Online in Portland, Oregon
Therapy for Women in Male-Dominated Fields in Portland, Oregon
Online therapy for women in Portland’s STEM, Law, Academia, & corporate Industries
If you work in a male-dominated field in Portland, you 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 spent an extra two hours on a Friday perfecting a deliverable 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,” and the gap between those two phrases is one you’ve read often enough to recognize without anyone having to translate it.
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 kept a running tab, and that tab started showing up as the 3am wakeups where your brain is already running through tomorrow’s design review, the Sunday heaviness, and the way you get home to your place in Irvington or Southeast Portland or 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 didn’t go away when you took a vacation, and it didn’t resolve when you got the promotion.
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.
All of those tools were aimed at the analytical, problem-solving part of you, and that part has rarely been where the difficulty was.
What Starts to Change Through Our Work Together
The women I work with 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, approaches that move you out of the analytical mode you’ve been operating in your whole career and into the 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 your concern in the planning meeting and your voice stays steady. You make your point, the room hears it, and afterward you drive home 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 condo in Southeast Portland, and you’re present for your partner instead of sitting on the couch with your mind still at work.
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 made out of anxiety.
You sit through a design review where a senior engineer pushes back on your architectural choice, and your body stays calm. You answer his question, you hold your position on the parts you’ve thought through, you adjust on the part you hadn’t considered, and the meeting moves on.
You say no to the weekend work request, and you sleep through the night afterward. 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 sit on your couch and do nothing without feeling like you should be preparing for Monday, and you don’t feel any of the old guilt for resting.
The dynamics in your industry aren’t going to change because of this work, but what can change is what your body does with those dynamics.
What You Can Expect
Sessions are online. 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 Oregon, and I work with women in male-dominated fields across the Portland metro, including Portland, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Tigard, Tualatin, Lake Oswego, West Linn, Milwaukie, Gresham, Oregon City, Wilsonville, Sherwood, Forest Grove, Happy Valley, Clackamas, Aloha, Cornelius, Newberg, Sandy, and Hood River.
Jeniffer Duncan, LPC, LMHC, LAT, ATR
I work specifically with Portland women in fields where being a woman means being outnumbered.
I’ve been a therapist for 18 years. I’m a Licensed Professional Counselor in Oregon, a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in Washington, and a Licensed and Registered Art Therapist. The ATR designation means that creative and expressive approaches are 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.
Licensed in Oregon: LPC (#C3022 — verify with Oregon state board)
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.
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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.