About
Background & Therapeutic Approach
Treatment Areas
| • Anxiety • Stress • Depression • Grief and loss • Life transitions • Self-esteem |
• Trauma • PTSD • Relationships • Existential Issues • Boundaries • Spirituality |
My Approach
| ↳ Parts Work ↳ Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) ↳ Body-Based Therapies ↳ Community Grief Tending ↳ Anti-Oppression Framework ↳ Honoring Life Transitions |
Siena Tenisci, MA, LMHCA (she/her)
Hello, and welcome! I’m Siena, and I’ve been working therapeutically with adults for a decade in individual counseling, group therapy, and community-based settings.
I recognize that it can take courage to reach out for support – especially if you are new to counseling or support groups. I have enormous compassion for people going through life’s challenges and transitions and strive to create an environment that feels safe, comfortable, and authentic. I value your inherent resiliency and expertise on your own life, and I’m here to provide tools and a supportive environment as gentle guide alongside your journey.
I am trained in several therapeutic modalities and enjoy working collaboratively with clients to integrate these into a holistic, individualized approach. For individual counseling, I draw largely from Internal Family Systems (ISF) informed parts work, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), body-based therapies. You are welcome to explore these approaches below and let me know if there is anything particular you are drawn to. I can also offer options and suggestions based on your goals, and we can continue to check in on what approach feels most supportive.
In addition to working collaboratively, I strive to create an inclusive environment where all aspects of your identity are honored and validated. Alongside my work as a therapist, I specialize in community grief tending, anti-oppression work, and rites of passage work. These areas are all grounded in efforts to challenge oppressive narratives, reclaim lost communal healing arts, and work towards personal and collective liberation. You can learn more about these frameworks and how they inform my therapy practice below.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions or schedule a free consultation to explore if working together might be a fit. I look forward to connecting with you.
Schedule an appointment or free consult
Ready to schedule an appointment? Please reach out to Siena Tenisci at sienatenisci@gmail.com or call 206-657-6335 to schedule. I also gladly offer free 30-minute consultations to address any questions or explore if we might be a good fit for working together.
Therapy styles we can draw from:
Parts Work
An ISF-informed therapy that helps individuals integrate and heal the various “parts” within themselves – inner child parts, protective parts, or even seemingly conflicting parts – while accessing their core, authentic self.
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What we might do in therapy:
- Cultivate self-compassion
- Corrective inner-parenting
- Unburdening parts
- Parts dialogue
- Empowering your authentic voice
- Healing attachment wounds
How this might support your goals:
- Increasing self-compassion
- Healing childhood wounds and shame
- Improving relationships
- Increasing resilience
- Restoring internal balance for a more authentic, fulfilling, and empowered life
Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT)
An evidence-based therapy for building skills that address unhelpful patterns of thinking and behavior through a range of structured, collaborative therapeutic techniques.
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What we might do in therapy:
- Thought reframing
- Behavioral activation
- Exposure therapy
- Accountability practices
- Skill building supported by weekly journaling or home practices
How this might support your goals:
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Improving self-esteem
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Addressing negative or unhelpful thought patterns
- Developing new coping skills
- Build healthy habits and routines
- Increasing accountability
- Asserting healthy boundaries
- Reducing anxiety, depression, or chronic pain
Body-Based Therapies
Mindfulness & bioenergetic therapies promote the connection between the mind and body through a range of somatic techniques that facilitate emotional release and body awareness.
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What we might do in therapy:
- Movement
- Breath work
- Grounding techniques
- Expressive techniques
- Body-oriented interventions
How this might support your goals:
- Enhancing self-awareness
- Releasing emotional blocks
- Improving emotional regulation
- Increasing vitality
- Enhancing relationships
- Developing a greater sense of embodiment and authenticity.
Frameworks to support our work:
Grief Tending Practice
I am founder of Northwest Grief Tending, an organization that offers community grief rituals to honor the many different forms of loss – big and small. This may include personal loss, change and transitions, collective sorrows (environmental, political, racial, cultural), loss of village and belonging, ancestral grief, and more. As part of my therapeutic approach, I offer attunement to any underlying grief, even if it’s not our primary focus. Through a grief tending practice, individuals can experience how expressions of grief strengthen collective health and reconnect us to each other and what truly matters.
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Living in a grief illiterate and death phobic culture leaves so many of us feeling disconnected and confused because we are not taught how to even recognize the grief we may be carrying. Without being able to name our grief when we experience losses big and small, it often goes untended and we can end up feeling like something is wrong with us – which couldn’t be further from the truth.
The Five Gates of Grief from Francis Weller is a great resource for beginning to name the forms of grief that too often do not get acknowledged:
- Everything we love we will lose,
- the places that have not known love,
- the sorrows of the world,
- the things we cannot even name that we ache for, and
- intergenerational or ancestral grief.
As part of my therapeutic style, I offer attunement to any grief that may be present – even if it’s not the focus of our work together. To be healed, grief needs to be acknowledged and witnessed. I hold space for this in individual session and also offer grief support circles and in-person retreats through Northwest Grief Tending.
Anti-Oppression Framework
I am committed to a lifelong practice of cultural sensitivity and to dismantling systemic and internalized oppression. I strive to create an environment where all aspects of your identity are honored and validated. I understand that systemic and internalized oppression can greatly impact mental health and well-being. In therapy, we can hold this understanding in the background of our work together or examine it more closely. Many discover that by acknowledging and addressing internalized oppression, they can begin to reclaim their identities, challenge oppressive narratives, and work towards personal and collective liberation.
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We are born into a world with the mechanics of oppression already in place. Bias, stereotyping, prejudice, habits, tradition and a history of oppression already exist. We inherit them without our permission – socialized by people we love and trust and bombarded by our institutions and culture with messages about who should have power and who should not. Over time, these messages become internalization and lead to individuals unknowingly perpetuating oppression, both towards themselves and others. This leads to bad outcomes for those with and without power.
Internalized oppression refers to the process by which individuals from marginalized groups internalize and believe negative stereotypes, biases, and prejudices about themselves, leading to a diminished sense of self-worth and self-discrimination. It is not the fault of the individuals experiencing it but rather a consequence of oppressive systems and societal structures.
Breaking the cycle of socialization and internalized oppression requires critical consciousness, education, and efforts to challenge and unlearn oppressive beliefs and behaviors. Recognizing and confronting internalized oppression is a crucial step toward personal liberation, empowerment, and dismantling systemic oppression.
I am trained in an Anti-Oppression Framework that helps us examine aspects of our identities in the context of privilege and power such as: age, disability, race & ethnicity, indigenous heritage, national origin, religion & spirituality, social class, body size, sexual orientation, gender, relationship status, and trauma history. Through this lens, we can better understand and address the ways our own internalized oppression infringes upon our birthrights of belonging, power, trusting our thinking and feeling, hope, love, and safety. We can begin to reclaim our identities, challenge oppressive narratives, and work towards personal and collective liberation.
Honoring Life Transitions
Across time and cultures, the practice of holding rituals to mark significant life events and transitions has been foundational to maintaining individual and communal wellbeing. Only in recent years has this cultural inheritance become increasingly discarded and commodified. We are left with an unconscious longing for something we may not even realize we’ve lost: guidance, elder wisdom, and frameworks for navigating these profound transformations that shape our lives. I believe that acknowledging and honoring moments of birth, growth, union, and loss are vital to our wellbeing. Reclaiming the sacredness of these lost arts can enrich our lives with a sense of meaning, community, and connection to the life’s cycles.
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Coming soon…
“I always leave feeling nourished and held. It is a safe place to share and be heard, to feel less alone.”
– Client
Quick Links
Learn more about my other offerings and approach to therapy.