About

At Two Rivers Counseling, I offer professional therapeutic services for four different populations:

1) Couples in grief and loss.
2) Families experiencing difficulties.
3) Individuals suffering from traumatic experiences.
4) Men of all ages who are making tough life decisions.

As we sit in the nurturing environment of the therapy room or walk together along the tree-lined trails of Forest Park, we collaborate to identify the change you hope to make in your life. My approach to therapeutic change emphasizes the interconnections and secure attachments between people, the stories that we create for ourselves, and the mending of dysfunctional thought patterns.

I listen deeply and carefully to individuals, couples, and family as they tell their stories. I work with the connections between people, how change or lack of change causes something to happen somewhere else in the system (systems theory). I look for the secure and insecure attachments that exist between each person and their family members, partners, friends, and co-workers.

I help people who have experienced trauma. We work together to abandon old harmful brain connections that are painful. We reprocess the old, and forge new, functional, and life-affirming brain pathways.

Where there are old, tired, and dysfunctional stories that hold people back, I help them to build new stories and to repair broken attachments.

With a cup of hot tea or a glass of cold water at our side, we can sit in a chair, or on the floor, or stand up to stretch and breathe in the nurturing surround of the therapy room.  Sharing…listening…learning from the past and visioning  what the future can be.

We can grab a coat and head out the door for the unique therapeutic connection that takes place on a walk and talk session in Forest Park. It is the same bi-lateral right/left brain stimulation that for generations has helped people to think more clearly and move forward with their lives.  Aborigines on walkabouts…the walking meditation of Christian and Buddhist monks…swaying with babies.


In my last lifetime:

I was a mountaineering guide for 25 years. I took novices on 5-week expeditions into the mountains and deserts of North America, Africa, and India.

My clients came to learn how to rock climb, ski, and travel on glaciers. What they also learned was how to form community and create family. I helped them to process inter- and intrapersonal difficulties, communicate more effectively, take and bestow leadership roles, and draw boundaries. At one point in my career, I trained NASA space shuttle crews in how to get along with one another on extended space expeditions.

At the end of five weeks, clients thanked me for teaching them how to climb or ski, and they whole-heartedly thanked me for helping them to learn about themselves and how to grow as human beings.

“Have you ever thought about being a therapist?” they would ask me.


In this lifetime:

Jeffrey has a Master’s Degree in Marriage, Couples, and Family Therapy from Lewis and Clark College. He has intensive training and supervision in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), and EFCT (Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy), which he utilizes to help people who have experienced traumatic events, and broken couple’s attachments.

His most recent work has been as an intensive community-based Family Therapist for a social service agency in Portland, Oregon. During that time, he worked with families, couples, and children with multi-generational legacies of poverty, broken attachments, and abuse.

Jeffrey weaves threads of attachment theory, emotionally-focused therapy, narrative therapy, and trauma reprocessing into his practice. His practical life experience in loss, parenting, husbanding, blended families, climbing, running, biking, yoga, meditation, and living abroad all combine to inform his practice as a therapist with Two Rivers Counseling.