You were never the problem. The systems that taught you to doubt yourself were.
Individual and relationship therapy for queer, trans, nonbinary, Two-Spirit, intersex, asexual, and questioning adults in Portland and across Oregon. Therapy that treats your identity as a lineage and a source of knowledge, not a symptom to be managed.
Most of what hurts was handed to you. None of it started with you.
- You have sat across from a therapist who treated your gender, your relationship, or your culture as the thing to be fixed, and left feeling more alone than when you arrived.
- You hold more than one identity at once, queer and brown, trans and immigrant, gay and devout, and you are tired of spaces that ask you to pick one at the door.
- The shame you carry has a specific accent. It sounds like a church, a family table, a school hallway, a border, or a clinic, and it still speaks in a language you did not choose.
- You love your people and your people have not always known how to love you back. You want to keep the culture without keeping the wound.
- You are told to "just be yourself," but the self you were taught to perform was built for someone else's comfort, and you are not sure yet who is underneath.
- Something happened to you, or to your family before you, and it lives in your body in ways that insight alone has not reached.
Colonization did not only take land. It installed a single story about what a body, a gender, a family, and a love are allowed to be, and it called every other story a disorder. The anxiety, hypervigilance, and self-doubt you feel are the reasonable responses of a whole person to a world that was organized against your wholeness. We start there, so we can spend our time on what you actually want to build.
What you carry, and where it came from.
Coming out, coming home
Deciding who gets to know what, on your terms and your timeline. For many of us this means coming out across languages, generations, and cultures that each hold the news differently. There is no single right script.
Minority stress and the cost of vigilance
Constant scanning, code switching, and managing other people's comfort are survival skills, not flaws. We honor what they protected and learn where your nervous system can finally set them down.
Family and inherited messages
Rejection, conditional love, and religious teaching imported alongside the idea that your existence is a sin. We separate the ancestors and traditions worth keeping from the colonial rules that got stapled to them.
Gender exploration and affirmation
The strict two-gender rule most of us were raised inside is a fairly recent invention, enforced through colonization, and many cultures held and still hold more room than that. You do not need to prove your gender is real or ancient to deserve care for it.
Shame and the internalized colonizer
The inner voice that says too much, not enough, not really, not normal. We trace where it was installed, what it has been trying to protect, and how to take back authorship of your own worth.
Trauma held in the body and the bloodline
Violence, medical harm, sexual trauma, the slow trauma of hiding, and the trauma your family carried across borders and generations. Body based work for when the story alone has not been enough.
Relationships and intimacy
Communication, conflict, desire, trust after rupture. For couples and for relationships with more than two people in them, in whatever form your culture or your chosen family recognizes.
Life that has nothing to do with being queer
Career, grief, burnout, migration, becoming a parent. You can come in for ordinary reasons and still have a therapist who understands this part of you without a tutorial.
Belonging, community, and chosen family
Loneliness inside a crowded life, feeling like the odd one out even in queer spaces that center whiteness, and building the kind of kinship that many of our cultures practiced long before the nuclear family became the rule.
Relational, parts aware, in the body, and accountable.
A decolonized lens does not mean rejecting every tool from the Western clinical tradition. It means refusing to let those tools decide what counts as healthy, holding them accountable to your culture and your knowledge, and remembering that healing has always happened in relationship and in community, long before it happened in offices.
You are the authority on your own life. I bring training, pattern recognition, and a willingness to be corrected.
Relational Life Therapy (RLT)
I work predominantly from RLT. It is direct, warm, and refuses the myth that a therapist should be neutral about harm. We look at the stance you take under stress, where you learned it, and how to stand up for yourself with firmness and care. For queer clients of color this often means unlearning survival strategies that kept you safe in hostile systems and now cost you closeness with the people you chose.
Certification track in progress, Relational Life InstituteInternal Family Systems (IFS)
Parts work runs through everything I do. Many clients know the experience of one part that is proud and out and another that still flinches, or one part that speaks the mother tongue and another that learned to pass. IFS lets us meet all of them with curiosity instead of making any one of them wrong. Many Indigenous and ancestral traditions understood the self as plural long before psychology did.
Level 1 Certified, IFS InstituteSchema Therapy
Schema Therapy maps the deep patterns formed when core needs for safety, acceptance, and belonging went unmet. Growing up queer under colonial, religious, and racial hierarchies tends to install specific ones: defectiveness, isolation, subjugation, the sense that you must earn the right to exist. We name them, understand how they are triggered, and grow an adult voice that can meet those needs now.
Consensual Non-Monogamy (Martha Kauppi model)
Open, polyamorous, and otherwise non-monogamous relationships have their own dynamics, and treating them as a problem to be solved is its own kind of harm. Drawing on Martha Kauppi's model, we work on agreements, jealousy, differentiation, and repair in ways that fit the relationship you actually have, whether it has two people in it or more.
Consensual Non-Monogamy Level 1: Clinical Skills and Interventions, Certified, Institute for Relational IntimacyAcceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
ACT helps you unhook from the thoughts and rules that were installed in you, including the ones about who you are allowed to be, and take action toward what you actually value. Not every thought that sounds like truth is yours. We practice noticing the difference and choosing your next move from your own values rather than inherited ones.
Somatic work
The body remembers what the mind was told to forget, including what was passed down through family and history. Somatic attention brings the nervous system into the room: tracking sensation, breath, and posture so you can learn what safety and settledness feel like in your own body, not just as an idea.
Brainspotting
For trauma and chronic activation that talking has not reached, Brainspotting works below the level of story. By locating where your gaze holds a charge, we give the deeper brain a way to process and release what it has been carrying, so you are not just managing symptoms week to week.
Phase 1 and Phase 2 CertifiedAll relationships and all identities have a seat here.
Monogamous couples, open relationships, polyamorous constellations, long term partners who never put a name on it, and partnerships that bridge languages, faiths, or countries. I work with the relationship you actually have, and I will not spend your session asking you to defend its shape or translate your family.
Queer and trans relationships carry particular loads: families that will not come to the wedding, mismatched outness, partners at different points in transition, the pull between a home culture and a chosen one, and the pressure to look like you have it together because people are watching. We make room for all of it.
Relationship therapy often focuses on
- Breaking the fight, flight, or freeze cycle you both know by heart
- Repairing after betrayal, including agreements broken in non-monogamous relationships
- Desire discrepancy and intimacy that has gone quiet
- Renegotiating agreements when a relationship opens, closes, or changes shape
- Navigating cultural, racial, or religious differences inside the relationship
- Supporting a partner through transition without losing yourself in the process
- Deciding together whether and how to stay
Getting started is simple.
A free 30 minute consult
By video. You tell me what is bringing you in, I tell you how I would approach it, and we both decide whether it feels like a fit. You are interviewing me as much as I am listening to you.
Your first sessions
We map what matters to you and set goals you can measure yourself against. You set the pace. From the first intake form through every session, I use the name and pronouns you give me, whatever an insurance card or legal document says. You decide which parts of your story we go into and when.
Ongoing work
Weekly or every other week, in person or online. We check in regularly on whether the work is moving in the direction you wanted, and I adjust when it is not. If I get something wrong about your culture or identity, I want to hear it, and repair is part of the work.
Clifford (Chepo) Henry
Professional Counseling Associate
Hi, I'm Chepo, Professional Counseling Associate, a queer, first-generation Black Latinx American therapist for couples and individuals in Portland, Oregon. I come from a blended, multiethnic family, so I know how culture, family expectations, and the systems around us shape how we love. There's room here for all of you, including the parts you've been told were too much or not enough.
I specialize in working with all relationship types: monogamous, open, polyamorous, and everything in between. Couples come to me when they're stuck in the same fight, feeling more like roommates than partners, or trying to rebuild trust after betrayal. I work with queer, interracial and multicultural, kink-involved, and neurodivergent partners, and with polycules. I also work with trauma, anxiety, and depression. My practice is queer-, trans-, polyamory-, kink-, and neurodivergent-affirming.
I hold a master's degree in Integral Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. I practice Relational Life Therapy (RLT), Terry Real's direct, skills-based model that names the pattern between partners and teaches you how to change it, and I'm on the certification track. I also draw from Schema Therapy, and I'm Level 1 Certified in Internal Family Systems, with Brainspotting and somatic work. I won't just referee. Our work will focus on changing long-standing patterns. Sessions are online across Oregon and in person in SE Portland, and the first 30-minute consult is free.
Roots of Resilience Counseling sits on the ancestral lands of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Cowlitz, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other peoples who made their homes along the Columbia and Willamette rivers and who are still here.
Before you reach out
What does "decolonized" mean in a therapy office?
It means I do not assume that the mainstream Western picture of a healthy person, family, or relationship is the goal. We look at how racism, colonization, religion, migration, and gender rules shaped what you were taught to believe about yourself, and we treat your culture, your community, and your ancestors as resources rather than obstacles. It also means I stay accountable: you can question my framework, and I will take it seriously.
I had a bad experience with a therapist who said they were affirming. How is this different?
That experience is common and it is a legitimate reason to be cautious. The consult exists so you can ask me anything before committing. Ask about my training, who I work with, how I handle race and culture in the room, and how I respond when I get something wrong, because at some point I will, and repair matters more than perfection.
I am not white. Will I have to explain my culture to you?
You will never be asked to teach a 101 course. You may still need to tell me what your specific family, community, or faith is like, because no two are the same and I would rather ask than assume. The difference is that I start from the premise that your culture is a strength, and that the harm you experienced within it was often colonial, not cultural.
Can my partner or partners come too?
Yes. I see couples and relationships with more than two people. If you are starting individually and want to bring a partner in later, we can talk about the best way to do that.
Do you offer telehealth?
Yes, secure video sessions for anyone located in Oregon, and in-person sessions at 6536 SE Duke St, Portland, OR 97206, where I currently see clients. Many clients mix both.
What does it cost, and do you take insurance?
I am in network with Moda, Aetna, and Anthem. For other plans I provide superbills for out-of-network reimbursement. Private pay rates are listed on the fees page, and I will give you a Good Faith Estimate before we begin.
I am not sure what my identity is yet. Is this still for me?
Yes. Questioning is a full and valid place to be, and many cultures never required anyone to settle on a fixed label. You will not be nudged toward a conclusion. We will slow down and make room for whatever is true for you, for as long as it takes to know.
Your wholeness is older than the rules that questioned it.
Reach out for a free consult. I typically respond within one business day.
Request a consultation7831 SE Stark St #211
Portland, OR 97215
rootsofresiliencecounseling.com
Serving Portland in person and all of Oregon by telehealth