At Fjord Counseling, we know that pain and suffering are not isolated and that healing doesn’t happen alone. Just like the health of a tree depends on the soil around it, we as people rely on the social ecosystem we live in — the systems, history, and culture that shape our lives.
We recognize and name that our community exists within a social ecosystem built on a legacy of colonialism, slavery, racism, patriarchy, transphobia, poverty, white supremacist culture, and other systems of harm that have had lasting impacts and become so embedded that they are sometimes hard to see. These forces have created what we call a superstructure — a network of rules, beliefs, and systems that affect how people are treated, who is safe, who gets access to care and opportunity, and who is left out. Racism, for example, is not just about hate groups or individuals being unkind, it is also about the ways racial inequity is hidden in our laws, education, housing, and healthcare systems. These more subtle and/or structural inequities require vigilance to recognize and respond to, especially in Oregon, where racism and exclusion can appear quieter, but remain deeply harmful.
We also name that harm comes from all forms of othering — when people are made to feel like they don’t belong or don’t matter because of their race, gender, sexuality, income, body, beliefs or ability. Othering causes trauma, and that trauma lives in the body, heart, and nervous system. It also limits access to the basic things people need to live healthy lives, like housing, clean water, steady income, education, transportation, and compassionate healthcare. These are known as the social determinants of health, and they play a major role in shaping personal well-being. At Fjord Counseling, we know that equality, treating everyone the same, is not enough to repair this harm. We instead focus on equity, making sure people get what they actually need to heal and we work to replace othering with belonging, creating spaces where people feel they truly fit, not just where they’re expected to blend in.
We root our work in health equity, not as a slogan, but as a responsibility. We do not hide behind neutrality and we reject the idea that therapy should be neutral, recognizing and acknowledging that neutrality in the face of injustice is complicity. Instead, we choose to be a practice that is actively engaged in the work of social justice. We are explicitly equity-focused, anti-racist, queer-affirming, transaffirming, and feminist — committed to undoing systems of oppression both in our internal culture and in the care we provide.
We also examine how even well-meaning clinical models can cause harm — by pathologizing people’s natural responses to oppression, by centering white and Western ways of knowing, or by ignoring the spiritual, political, and communal dimensions of suffering. We welcome and support LGBTQIA2S+ people, Black and Indigenous communities, people of color, disabled people, and anyone who has been pushed to the margins.
We draw from Liberation Psychology, a framework that lifts up the oppressed and shines light on the truth that mental health struggles are often natural responses to living in an unjust world. In white, Western, and capitalist systems, people are often told that anxiety, sadness, or anger means something is wrong with them. But Liberation Psychology reminds us: your pain is not a personal failure. These feelings are often wise, grounded responses to oppression, signs that something around you needs to change.
We also strive to make the core principles of non-dominant frameworks, such as Critical Race Theory and Critical Queer Theory, more accessible. Though often misunderstood or misrepresented, these frameworks are grounded in decades of Black and queer scholarship, thought, and lived experience. They offer powerful tools for understanding how harm is built into our systems and how change must be structural, not just individual.
We practice anti-racism, which means we do more than simply say we oppose racism. We take active steps to recognize, challenge, and undo the ways racism shows up in our systems and our field. We understand that racism affects our providers as well as our clients and impacts who gets licensed, who gets paid, and who gets criminalized. At Fjord, we work to disrupt these patterns — by hiring and supporting underrepresented clinicians, offering sliding scale services, holding internal dialogues on power and privilege, and making space for clients to name harm, including harm experienced in therapy, with agency and dignity.
Our practice is also committed to the ongoing work of decolonization. We acknowledge that we work on stolen Indigenous land, and we actively question the dominance of Western science as the only valid way of understanding healing. We honor and uplift the healing traditions, wisdom, and cosmologies of Indigenous, African, diasporic, and global majority cultures. We believe there are many valid ways of knowing — intuitive, ancestral, embodied, and spiritual — and we make space for all of them in our work.
We believe that people are fundamentally kind, caring, and compassionate. We believe that hatred is an abnormal condition and toxic to all of society, perhaps the most poisonous within the hearts of those who carry it. We believe that knowledge is power and that education, humility, self-reflection and honesty are the foundations of healing. We share this information to uplift and to inform, and we welcome questions and dialogue. We know that none of us is perfect and we hold these values as our north star and guiding compass towards the growth we hope to foster together with vulnerability and willingness.
To those who have been made to feel like outsiders in therapy — because of your race, gender, sexuality, body, neurotype, income, or history — we say: you belong here. Not in spite of who you are, but because of who you are. We are honored to walk with you, to listen deeply, and to co-create a path toward justice, restoration, and freedom.