Hello! My name is Tierney and I’m a therapist based in Portland, Oregon. I love to read, spend time in nature, dance, and make music. Here are a few things I believe in:

• Pursuing joy and happiness in everyday life, amidst stress, chaos, uncertainty, and the mundane.

• Healing through connection to ourselves, our relationships, our communities, and nature.

• Integrating Eastern perspectives on mindfulness and spirituality with Western views of the mind and brain.

• Trusting that everyone has the ability and wisdom needed to heal through immense hardship when supported to access their inherent resilience and affirm their self-worth.

The Paths to Enlightenment are as innumerable as those who seek it. This too is The Path. This too is it.

Buddhist Proverb

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My Story

I began my journey as a healer after struggling through my own mental health challenges as a teen and young adult, finally reaching out for help when things couldn’t have gotten much worse. The therapists I worked with affirmed, supported, and guided me through the difficult process of looking at all of my parts and beginning my journey of learning to accept myself and my shadow. In their own wonderful ways, each of these therapists helped me recognize the weight of sociocultural and intergenerational trauma passed down to me, and ushered me through healing a lifetime of perfectionism, self-criticism and self-rejection, codependency and relational insecurity, anxiety and depression, and the assortment of unhelpful coping methods I had collected along the way.

More than a decade later, I achieved my dream of becoming a therapist, partly in homage to the ones that walked beside me during my darkest times, wholly in honor of the lonely little girl, the insecure teenager, and the conflicted young woman within me who needed me to lay down my arms, look, listen, and learn to love. I became the adult I had always needed.

I began exploring ways to develop and share the lessons from my own experiences in therapy with others. I pursued an incredible adventure as a Wilderness Therapy Field Guide in the Nantahala National Forest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. There, on the traditional land of the Cherokee Nation, I discovered my deep love for nature, confirmed my calling as a healer, and understood through lived experience that we are inextricably linked to a network of systems that impacts our worldview, beliefs, identity, relations, and experiences.

Two years, one cross-country move, a sunset-worshipping sailboat, and a hard-earned transition into adulthood later, I used my therapeutic gifts to support adolescents and their families through the challenging transition home from in-patient treatment. Simultaneously, I received my Master’s Degree in Marriage, Couple, and Family Therapy at Lewis & Clark College.

I am a Marriage & Family Therapist Associate (R7822) registered with the Oregon Board and am working under experienced supervision toward full licensure. I am trained in EMDR Level 1 & 2 and am qualified to use EMDR techniques to process single event and complex traumas. I am an Eagala Certified Equine Therapist and use an experiential model to support growth and learning about yourself and others by engaging with horses while exploring thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, and patterns. I am trained in Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy Level 1 (PACT) and integrate attachment theory, developmental neuroscience, and arousal regulation to support couples to improve communication and interaction, get unstuck from unhelpful patterns, and find greater relational fulfillment.

I have a private therapy practice based in NE Portland, Oregon and offer office and telehealth visits to help adolescents and adults heal low self-esteem, self-criticism, trauma, grief, depression, and anxiety, and guide couples and families to get unstuck from unhelpful patterns of communication, develop healthy boundaries, and find greater relational fulfillment. I provide a trauma-informed, evidence-based, social justice oriented, and collaborative approach to therapy.

I offer Equine Assisted Psychotherapy (EAP) in Newberg, Oregon, using the Eagala Model framework to create a unique space for an emotionally safe, hands-on experience. With real-time feedback, clients are able to reach issues where traditional talk-based therapies fall short. EAP incorporates horses to effectively address client goals, helping with issues such as addiction, domestic abuse, behavioral disorders, eating disorders, depression, anxiety and trauma.

“It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself. If you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless and therefore trustworthy.”

Oriah Mountain Dreamer