Online Therapy Throughout Oregon and Washington
Therapy for High-Functioning Anxiety
For women who hold everything together on the outside and are exhausted from the effort it takes
You Hold Everything Together, and Your Body Is Paying for It
You can instantly tell when someone’s mood is just off, even before they say anything. A subtle shift in their tone of voice, less enthusiasm when they greet you, their vibe in a text message. “Sounds good.” is obviously a red flag because they would normally say “Sounds good!” You noticed the missing exclamation point before you noticed what you were having for lunch. By the time you get home, you’ve run through four possible explanations, mentally drafted a response to each one, and landed on the conclusion that you probably did something wrong, even though there’s no actual evidence of that. Your partner asks how your day was and you say “fine” because explaining that you’ve spent the last three hours decoding a punctuation mark would sound ridiculous, and yet your chest is still tight.
This radar system never turns off. It’s been running at an exhausting 11/10 for as long as you can remember.
Your friend went through a difficult breakup, and you dropped everything to come over with tea, tissues, a rom com, and a list of breakup books. You’re the friend who creates structure and takes care of the logistics when things get chaotic, the one everyone calls first because you always know what to do. You drove home that night feeling needed but also hollow, because not a single person in your life would think to show up for you the way you just showed up for her, and if you’re honest, you’re not sure anyone even knows what you’d need. You haven’t told anyone. You’ve never been the one who gets to fall apart.
You keep making yourself essential, and you still feel invisible.
Your boss made a casual comment about your presentation, something like “the structure could have been tighter.” It wasn’t even negative. But your heart rate spiked, your chest locked up, and you spent the drive home replaying the sentence on a loop, testing it from every possible angle: was he disappointed, was this the beginning of something, should you have prepared more, should you follow up tomorrow or would that look desperate. By 11pm you were lying in bed staring at the ceiling, still turning it over, and by Tuesday it had blended into a low-grade dread that colored your whole week. Meanwhile, at work, you looked completely fine. You answered emails, hit your deadlines, smiled in the hallway. Nobody would have guessed that a seven-word comment was still living in your body four days later.
The emotional hangover lasts for days. You button it up, carry on, and pretend everything is fine.
What Changes When You Go Beyond Just Talking About It
You’re smart and self-aware. You can describe exactly what’s happening when it’s happening, the tension in your shoulders, the loop of self-doubt, the way you brace before a difficult conversation. You’ve probably done this in therapy before: sat across from someone, explained the problem clearly, connected it to your childhood, analyzed it from every angle, and left each session with a thorough understanding of your own experience. Then your director used a certain tone in a team call and your whole body locked up, because understanding why something happens and changing how your body responds to it are two completely different things.
Talk therapy works with the logical, rational part of your brain. But the responses that are running your life, the bracing before criticism, the people-pleasing that exhausts you, the hyper-awareness that started before you had words for it, those live in a part of you that doesn’t respond to explanations. That’s why you can tell yourself “I shouldn’t take feedback so personally” and still feel your heart hammering through your ribs ten minutes into a one-on-one with your manager.
Those responses aren’t random. The radar that’s always scanning, the people-pleasing, the way a small criticism can wreck your week, those are old ways of protecting yourself. They started long before your current job or your current relationship. Think about it: you rehearse conversations in advance because some part of you learned early on that your unfiltered thoughts weren’t acceptable. You sacrifice to the point of exhaustion for others because some part of you learned that your worth depended on what you did for people, not who you were. You feel devastated by criticism because some part of you still believes that mistakes are proof that something is fundamentally wrong with you. These responses got wired into your body before you had any say in the matter, and they’re still running because nobody ever showed you how to turn them off.
What I do Differently
Instead of spending our sessions talking through what happened and why, I work directly with what your body is still holding, using approaches that are physical and creative.
Art therapy and somatic therapy move you out of the analytical mode you’ve been operating in your whole life and into the place where the bracing and the guarding can actually start to release.
If you’ve spent years being precise, strategic, and in control of every word, sitting in a room and talking about your feelings can easily become another exercise in analysis. I help you get out of your head and into the place where the work needs to happen.
What Changes Through Our Work Together
You sit through a tense conversation with your partner, the kind that used to end with you shutting down or over-apologizing, and this time you stay in it. You say the thing you actually mean instead of the version you calculated would cause the least conflict. He hears you. You don’t spend the next two hours in the bathroom replaying it. You eat dinner together and talk about something else.
You get a Slack message from your manager that says “can we talk tomorrow?” and you notice the familiar spike, the tight chest, the urge to mentally prepare for every possible scenario. But instead of spending the evening rehearsing, you register the tension, let it move through, and watch a show with your roommate. You sleep. In the morning, the meeting turns out to be about a new project, and you realize you just got an entire evening back that anxiety would have taken from you six months ago.
You’ve been going back and forth for months about whether to set a boundary with your mother about the Sunday calls, the ones where she spends forty-five minutes telling you everything you should be doing differently. You’ve rehearsed the conversation a hundred times in the shower but never followed through because the thought of her reaction made your stomach drop. After a few months of working together, you have the conversation. It’s not perfect, she doesn’t take it well, and you don’t crumble. You hang up and your hands are steady. You go about your Sunday.
The jaw pain your dentist keeps asking about starts to ease up. The tension headaches that had become a weekly event become monthly, then occasional. You stop falling asleep fine and waking at 3am with your brain already running. The chronic digestive issues your doctor couldn’t explain start to quiet down. These aren’t separate problems, they’re all part of the same thing, and when the underlying tension starts to release, the physical symptoms go with it.
Your partner asks how you’re doing and instead of the automatic “I’m fine,” you say “I’m not great today.” You don’t spend the evening running the usual calculations: whether you’re being too much, whether he’s annoyed, whether you should just handle it yourself. He makes you tea, you sit on the couch together, and you let him be there for you. Later that night you’re actually present with him, in your body instead of in your head, not replaying the day or rehearsing tomorrow. You fall asleep without the usual mental inventory of everything you said wrong.
You stop canceling plans with friends on Friday nights because you actually have something left to give. You show up, and you’re present for the conversation instead of sitting at the table with your mind somewhere else. A friend says something vulnerable and instead of immediately switching into fix-it mode, you just listen. She tells you later it was the first time she felt really heard by you, and you realize it’s the first time you weren’t running surveillance on the conversation, scanning for what she needed, calculating your next response. You were present.
What You Can Expect
Sessions are online. I work with women across Oregon and Washington State, so you don’t have to rearrange your afternoon or sit in a waiting room. You can do a session from your home office, your car, or wherever you have privacy and 55 minutes.
We start weekly. When your body has been running these responses for years, it needs consistent work to learn something different. Weekly sessions give us enough momentum to build on each session before the old responses have time to fully reassert themselves.
Sessions are $250. I also offer 90-minute sessions for $375 and therapy intensives for deeper, more concentrated work. I don’t bill insurance directly, but I provide Superbills you can submit for potential out-of-network reimbursement. Many PPO plans reimburse 50-80% of session costs, and it’s worth a five-minute call to your insurance company to check your specific plan.
Jeniffer Duncan, LPC, LMHC, LAT, ATR
I’ve spent 18 years working with women whose stress didn’t match their circumstances, women who had everything under control on paper and couldn’t figure out why their body was acting like it wasn’t.
I’m a Licensed Professional Counselor (Oregon), Licensed Mental Health Counselor (Washington), and a Licensed and Registered Art Therapist. The ATR designation means that creative and expressive approaches aren’t something I added to my practice as a specialty; they’re the foundation of how I was trained to work, and they’re the reason I’m effective with women who’ve spent years trying to think their way out of anxiety that doesn’t respond to thinking.
Oregon LPC #C3022 — Verify with OR state board
Washington LMHC #MHC.LH.61685622 — Verify with WA state board
FAQs About working with me
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This is for women who hold everything together on the outside and are exhausted from the effort it takes. You might be the person who can tell when your partner is upset before he says anything, who lies awake replaying a conversation from eight hours ago, who cancels plans because after a full day of being “on” you don’t have anything left. You’ve probably tried therapy before and left each session understanding your experience more clearly without anything in your body actually changing. You’re ready for something different.
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The first session is about getting oriented. I want to understand what your body is doing, what situations set it off, and how long this has been building. You don’t need to come in with a perfectly organized history. Most of my clients are relieved to find that the first session doesn’t feel like a traditional intake where you recite your symptoms. It feels like a conversation with someone who already understands what you’re describing.
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Over the first month, you’ll start to feel the difference between this and whatever you’ve tried before. Instead of analyzing what happened and why, we work directly with what your body is still holding. By month two or three, most of my clients start noticing shifts outside our sessions without having to think about it: they stayed steady in a conversation that would have rattled them a month ago, or said something directly without rehearsing it first, or made a decision they’d been circling for months and felt clear about it for the first time. This is usually when we start spacing sessions to biweekly, because the changes are holding on their own.
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That’s common with high-functioning anxiety, and it usually means you did in therapy exactly what you do in every other room: you explained the problem clearly, analyzed it thoroughly, and left with a deeper understanding of yourself without the physical experience of anxiety changing at all. I work differently. We go below the understanding to where the tension and the guarding are still living in your body. Most of my clients come to me after other therapy didn’t stick.
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I primarily use art therapy (also called expressive art therapy, or creative art therapy) and somatic therapy.
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Yes, but only when it will be helpful and effective for you. If you’ve already had a lot of talk therapy, it’s likely time to try a more body-based approach.
You’ve been holding everything together for long enough.
If you’re ready to start, you can book your first session directly using the scheduling link below. It will take you to my calendar, where you can request a session. I will then email you your new client forms that you’ll digitally sign, and then we’ll meet on your scheduled day.
If you have questions before scheduling, please fill out the form on the contact page and I’ll be in touch within 1-2 business days.
Let’s Get STarted
Contact Me With Questions
Complete this form and I’ll be back in touch via email, text, or phone within 1-2 business days.
Call or Text
503-974-4140
jduncanlpc@gmail.com
MAILING ADDRESS
4207 SE Woodstock Blvd. #398 Portland, OR 97206
Please note: services are 100% online