Our Philosophy

 I’m Tahmineh Shadkhoo, a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor and the Owner of Cordillera Counseling Services. I approach therapy as a collaborative process grounded in authenticity, compassion, clinical expertise, humor, and cultural humility.

I believe meaningful change begins with understanding people in context—not simply identifying symptoms or trying to eliminate them. Together, we can explore how your experiences, relationships, beliefs, protective responses, and nervous system have shaped the ways you have learned to navigate the world, while creating space for new possibilities.

Therapy can be serious work, but it does not have to feel serious every minute. There is room for humor, curiosity, creativity, and moments of lightness alongside the harder parts. I want therapy to feel human—not clinical for the sake of being clinical.

My perspective as a therapist has also been shaped by lived experience. I understand from more than professional training what it can mean to live through profound change, loss, cultural transition, family complexity, and circumstances that require us to adapt long before we are ready. My own life has been shaped by more than one culture and by experiences of migration, rebuilding, and belonging.

Those experiences contribute to the depth, humility, and hope I bring to this work, but I never assume that my experience is the same as yours. Your story remains your own. I believe people can carry the effects of what they have lived through without being defined by them. Healing often involves understanding how we adapted, developing greater choice where survival once required automatic responses, and creating a life that feels increasingly like our own.

I have pursued extensive training in trauma, traumatic stress, attachment, and emotion regulation. I am a Certified EMDR Therapist, am certified in Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), and have completed Level I training in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy for the treatment of trauma. My additional training includes Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), Combined Parent-Child Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CPC-CBT), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and parts-oriented approaches informed by Internal Family Systems (IFS).

This breadth of training allows me to work integratively rather than requiring clients to fit a particular treatment model. We consider your history, needs, strengths, goals, preferences, and readiness as we determine what may be most helpful.

Culture, race, identity, family, community, and lived experience can all shape how we understand ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us. I approach these parts of your experience with cultural humility, recognizing that you are the expert on what they mean in your life. When larger social or cultural contexts are relevant to your concerns or healing, there is room for them in our work.

Much of my work focuses on trauma and its effects on how we understand ourselves, experience relationships, and respond to the world around us. I also work with anxiety, depression, grief and loss, attachment and relational concerns, and patterns that can develop when people have had to adapt to difficult or overwhelming experiences.

I approach these concerns with respect for both the ways you have learned to protect yourself and the capacities you already bring to the work. Therapy may include developing greater understanding, building resources, processing unresolved experiences, and creating more choice in how you respond to yourself, others, and the present.

I view therapy as a partnership. I bring clinical knowledge, perspective, and a range of therapeutic approaches; you bring your experience, goals, and sense of what feels helpful, tolerable, or not quite right. I am comfortable being direct, asking difficult questions, slowing down when we need to, and acknowledging when something simply is not landing.

We can change direction, revisit something, or decide that a particular approach is not useful. I also believe that misunderstanding and rupture can be part of therapy, and that working through those moments with honesty and care can be meaningful in their own right.

My goal is to create a relationship in which you can be understood without being reduced to a diagnosis, challenged without being pushed beyond your capacity, and supported in building greater clarity, flexibility, and choice.

Reach out today for a complimentary 15-minute consultation to determine whether we might be a good fit for one another.

Call 443-203-9838 or send us a message through our contact page.