I’m Tahmineh Shadkhoo, a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor and the Owner of Cordillera Counseling Services. I try to bring both clinical depth and realness into the room. My style is collaborative, compassionate, direct when it needs to be, and grounded in humor, curiosity, and cultural humility.
I believe meaningful change starts with understanding people in context, not just identifying symptoms. Together, we can look at how your experiences, relationships, beliefs, protective responses, and nervous system have shaped the ways you have learned to move through the world.
Therapy can be serious work, but it does not have to feel serious every minute. There is room for humor, creativity, and moments of lightness alongside the harder parts. I want therapy to feel human.
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 major change, loss, cultural transition, family complexity, and circumstances that require us to adapt before we are ready. My own life has also been shaped by more than one culture and by experiences of migration, rebuilding, and belonging.
Those experiences bring depth and humility to my work, but I do not assume that my story is the same as yours. Your experience is your own.
I believe people can carry the effects of what they have lived through without being defined by them. Healing often means understanding how we adapted, recognizing when old survival responses are still showing up, and finding more room for choice in the present.
I have pursued extensive training in trauma, traumatic stress, attachment, and emotion regulation. I am a Certified EMDR Therapist, 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).
That breadth of training gives me more than one way to think about what is happening and what may help. I do not require clients to fit a particular treatment model. We look at what you need, what feels useful, and what makes sense for the work we are doing together.
Culture, race, identity, family, community, and lived experience all shape how we understand ourselves and the world around us. I approach these parts of your experience with cultural humility. You are the expert on what they mean in your life, and my role is to stay curious, respectful, and open to understanding your perspective.
I view therapy as a partnership. I value honesty, collaboration, and flexibility. If something is not landing, I want us to be able to talk about it. We can slow down, change direction, revisit something, or decide that a particular approach is not useful.
I also believe that misunderstandings and ruptures can happen in therapy. When they do, working through them with care and honesty can become an important part of the work.
Therapy is not one-size-fits-all. Different people need different things, and what helps can change over time.
My work is integrative and trauma-informed. Sometimes therapy focuses more on thoughts, beliefs, patterns, and meaning. At other times, we may work more directly with emotions, relationships, the nervous system, the body, or experiences that still feel unresolved.
We figure out together what is actually useful for you.
Therapy can work through different pathways. Some approaches begin more with thought, language, understanding, and meaning-making. These are often described as top-down approaches.
Other approaches pay closer attention to the nervous system and body, including sensation, movement, emotion, activation, shutdown, and automatic protective responses. These are often described as bottom-up approaches.
Most therapy includes some of both. You may understand intellectually that you are safe while your body still reacts as though something is wrong. At other times, insight, new skills, or a change in behavior can make a real difference.
An integrative approach gives us more than one way into the work.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or EMDR, is a structured therapy approach that can help people work through experiences that still feel unresolved or easily triggered.
Sometimes something happened in the past, but parts of the experience still show up strongly in the present through emotions, beliefs, body sensations, or automatic reactions. EMDR can help those experiences become less activating and feel more clearly connected to the past.
We do not have to start with the hardest material. Preparation, resourcing, pacing, and making sure you can stay connected to the present are important parts of the process.
I am an EMDRIA Certified EMDR Therapist.
Trauma and chronic stress can show up in the body as much as in thoughts and memories. You might notice tension, numbness, restlessness, shutdown, changes in posture, or automatic reactions that seem to happen before you have time to think.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy brings attention to those patterns in a gentle, present-focused way. We may notice what your body is doing, get curious about what it has learned to expect, and experiment with new experiences of movement, boundaries, regulation, and choice.
The goal is not to force anything or make you relive the past. It is to include the body as part of the conversation.
I have completed Level I training in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy for the treatment of trauma.
Most of us have different internal reactions that can show up in different situations. A part of you may want closeness while another wants distance. One part may push you to stay productive and in control, while another feels scared, angry, shut down, or exhausted. You may even find yourself thinking, “Part of me knows this is okay, but another part of me is still bracing for something to go wrong.”
Parts-oriented therapy gives us a way to understand these different responses without treating them as signs that something is wrong with you. They are often adaptations that developed to help you cope, protect yourself, stay connected, or get through difficult experiences.
My approach draws from Internal Family Systems (IFS), Janina Fisher’s Trauma-Informed Stabilization Treatment (TIST), and attachment and body-based perspectives. We may notice when a particular part is strongly influencing how you feel or respond, understand what it is trying to protect, and help you relate to it with more awareness and choice.
The goal is not to get rid of protective parts. Most developed for a reason. Over time, the work can help those responses become less rigid so they do not have to work quite so hard.
Therapy often includes helping you understand what is happening in your nervous system and building the capacity to stay present with difficult experiences without becoming overwhelmed.
We may use psychoeducation and practical tools related to the window of tolerance, activation and shutdown, grounding, orienting, dual attention, and other ways of supporting regulation and present-moment awareness. Understanding what your nervous system is doing can sometimes make reactions that once felt confusing or frustrating begin to make a lot more sense.
These skills are not simply “coping techniques.” They can help create enough stability and flexibility for deeper therapeutic work to feel more manageable, while giving you more ways to respond when old patterns or strong emotions show up.
The goal is to help you notice what is happening, stay connected to the present, and have more choice in what you do next.
Our early relationships can shape what we learn about safety, closeness, vulnerability, conflict, boundaries, and whether other people are likely to be there when we need them.
Those patterns can continue to show up later in life, even when we consciously want something different. In therapy, we may look at what happens when you need support, fear disappointing someone, anticipate rejection, pull away, over-accommodate, struggle to trust, or become highly activated when connection feels uncertain.
Attachment-informed therapy is not about putting you into a category or reducing you to an attachment style. It is about understanding how relational patterns developed and what they may still be trying to accomplish.
The therapeutic relationship can also become part of the work. Moments of trust, misunderstanding, boundaries, honesty, rupture, and repair can help us notice old expectations and create new experiences in real time.
At times, therapy may also involve looking at thoughts, beliefs, assumptions, behaviors, and patterns that contribute to distress or keep you feeling stuck.
I draw from cognitive and behavioral approaches when they are useful, while recognizing that insight or changing a thought is not always enough, especially when emotional, relational, or nervous-system responses have been shaped by difficult or traumatic experiences.
I also use selected DBT-informed skills related to mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance, and interpersonal effectiveness. These can be helpful for building stability, increasing flexibility, and staying present when emotions run high.
I do not provide comprehensive DBT. Instead, I integrate specific DBT skills when they support the larger goals of therapy.
You do not need to know which therapy approach you need before you begin.
Part of the work is figuring that out together. We can try something, talk about how it is landing, slow down, change direction, build more resources, or decide that a particular approach is not useful for you.
Therapy should feel collaborative and flexible. The approach should support the work, not become something you have to fit yourself into.