Therapist Jeff Tidrick focuses on possibilities and solutions rather than problems.
“No matter what kind of problem someone comes into therapy with, there are always exceptions to the problem,” Tidrick said.
“There’s always times when it wasn’t as bad, or maybe it wasn’t troubling for a while. And so you focus in on those times, and you try to see what was different, and then use that to build on what would make sense for them to move forward.”
The former pilot started pivoting from his aviation career to the mental health sphere after experiencing his own mental health crisis in 2019. Earlier this month, he opened up his first practice, Bluemstream, at The Old School House in Ridgway at 1075 Sherman St., Suite 200.
Though Tidrick spent years flying across the country and the globe, his most meaningful trip was to India, where he dove deep into his spirituality and learned to meditate.
Right before the pandemic, Tidrick began putting on mental health retreats for others while returning to flying as a medevac pilot in Hawaii. In 2021, he decided to deboard his flying career for good to return to school.
While getting a master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling, he also worked at an addiction center in Arizona, where he started exploring alternative therapy options.
“It was fantastic, and it was also troubling in some ways, because I saw that the current way of treating people has become very much a medicalized, pathology-focused way of conceptualizing people,” Tidrick said.
“So I was a little worried, like, how am I going to work in this field in a way that makes sense to me?” he said.
Tidrick found some hope in Colorado’s Natural Medicine Health Act, which decriminalizes certain alternative medicines such as psilocybin and psilocin found in mushrooms, which is why he decided to move and open up his practice in the state.
Colorado is “a friendly environment to be more innovative or avant-garde,” as a therapist, he said.
He also found therapies that resonated with him, beyond his specialized training in trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder therapy.
Out of 400 psychotherapy methods, Tidrick focuses on two post-modern approaches: solutions-focused therapy and narrative therapy.
Solutions-focused therapy is in the name, helping a client focus on and practice tactics that are working or have worked for them in the past. Narrative therapy centers on the idea that the problem is the problem, not the person.
“You help people to externalize their problems. So it’s not them, it’s just something that’s intruding in their life,” Tidrick said. “How is it interfering with your values, and how do you want to maybe protest against it or take some action against it?”
At Bluemstream, Tidrick is also able to pair these therapies with ketamine therapy, which uses a low-dose injection of the drug — not a hallucinogenic dose — to create new pathways in the brain. The therapy has recently been popularized as an alternative to traditional pharmaceutical treatments.
Tidrick describes the drug as allowing clients to shift their mindsets, as a trip to a new city would.
For clients who are interested in ketamine therapy, Tidrick will connect them with a medical provider for screenings to ensure the treatment is suitable for them.
“Ketamine is one tool, one potential tool, in the toolbox. But the main thing, my whole thing is, I just want to help people to not suffer unnecessarily,” Tidrick said.
At Bluemstream, Tidrick also emphasizes his love for groups and group therapy, which is where most of his personal healing took place. He is currently offering an eight-week online group therapy course for adults to manage post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, called The Transcendence Project.
For more information about Tidrick and the new practice, visit bluemstream.com.
