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 Tacoma, Washington
Specialized Online Therapy in Tacoma, Washington
For Women Whose Anxiety Doesn’t Look Like ANxiety
Everyone in your life would describe you as the dependable one. You’re the friend who has been answering texts at 11pm for a decade, the colleague who has never once missed a deadline even when she had every reason to, and the partner who runs the household calendar, the bill payments, and the emotional logistics of every conversation that happens.
What nobody sees is what it takes to keep being that person. You make a mental list of everyone’s birthdays and follow-ups in the shower, and you add to the list when you remember something while making dinner. You apologize for delays before anyone’s noticed there’s a delay. You answer texts as they come in because not answering would mean carrying the unanswered text with you for the next two hours.
By 4pm you have a headache and a list of seventeen things you can’t stop thinking about, and you can’t put any of them down.
Friday night arrives, and instead of meeting your friends for the concert downtown that they’ve been planning for a month, you tell them at 4pm you’re not feeling great and offer to drive them home if they need a ride at the end. You go home, change into pajamas, and order soup. By 8pm you’re answering work emails in bed because being awake without a task is somehow worse than the headache.
You haven’t really known how to talk about this with anyone because anyone you’d want to tell already has more to manage than you do. Your sister is going through a divorce, your best friend’s dad has cancer, and the friends from work have their own things.
You don’t even know what you’d say to them, or how you’d explain your struggles, and you’ve stopped trying to figure it out.
Why self-awareness Hasn’t made you less anxious
You learned to be responsible and competent early in life because there wasn’t another option.
By elementary school you were packing your own lunch and reading the room well enough to know which version of you your parents needed. Other kids learned to ask for help, while you learned to figure it out.
You’re still figuring it out. Your boss assigns you a problem that isn’t yours to fix, and you stay up until midnight finding a workaround. A friend texts something cryptic about a fight with her partner, and you spend the next two hours on standby, checking your texts, in case she needs to talk. Your mother-in-law makes a cryptic comment at Sunday dinner, and you replay the comment for days trying to figure out if it was about you.
You don’t want to keep reacting like this, but you can’t seem to help it.
That’s the limit of traditional talk therapy. You’ve named the emotions, made the maps, and connected the dots back to where it all came from. None of that has made the reactions stop.
The next conversation with your mother still raises your heart rate, and the next email from your boss still produces a knot in your shoulder that lasts for days.
The reaction stays in your body, which is 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 disappoint someone without spending the rest of the day fixing it.
Saying no stops triggering the next-day spiral. You can decline a project at 2pm and not send a follow-up email at 11pm offering to do half of it anyway. You disappoint your sister and don’t spend Sunday afternoon writing her a long apology in your head. The yeses you say start being honest because they aren’t covering for the noes you couldn’t say. Your week stops being a list of half-commitments you’re running behind on.
You can have a hobby that doesn’t help your career.
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 that are based on how productive those choices are.
Your body stops being a barrier and instead is your greatest ally.
The tension in your shoulders that used to be there before you opened your eyes is gone by the time you’ve made coffee. You don’t fake energy anymore. When you have it, you have it. You start noticing hunger before 2pm, fatigue before 9pm, and the need to stand up before your back hurts, and as a result you have something left by 5pm. You fall asleep within twenty minutes instead of lying there for an hour, and on a stressful day, your body recovers by Saturday morning instead of carrying it for the whole weekend.
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 way your neck tightens by the afternoon, the way your jaw goes hard before every check-in with your boss, and the way your stomach turns when you see a missed call from your mom on your screen are reactions your body has by the time you can describe them.
We work with your body and nervous system because that’s where the anxious reactions come from.
Serving Tacoma and all of Pierce County
I work with women across Pierce County, including Tacoma, Lakewood, University Place, Gig Harbor, Federal Way, Puyallup, Sumner, Bonney Lake, Steilacoom, and Auburn.
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 Tacoma, 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.