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 Vancouver, Washington
Online in Vancouver, Washington
The anxiety nobody around you can see
You’re the woman everyone counts on, the colleague who flags the mistake before it’s sent out to a client, the friend who shows up the day after a divorce with a plan and a casserole, and the partner who keeps the calendar, the appointments, and the temperature of the household running. From the outside, you look composed, capable, and unflappable.
What no one sees is the work it takes to be that person. Every conversation runs through a filter before you respond. Did that text come across wrong, why has she gone quiet, and what does that face mean.
You revise an email to your manager four times before you send it, and then you reread it twice more after it’s gone. By the time you close the laptop, your shoulders have crept up to your ears, your jaw is set, and you’ve started drafting tomorrow’s first conversation in your head.
Friday night arrives, and instead of meeting friends at the Vancouver waterfront, you’re in bed at 8:30 with the door closed and your phone face-down, because the thought of producing one more pleasant version of yourself for one more person makes your chest feel like someone is sitting on it.
Your partner asks how you are, and you say, “long week,” because the real answer would take an hour you don’t have, and you’d spend the next two days worried that you burdened them with it.
The loneliest part is that nobody around you knows. You’ve made everything look easy for so long that no one has thought to ask, and you’ve stopped expecting them to.
Why self-awareness Hasn’t made you less anxious
This started long before your current job, your current relationship, and your adult life in Vancouver. The reading-the-room, the people-pleasing, and the sense that you’re responsible for everyone else’s mood: you’ve been doing some version of this since you were a kid.
You learned early that staying useful was how you kept things calm at home, that getting in front of someone’s frustration was easier than weathering it, and that being needed was how love was earned.
It worked, your body filed it away as the way the world works, and made it automatic.
These days, it happens on autopilot. Your manager pings you on Slack at 4:47 on a Friday, and your stomach drops before you’ve even read the message. A friend doesn’t text back within two hours, and you’re cycling through every sentence you sent her, looking for the one that came across wrong. Your partner gets quiet over dinner, and you spend the rest of the night tracing back through the day to figure out what you did.
You can name the scanning, the cycling, and the tracing-back as they’re happening, and your body keeps doing them anyway.
That’s the limit of talk therapy. You can sit with someone for an hour, describe exactly what happens to you when your manager pings you on a Friday, and walk out understanding it.
But the next time your manager pings you on a Friday, your stomach still drops before you’ve read the message. Understanding happens in your mind, but the reaction happens in your body. That’s where we work.
Learn more about how I treat high-functioning anxiety.
How specialized therapy for high-functioning anxiety Can Help
You can stop working without feeling like you’re getting away with something.
Resting stops feeling like cheating. You can sit on the couch on a Saturday afternoon and not list everything you should be doing instead, you can let the kitchen be messy, and you can let the emails wait until Monday. You start falling asleep without running through Monday in your head. Monday morning doesn’t start with the feeling that you should have done more on Sunday.
You can speak up in a meeting without paying for it for hours afterward.
You can push back on a deadline without losing two hours of your evening rehearsing it afterward. You can disagree with your boss in real time, not in a polished follow-up email at 11pm. You stop trying to perfect every comment before you make it, because being slightly wrong no longer costs you your evening. The mental energy you used to spend reviewing yourself starts going into your work, and into the evening hours you used to spend recovering from the day.
Your body stops being a barrier and instead becomes 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 around 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 tension you wake up with, the heart that jumps at a Slack notification, and the knot in your stomach when a meeting gets rescheduled don’t unwind through conversation, even good conversation.
We work with your body and nervous system because that’s where the anxious reactions come from.
Serving Vancouver and all of Southwest Washington
I work with women across Clark County, including Vancouver, Camas, Battle Ground, Ridgefield, Washougal, Hazel Dell, Felida, Salmon Creek, and La Center.
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 Vancouver, 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.