Private practice lets me structure my time differently. I continue to see people who want shorter-term therapy for milder difficulties. I also have room in my schedule for longer-term psychotherapy with people whose problems are more enduring, where we can take the time to understand the nature of the difficulty as it appears in their lives and as it shows up in the therapy relationship itself. When the same problem has survived skill-based treatment, it is usually rooted in something older, and resolving it takes an honest, trusting relationship that has time to develop.
I deeply value those longer relationships. They are the reason I chose, after more than three decades of practice, to enter the Adult Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Program at Columbia University, and they are the center of how I practice now.
What sessions are like
Sessions are conversational rather than scripted, but they have a clear direction. Early on, we work together to identify what you want to be different in your life, as specifically as we can, and those goals guide our work. We focus on the problems that brought you in and on the patterns beneath them, including how those patterns show up between the two of us, which is often where they become easiest to see. From time to time we look back at your goals together, to see what has changed and what may be getting in the way. When practical skills would help, I’ll suggest them. I’ll ask you to speak as openly as you can, including about your reactions to me. You are free to end therapy at any time.
What I do not provide
To help you decide whether we are a good match: I do not provide psychological testing, evaluations, or reports; disability evaluations or evaluations for emotional support animals; therapy for children, teenagers, or families, including family therapy; or counseling for alcohol, substance use, or other addictions such as gambling or pornography, which are outside my training. Although I am trained in EMDR, I do not offer it as a treatment method, and although I am trained in DBT, I integrate DBT skills into psychotherapy rather than offering a full DBT program. I also do not provide crisis or emergency services.
Training and Experience
I earned my Doctor of Psychology (PsyD) from Wright State University School of Professional Psychology in 1988, with a specialization in clinical psychology, and completed an accredited clinical psychology internship at a Veterans Administration Medical Center and a postdoctoral year of supervised practice at Psychological Associates of the Black Hills. I have been a licensed psychologist in Colorado since 1991.
My work has spanned private practice, crisis teams, hospitals, and Kaiser Permanente Behavioral Health, where I served as staff psychologist and supervising psychologist from 1991 to 2019 and supervised psychotherapists and psychologists in training.
In 2026 I began the two-year Adult Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Program at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, a course of advanced seminars and supervised clinical practice with senior psychoanalytic clinicians. Ongoing supervision of this kind is what keeps a long-practicing therapist’s work sharp rather than settled. I also maintain training in contextual behavioral approaches, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Relational Frame Theory.
Memberships and Affiliations
American Psychological Association (APA)
Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA Division 39)
Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS)
Colorado Psychological Association (CPA)
International OCD Foundation
Rachael St.Claire, PsyD
Licensed Psychologist, Colorado (PSY1546)
I’m Dr. Rachael St.Claire, a licensed psychologist providing psychotherapy by secure video for adults across Colorado. My work centers on anxiety, OCD and intrusive thoughts, depression and mood disorders, and the longstanding emotional and relational patterns that keep these difficulties returning. It is grounded in psychodynamic psychotherapy and draws on ACT, CBT, exposure and response prevention, DBT, and mindfulness when those skills will help.
Why I do this work
For twenty-eight years I was a staff psychologist at Kaiser Permanente, where I worked with a large number of people across the full range of psychological difficulty: from distress in response to stressful events and life changes to enduring and serious mental health conditions. Working inside an integrated medical system also meant working alongside psychiatrists, crisis teams, primary care physicians, and specialists in neurology, gastroenterology, endocrinology, and other fields. That breadth taught me a great deal about what helps, and about the limits of what brief treatment can reach.
The watercolors on my website are my own. Not every watercolorist works the same way. Some paint realistically with planning and control, while some paint expressively. I seek a relationship with water, color, and paper, letting the water carry the pigment in ways I can’t fully predict and responding to what emerges. Painting is one of the places I find joy and creativity. Painting offers something my clinical work offers as well: learning to be present to what is actually happening, moment by moment with no script, trusting the process. In On Not Being Able to Paint, the psychoanalyst Marion Milner wrote about how hard it can be to loosen our grip, to let go of directing and control, and to let something new emerge, and how much aliveness becomes possible when we do. Over the years, practice has given me not more control but more trust in the process. Also see The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin.
Outside the office, running has been a great teacher, offering refuge from painful emotions and offering a way to integrate my body and psyche and ground it in the physical world. Over nearly two decades I ran marathons and ultramarathons, including 100-mile races in the mountains and deserts of the West, and learned as much from the races I didn't finish as from the ones I did. Read more about my running.
I have been a longtime student of early Buddhist philosophy and meditator in the vipassanā tradition. See Satipaṭṭhāna Meditation: A Practice Guide and Satipaṭṭhāna: The Direct Path to Realization by Bhikkhu Anālayo.
Hand of Buddha, abhaya mudrā ( gesture of fearlessness)
