Online in Oregon and Washington State
Therapy for Women in Male-Dominated Fields
For women in tech, aerospace & engineering, finance, Academia, law, & other male-dominated industries
For Women who have held everything together at work for years
You’ve spent years being the smartest and most prepared person in the room. The people around you know it, even the ones who don’t always make it easy.
But somewhere along the way, your body started keeping score:
You brought a recommendation to the leadership team that you'd spent weeks refining, backed by data, clearly structured, ready to go. The room nodded politely, the conversation moved on, and forty-five minutes later a male colleague restated the same idea in slightly different words, and everyone leaned forward like they were hearing it for the first time. You sat there calculating whether to say something, knowing that if you pointed it out, you’d be the woman who “needs credit” instead of the woman who had the best idea in the room.
You got pulled into a project review where your technical lead questioned your methodology in front of the whole team, not with a genuine concern but with the kind of slow, patient tone people use when they think they're explaining something to someone who doesn't quite get it. You had fifteen years of experience on him. You answered his question cleanly, watched him nod like he was granting you permission to continue, and spent the rest of the afternoon wondering why your hands were still shaking.
Your annual review came back glowing, full of praise for your “communication style” and your ability to “build consensus across teams,” while the man at your level, the one who sends two-sentence emails and talks over people in meetings, got recognized for his “bold strategic thinking.” You know exactly what that language means. You also know that if you said it out loud, you'd spend the next six months labeled as the woman with a chip on her shoulder, so you nodded and said thank you and drove home with your jaw clenched.
None of these moments were big enough to report, and most of them weren’t big enough to explain to anyone outside your industry without sounding like you were overreacting. The worst part is you're not even sure you’re reading them right. Maybe he didn't mean it that way, maybe you're being too sensitive, maybe this is just how it works and you need to stop turning every interaction into a gender issue.
You went back and forth in your head about each of those moments, but your body didn't deliberate. Your body registered every one of them and kept a running tab, and somewhere along the way that tab started showing up as the jaw pain your dentist keeps asking about, the insomnia that isn't about falling asleep but about waking at 3am with your brain already rehearsing a conversation that isn't happening for six hours, the Sunday evenings that carry a heaviness now, the way you cancel plans with friends because after nine hours of monitoring your tone and your volume and the precise wording of every email, you don't have anything left to give anyone.
You've probably explained it away as burnout, or stress, or just the price of working in your field. But it doesn’t go away when you take a vacation, and it didn’t resolve when you got the promotion.
You’ve been managing all of this for years, and for most of that time, your system worked. The preparation and the self-monitoring kept you performing at a level no one could question.
But something happened that you can’t manage your way through:
Your partner told you he’s thinking about leaving because you haven’t been present in your marriage in years, and you didn’t have an argument ready for that because you know he’s right.
Your doctor told you the chest pain is stress-related and asked what you’re planning to do about it, and for the first time you didn’t have a good answer.
You had a panic attack in the parking garage before a board meeting, the kind where you couldn’t breathe and thought you were dying, and you sat in your car for forty minutes telling yourself it was nothing, and then it happened again the following week.
You stopped sleeping and after three months of it your body started shutting down in ways you couldn’t hide anymore, the weight loss, the hair falling out, the hands shaking in meetings.
Whatever it was, it took the decision out of your hands. Something happened, and you can’t fix it with better preparation or a 3-day weekend.
what you’ve been Experiencing doesn’t just create stress. It changes you physically.
When you spend that long as one of the only women in the room, constantly managing how you’re perceived, monitoring your tone, judging when to speak and when to hold back, your body starts running a low-grade stress response that never fully turns off. It was designed to protect both you and your livelihood, and it did.
But over months and years of staying on alert, that response stops matching the situation in front of you: you end up braced at the dinner table the same way you’re braced in the Monday meeting. Your body can’t tell the difference anymore between the room where you need to be on guard and the living room where you’re trying to watch a movie with your partner.
That's why the vacation didn’t fix it. That's why the promotion didn’t fix it. The stress isn’t coming from any single situation you can change or leave. Your body learned, over years of repetition, to stay guarded, and it’s still running that program because nobody ever showed you how to turn it off.
You’ve Tried to fix this…
The breathing exercises your coach taught you work for about twenty minutes, maybe through the end of lunch, and then the tightness comes right back. The meditation app helped you fall asleep for a while, but it didn't stop the 3am wakeups. You did yoga for six months and your body felt better on Saturday mornings, but by Monday at 10am everything was right back where it started.
If you've been to therapy before, you probably did exactly what you do in every other room: you explained the problem clearly, analyzed it from every angle, drew connections, and left each session with a thorough understanding of your own experience. Then Monday morning your director used that particular 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.
What Starts to Change Through Our Work Together
After 18 years of clinical practice, I’ve learned that the women who come to me aren’t short on self-awareness. They can describe exactly what’s happening and why. What they need is someone who works below the surface of that understanding, and that's what I do.
Instead of spending our sessions talking through what happened, I work directly with what your body is still holding, using approaches that are physical and creative, things that move you out of the analytical mode you've been operating in your whole career and into a place where the bracing and the guarding can 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 turn into another exercise in analysis. You explain the problem clearly, you connect the dots, and you leave understanding everything… without anything in your body changing. Most of my clients don’t even realize they’re doing it.
I help you get out of your head and into the place where the work needs to happen.
Here’s what it looks like in your life when things start to change:
You sit through a tense meeting and notice that your heartbeat stays steady, even when someone pushes back on your recommendation. You respond clearly, and afterward you drive home thinking about dinner instead of replaying every sentence you said. You eat with your family, and you're present for the conversation instead of sitting at the dinner table with your mind still in the conference room.
You’ve been going back and forth for months about whether to apply for the VP role or whether it’s time to leave the company entirely, and you haven’t been able to think clearly about either option because every time you sit down to evaluate it your chest tightens and the decision feels impossible. After a few months of working together, you notice you can think about both options without your body flooding with dread. You can weigh the trade-offs based on what you want instead of what you’re afraid of, and you make a decision you trust instead of one you talked yourself into at 2am.
You set a boundary with your boss about the weekend emails, and you sleep through the night afterward. Not because you’ve convinced yourself it’ll be fine, but because your body has stopped treating every difficult work conversation as a threat that requires hours of analysis. You wake up Monday morning, and you handle his response, whatever it is, from a clear head instead of a clenched stomach.
You stop over-preparing for the quarterly presentation because you trust yourself to handle the room. You spend the time you used to burn on the fifteenth rehearsal doing something else, maybe finishing the proposal that’s been sitting on your desk, maybe picking up your kids early, maybe doing nothing at all, and you don’t feel guilty about it.
You’re at dinner with your partner and you’re there. You tell him about your day and it comes out like a conversation instead of a debriefing or a flat “fine.” You laugh at something he says and realize you haven’t done that on a weeknight in a while. You stay at the table after dinner instead of disappearing upstairs to decompress alone, because the day isn’t living in your body anymore. There’s something left for the life you built outside that office.
The 3am wake ups that had become your normal start spacing out, first to a few times a week, then less. You fall asleep without rehearsing tomorrow’s meetings and when you do wake up early your chest isn’t tight and your mind isn’t already racing through a conversation that hasn’t happened yet. Your doctor notices the change at your next visit. The jaw pain eases because you’re not clenching through every interaction anymore, and the headaches that had become part of your weekly routine start to feel like something that used to happen instead of something that’s always happening.
I can’t promise that the problematic dynamics in your industry will disappear. But your body doesn’t have to carry every room you’ve ever walked into.
What You Can Expect
Sessions are all online. I work via secure telehealth so that 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 locked into this kind of guarding 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 don’t bill insurance directly, but I provide Superbills you can submit to your insurance 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.
I work in Oregon and Washington State. I work with women navigating Seattle’s tech corridor, the enterprise culture of Bellevue and the Eastside, and Portland’s Silicon Forest, all from the privacy of your own home.
Jeniffer Duncan, LPC, LMHC, LAT, ATR
I’ve been a therapist for 18 years, and I’m a Licensed Professional Counselor in Oregon, a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in Washington, and a Licensed and Registered Art Therapist.
I use art therapy and somatic therapy with my clients because you've spent your career being verbal and analytical, and those are the exact skills that keep you spinning in therapy too. You explain the problem clearly, you connect all the dots, and nothing in your body changes. Art therapy gives you a way in that doesn't require finding the perfect words. Somatic therapy works directly with the jaw clenching, the shallow breathing, and the tension you've been carrying so long you don't notice it anymore. Together they reach what years of talking about it couldn't.
-
This work is for women who’ve spent significant time as one of the only women in their department, their leadership team, or their industry, and who’ve reached a point where the cost is showing up in their health, their relationships, or their ability to make clear decisions about their own career.
You might be a director who used to present without thinking twice and now feels her heart rate spike the moment she sees "presentation" on the calendar. A senior engineer who spends more time editing her Slack messages than writing actual code. A project lead who turned down a role she wanted because more visibility meant more rooms full of senior men evaluating her, and her body already knew what that would cost. A woman who can't figure out whether to stay at her company or leave, and can't think clearly enough about it to make a decision she trusts.
-
Most of my clients work in technology, aerospace, software engineering, finance, academia, healthcare leadership, law, construction, architecture, biotech, or other STEM fields.
I also work with women in operations, logistics, manufacturing, law enforcement, and executive leadership roles across industries where women are still a minority at the decision-making level.
What these fields have in common is that the women in them have spent years navigating environments where being competent was never enough on its own, where they also had to manage how they were perceived, calibrate their tone, and absorb things their male colleagues never had to think about.
-
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 of everything that happened at work.
-
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. Some sessions will feel unfamiliar, especially if you're used to therapy that's built around conversation, and that unfamiliarity is usually a sign we're getting somewhere that talking alone wasn't reaching. 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 meeting that would have rattled them a month ago, or said something directly without rehearsing it first, or made a career 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. Over three to six months, the way you feel at the end of a workday starts to change. You have energy left over. Your body stops bracing for every interaction. You make decisions about your career, your boundaries, and your relationships from a place of clarity instead of self-protection. And the people in your life start noticing the difference even if you haven't told them what you're doing.
-
Sessions are online, so you can do them from your home office, your car, or wherever you have privacy and 50 minutes. I work with women across Oregon and Washington State. We start with weekly sessions, then taper to biweekly after about two to three months as the changes start holding on their own. Sessions are $250. I don't bill insurance directly, but I provide Superbills you can submit for potential out-of-network reimbursement.
frequently asked questions About WOrking with Me
You’ve been white-knuckling your way through 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.