Online in BellEvue, Washington & Throughout the Eastside
Therapy for Women in Tech, Engineering, and Male-Dominated Fields in Bellevue
Online therapy for women in Bellevue’s tech , Engineering, & corporate Industries
If you work in tech or another male-dominated field on the Eastside, you already know what it costs to hold your position in rooms that weren't designed with you in mind.
You've spent a month building the technical analysis for a project review, walked the team through every detail, answered every question, and then watched your director turn to the man next to you and ask, "What's your take on the risk profile here?" as if you'd just been presenting someone else's work for feedback. You didn't say anything. You smiled and waited for him to essentially agree with everything you'd just said, and the meeting moved on.
You've stayed late at the Bellevue office perfecting a presentation that your male counterpart would have shipped at 80% and still gotten praised for, because you learned a long time ago that "good enough" has never been good enough for you in these rooms. You've gotten a performance review that praised your "collaborative leadership" while the man at your level got recognized for his "bold technical vision," and you know the difference between those two sets of words isn't about what you delivered. It's about what they're comfortable seeing you as.
None of those moments left a mark you could point to or a story you could tell that would make someone outside your company understand why you drove home with your jaw clenched. But your body didn't need the story to make sense of it. Your body kept a running tab, and somewhere along the way that tab started showing up as the 3am wakeups where your brain is already running through tomorrow's leadership sync, the Sunday evenings that carry a heaviness now, the way you get home to your place in Kirkland or Issaquah and don't have anything left for the loved ones there.
You've probably explained it away as burnout, or the culture at your company, or just the price of building a career at one of the Eastside tech or corporate companies. But it doesn't go away when you take a vacation, and it didn't resolve when you got the promotion.
WHY WOMEN IN Bellevue and on the Eastside CARRY This DIFFERENTLY
The Eastside has grown into one of the most concentrated tech corridors in the country. Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Amazon's expanding Bellevue workforce, T-Mobile in Factoria, Expedia and Smartsheet in Bellevue, and a growing ecosystem of mid-size companies and startups across the Spring District, Kirkland, and Bothell. The new Link light rail connecting Bellevue to Redmond has only accelerated the density of talent and competition on this side of the lake.
For women building careers here, the pressure is specific. The Eastside tech culture tends to run on technical credibility and tenure, and if you're a woman who's earned your way into a senior role at a company where the engineering org is still overwhelmingly male, you know exactly what it took to get there. You also know what it takes to stay, the constant calibration, the over-preparation, the self-monitoring, the exhausting math of figuring out how much of yourself to show and how much to put away so the room takes you seriously.
And that stress doesn't stay on campus. It follows you onto 405 or across the 520 bridge, into your house in Sammamish or Woodinville, into the weekend that's supposed to be yours. It shows up as the tightness in your shoulders that hasn't loosened since your last reorg, the inability to stop replaying a meeting that ended hours ago, the way you pour a glass of wine before you've even changed out of your work clothes. And because the Eastside runs on achievement and competence, it's easy to convince yourself this is just what high performance feels like, that everyone at your level carries this, that you just need to be tougher.
The thing you already know is that the men at your level aren't carrying this the same way. They're not spending their Sundays pre-writing Monday's emails or running worst-case scenarios about a conversation they haven't had yet. They walk into the same rooms, sit through the same reviews, present to the same leadership team, and their bodies aren't bracing the whole time. The job is hard for everyone, but the invisible tax of being a woman in that job, the self-monitoring, the calibrating, the constant proof-of-competence, that's yours alone, and after enough years it stops being something you can push through.
You’ve Tried to fix this…
You've tried the coaching frameworks and the breathing techniques, and they help for about twenty minutes before the tightness comes back. You've tried yoga and meditation, and your body feels better on the weekend but resets to full tension by Monday's first meeting. If you've done therapy, you probably showed up the same way you show up everywhere, well-prepared, articulate, and in control, and you left each session with a clear understanding of the problem and a body that hadn't changed at all.
Everything you've tried so far was aimed at the part of you that thinks and analyzes, and that part was never where the problem was living.
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 leadership review on the Redmond campus and notice that your heartbeat stays steady, even when your director pushes back on the timeline you proposed. You respond clearly, and afterward you get on 405 heading home and you're thinking about your evening instead of replaying every sentence you said. You walk in the door in Kirkland or Issaquah, and you're present for your family 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 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 manager 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 conversation as a threat that requires hours of post-game 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 business review 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 spec that's been sitting on your desk, maybe leaving the Bellevue office early enough to pick up your kids, maybe taking the Link light rail home and reading something that isn't work, and you don't feel guilty about it.
You're at dinner with your partner at a restaurant in downtown Bellevue 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 instead of checking your phone under the table, because the day isn't living in your body anymore. There's something left for the life you built outside that campus.
I can't promise that the dynamics on the Eastside will disappear. But your body doesn't have to carry every room you've ever walked into.
What You Can Expect
Sessions are online. You don't have to add another commute to your day or try to squeeze an appointment between meetings on campus. You can do a session from your home office in Bellevue, Redmond, Kirkland, Issaquah, Sammamish, Woodinville, Bothell, or anywhere on the Eastside, 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 Washington: LMHC (MHC.LH.61685622 — verify with Washington 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 principal engineer in Redmond 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 program manager in Bellevue who spends more time editing her emails than doing the work those emails are about. A director in Kirkland who turned down a VP 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.