For women who take care of everyone, hold it all together, and feel alone in the middle of it.
Therapy for High-Functioning Anxiety in Olympia, Washington
Specialized Online Therapy in Olympia and Throughout Washington
For Women Whose Anxiety Doesn’t Look Like ANxiety
By every measure that matters to the people around you, you’re the one with your life under control. You’re the one who shows up early, who follows through on what she says she’ll do, who remembers the birthday card and the doctor’s appointment and the deposit deadline, and when something goes sideways at work or at home, you’re the first person anyone calls.
What nobody sees is the work you do to keep being that person. You prep for tomorrow’s meeting tonight by reading two background documents you don’t need to read. You over-explain your reasoning in your emails, so nobody has to ask. You arrive ten minutes early to every appointment and use the time in your car going through whatever could go wrong. By the time you walk into the room, your hands are cold and you’re rehearsing the third question someone might ask.
Saturday morning arrives, and instead of meeting your sister for the brunch downtown that you’ve already had to reschedule twice, you text her at 9am that you’re not up for it, and ask if next weekend works. You’re just not up to being the version of yourself she needs you to be today.
You haven’t told your partner the truth about how you’re doing because you don’t have a name for it. The job is fine, the marriage is fine, and the kids are fine.
When they ask how you’re doing, you say “good” and ask about their day.
Why self-awareness Hasn’t made you less anxious
You’ve been doing some version of this for as long as you can remember. You learned to be the helpful one because the alternative was being a problem.
You learned to keep things calm by anticipating what people needed before they asked, by smoothing over disagreements before they escalated, and by becoming the person nobody needed to worry about.
You’re still doing it. A coworker’s tone changes in a meeting, and you spend the rest of the day trying to figure out if it was about you. Your kid asks for help with homework, and you start cataloging whether you’ve been distracted enough lately that they noticed.
You know you still do it, and yet you don’t know how to stop doing it.
That’s the limit of traditional talk therapy. Naming the pattern hasn’t stopped the pattern. You can come out of a session understanding why your boss’s tone bothers you so much, and the next time a coworker forwards an email at 4:30 with no message, you’re back to scanning, rehearsing, and reviewing what you did wrong and why they’re mad at you for the next hour.
Insight and understanding don’t change the automatic reaction. That’s why we work directly with your body.
Learn more about how I treat high-functioning anxiety.
How specialized therapy for high-functioning anxiety Can Help
You can feel proud of what you did before chasing what’s next.
You finish a project and you let yourself be proud of it for the rest of the week, not just for the fifteen minutes it takes to update your resume. You stop needing the next promotion or the next contract or the next title to remind yourself you’re good at your work. The accomplishments that used to evaporate the second they happened start to accumulate into evidence you can lean on when something hard comes up next.
You can have a hobby that doesn’t help your career.
You can answer “what do you want for dinner” without overthinking it. You sign up for a pottery class because clay-throwing sounds satisfying. You take up trail running because you like being in the woods. You read a novel for the pleasure of it. You stop making choices about your free time based on whether those choices are productive enough.
You stop being mad at yourself for being tired.
The voice that’s been calling you weak, neurotic, and unreliable stops sounding like the truth. You give yourself credit for what you’ve been managing without help: the constant readiness, the cycling thoughts, and the body that wouldn’t stop bracing. You stop punishing yourself for not handling it more gracefully. You let yourself take a sick day for being tired. You ask for help without first having to prove you couldn’t do it alone.
How I work with high-functioning anxiety
I use somatic therapy and art therapy with my clients because your mind doesn’t calm through more thinking.
The tightness that sits in your chest from your first email of the morning, the way your stomach drops when your phone vibrates with an unknown number, and the headache that builds across the afternoon and is fully present by 6pm are reactions your body makes before you have a chance to override them.
We work with your body and nervous system because that’s where the anxious reactions come from.
Serving the broader Olympia area
I work with women across Thurston County and the South Sound, including Olympia, Lacey, Tumwater, Yelm, Tenino, Rochester, McCleary, Centralia, and Shelton.
All sessions are online by secure video, so wherever you are in Washington, you can meet with me from home.
Online therapy for high-functioning anxiety in Olympia, Washington
Sessions are online via secure video. You’ll need a private space and a device with a camera. Most of my clients do sessions from their home office, bedroom, or car.
We meet weekly to start. The kind of anxiety you’re experiencing has been there for years, and it needs consistent work to change. Weekly sessions give us momentum. Most clients move to biweekly after a few months as they start feeling better.
Sessions are $250 for 55 minutes. I also offer 90-minute sessions ($375) and longer 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 out-of-network therapy costs. I recommending checking your specific plan to verify.)
Jeniffer Duncan, LPC, LMHC, LAT, ATR
I’ve been a therapist for 18 years. I’m a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in Washington and a Licensed and Registered Art Therapist.
Working with art and with your body skips past the part of you that’s been managing every interaction. It works directly with your body’s and nervous system’s reactions, and that’s where long-term change and healing happen.
Jeniffer Duncan, Washington LMHC (License #MHC.LH.61685622)
You’ve been holding it together for everyone else long enough.
If you’re ready to start, you can book your first session through the scheduling link below. Clicking the link will take you to my HIPAA-compliant calendar where you can request a date and time for your intake session. Once I approve the intake session, I will send you your new client forms via email for you to review and digitally sign.
If you have questions first, please contact me using the contact form below, and I’ll be in touch within 1-2 business days.
Let’s Get Started
Contact Me
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 (Services are conducted 100% online)
4207 SE Woodstock Blvd. #398 Portland, OR 97206
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You need to be physically located in Oregon or Washington at the time of our session. I’m licensed in both states, so if you travel between them for work, we can still meet.
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For the kind of work I do, yes. Research consistently shows that online therapy produces comparable outcomes to in-person sessions for anxiety treatment. And there’s an advantage specific to somatic and art therapy: you’re in your own space, which means we’re working with your body in the environment where your anxiety actually shows up, not in a clinical office where you might unconsciously shift into “therapy mode.”
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I’m not in-network with any insurance company, but I provide Superbills that you can submit for out-of-network reimbursement. Many Oregon plans offer meaningful reimbursement for out-of-network mental health services. It’s worth a five-minute call to your insurance company to ask about your out-of-network mental health benefits.
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I use somatic therapy and art therapy with my clients.
If your previous therapy was primarily talk-based, you probably did what you do in every other room: explained the problem clearly, analyzed it thoroughly, and left understanding yourself better without the physical experience of anxiety changing at all. I work differently. We go deeper than the understanding.