University in 2007 and have been a licensed clinical social worker since 2010. My first decade as a therapist was spent in community mental health, working with people of all ages and backgrounds, navigating crisis, addiction, grief, trauma, and everything in between. That time shaped me in ways that private practice alone never could have. In 2016 I opened my own practice and have been doing this work on my own terms ever since.

What I have learned across twenty years is that the symptoms people come in with, the anxiety, the depression, the patterns that will not quit, are almost never the real problem. They are the body's best attempt to manage something that has not yet been fully felt or processed. When we get underneath that, when we work with the nervous system rather than around it, something becomes possible that was not possible before.

That is the work I am here to do.

Education and Licensure

• MSW, Clinical Social Work, Colorado State University, advanced standing program, 2007
• Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), Colorado, since 2010
• CCPT II
• CGP
• Intermediate III Student with Somatic Experiencing International

My professional growth and my personal healing have always moved together. That is not an accident.

I experienced traumatic loss early in my life. The injury that left behind shaped how I attached to people, and for a long time I did not have language for any of it. In childhood it showed up as impulsive, extreme behavior. In adolescence and early adulthood it found its way into addiction and relationships that kept breaking apart.

In 2005 sudden loss found me again. That moment pushed me to stop managing and start actually doing my own work. I sought the care I needed. I sat with my own grief, my own addicted parts, my own injured places. I still do.

That personal reckoning ran alongside a professional one. My years in community mental health were built on relationships, systems work, and cognitive approaches. That foundation was real and it served people. But the more I sat with clients carrying deep trauma and grief, the more I felt the limits of working from the neck up. I wanted to understand what was happening in the body. I wanted to go deeper.

That search led me to Somatic Experiencing and Internal Family Systems. Both changed how I understand healing and what I believe is actually possible in a session. Not faster. Not easier. Just truer to how human beings actually work.

What I have found on the other side of all of it is not a finished product. It is a deepened capacity to be present with pain without needing to fix it or move past it too quickly. A lived understanding of what it actually takes to heal.

I believe healing asks for the whole person, body, mind, and soul. No single approach holds all of it. That is why my work draws from multiple frameworks depending on what each person needs.

I am trained in Somatic Experiencing, a body-based approach developed by Dr. Peter Levine that works directly with the nervous system to process and resolve trauma. I have completed Intermediate III with Somatic Experiencing International and am currently in my final year of advanced training. I also draw on Internal Family Systems and trauma-informed cognitive behavioral approaches. Each person brings a story that is entirely their own, and the care plan follows from that.

I see my role as a guide, not an authority. A significant part of this journey is developing new patterns, ones that respond to pain with care rather than avoidance, and that build a genuine capacity for connection and authentic living. Healing is real work. It takes time, support, and commitment.

I am here to guide you for as long as it is useful.

Andrew J. Heinz, MSW, LCSW, Intermediate III Student with Somatic Experiencing International