Online in Portland, Oregon
Therapy for Women in Tech, Engineering, and Male-Dominated Fields in Portland
Online therapy for women in Portland’s tech , Engineering, & corporate Industries
If you work in tech, engineering, or another male-dominated field in Portland, you already know what it costs to hold your position in rooms that weren't designed with you in mind.
You raised a concern in a planning meeting about the timeline, backed it with data, laid it out clearly, and the room got quiet in that particular way it gets quiet when a woman says something the group wasn't ready to hear. The conversation moved on. Two weeks later, when the timeline slipped exactly the way you predicted, your manager mentioned it in the retro as something "the team" should have caught earlier. You sat there and said nothing, because you've learned what happens when you say "I flagged this."
You've spent an extra two hours on a Friday perfecting a deliverable that your male counterpart would have sent at 80%, because somewhere along the way you learned that being good enough was never going to be good enough for you in these rooms. Your annual review praised your "team-oriented approach" while the man at your level got recognized for his "technical leadership and vision." Nobody needed to explain the difference to you.
You've been absorbing moments like these for years, and individually none of them would make a story anyone outside your industry would understand. But your body didn't need them to be a story. Your body kept a running tab, and that tab started showing up as the 3am wake-ups where your brain is already running through tomorrow's design review, the Sunday heaviness that settles in before dinner, the way you get home to your place in Irvington or Southeast Portland or out in Beaverton and don't have anything left for your family.
You've probably explained it away as burnout, or the culture at your company, or just how it is when you work in the “Silicon Forest.” But it doesn't go away when you take a vacation, and it didn't resolve when you got the promotion.
WHY Portland WOMEN IN Male-Dominated Fields CARRY This DIFFERENTLY
Portland's tech and engineering sector is bigger than most people outside Oregon realize. Intel, Nike, and Adidas both have major operations in the metro area. Amazon, Salesforce, and Daimler Trucks North America have significant Portland presences, and the Silicon Forest stretches from downtown Portland through Beaverton and out to Hillsboro with hundreds of smaller tech firms, startups, and engineering companies in between.
For women building careers in Portland’s male-dominated industries, the pressure has its own flavor. The Pacific Northwest culture can make it harder to name what's happening because everything is wrapped in a veneer of progressivism and “Portland nice.” The rooms are still overwhelmingly male at the senior level, but the bias shows up in subtler ways, the ideas that get attributed to someone else, the feedback that grades you on likability while grading him on strategy, the slow realization that your over-preparation isn’t a personal quirk but a coping skill you developed because the margin for error was never the same for you.
That stress doesn't stay at the office. It follows you onto 26 heading east, down the Sunset Highway toward Beaverton, into your house in Lake Oswego or Tigard or the Alberta neighborhood. It shows up as the tightness in your shoulders that hasn't loosened since your last reorg, the inability to stop replaying a conversation that ended hours ago, the way you pour a glass of wine before you've changed out of your work clothes. And because Portland prides itself on work-life balance and livability, it's easy to feel like something must be wrong with you for struggling when everyone around you seems to have it figured out.
And the part that makes Portland tricky is that nobody around you seems to be struggling the way you are. The men on your engineering team go home and seem fine. They're not replaying the all-hands in their head at 10pm or spending their weekends pre-reading documents for Monday. Portland tells itself it's different from other tech cities, more balanced, more progressive, more humane, and that narrative makes it harder to admit that what's happening to your body isn't about your ability to handle pressure. It's about what the pressure has been asking of you specifically, as a woman, for years.
You’ve Tried to fix this…
You've tried the things that are supposed to help. The meditation app, the breathing exercises from your executive coach, the yoga studio in the Buckman neighborhood. They take the edge off for a few hours, maybe a day, and then Monday morning arrives and everything is right back where it started.
If you've done therapy before, you probably walked in, explained the situation clearly, connected it to the right things, and left each session feeling like you understood the problem thoroughly without anything in your body shifting.
That's because understanding and changing are two different processes, and everything you've tried so far has been aimed at the understanding part.
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 raise the concern in the planning meeting and your voice stays steady. You make your point, the room hears it, and afterward you drive down the Sunset Highway thinking about your evening instead of replaying what you said and whether you should have phrased it differently. You get home to Lake Oswego or Tigard or your apartment in Southeast Portland, and you're present for whoever is there instead of sitting on the couch with your mind still at the Hillsboro campus.
You've been debating for months whether to stay at your company or make a move, maybe to one of the smaller Portland firms, maybe to something entirely different, and you haven't been able to think clearly about any of it because every time you sit down to evaluate your options your chest tightens and the decision feels impossible. After a few months of working together, you notice you can think about what you want without your body flooding with dread. You weigh the trade-offs based on where you want your career to go instead of what you're afraid of leaving behind, and you make a decision you trust instead of one you talked yourself into at 2am.
You say no to the weekend work request, and you sleep through the night afterward. Not because you've convinced yourself your manager won't care, but because your body has stopped treating every difficult conversation as a threat that requires hours of post-game analysis. You wake up Monday morning and you handle whatever response comes from a clear head instead of a clenched stomach.
You stop spending your Friday evenings perfecting the deliverable that could have gone out at 4pm because you trust the work is good enough without the third pass. You get that evening back, maybe you walk through the Alberta neighborhood, maybe you meet someone for dinner on Hawthorne, maybe you just sit on your couch and do nothing without feeling like you should be preparing for Monday, and the guilt that used to come with stopping doesn't show up.
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 to decompress alone, because the day isn't living in your body anymore. There's something left for the life you built in Portland, the one you moved here for.
I can't promise that the 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 online. Whether you’re in downtown Portland, out in Hillsboro, or anywhere else in Oregon, you don't have to add another commute to your day. You can do a session from your home office, your car, or wherever you have 55 minutes and some privacy.
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’m licensed in Washington State and Oregon, and I work with women across both states. Learn more about how I work with women in male-dominated fields and what changes you can expect as things start to shift.
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 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 experience the ongoing stress of working in male-dominated fields.
I work specifically with Seattle women in fields where being a woman means being outnumbered. I chose this focus because I kept seeing the same thing: brilliant, accomplished women who are able to explain exactly what was wrong, and yet completely unable to make it stop. The understanding was never what was missing. What was missing was someone who could work with them at the level where the tension, the guarding, and the bracing were still running.
Licensed in Oregon: LPC (#C3022 — verify with Oregon state board)
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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 are starting to notice that the experience has left marks that don't go away with a long weekend or a job change.
You might be a senior engineer at one of the Hillsboro campuses who used to present without thinking twice and now feels her heart rate spike the moment she sees a large meeting on her calendar. A product designer at a downtown Portland agency who spends more time editing her Slack messages than doing the creative work those messages are about. A project lead at one of the sportswear companies in Beaverton who turned down a director role 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.
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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 of everything that happened at work.
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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. 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.
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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.