For women and LGBTQIA+ adults ready to stop shrinking and start choosing themselves.
Virtual therapy available across Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin.
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“She has helped me find my voice, reclaim my confidence, and navigate some of the most difficult moments of my life.”
- Privately disclosed
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“I have felt heard and understood in my feminism... and my queer identity.”
- Privately disclosed
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“Bethany has a rare combination of clinical expertise, warmth, authenticity, and a genuine ability to connect.”
- Privately disclosed
You learned to question yourself before you ever questioned the system.
You can be wildly capable and still feel one raised eyebrow away from wondering if you’re too much, selfish, difficult, or somehow the problem.
You keep the peace, swallow what you really want to say, carry everyone else’s emotions, and then replay the conversation later because upsetting the system still feels weirdly dangerous.
Maybe you were shaped by controlling men, women who learned to survive them and passed those expectations down, or a family or religious system that taught you belonging could disappear if you stepped too far out of line.
What if you chose yourself this time?
You make the choice without first imagining everyone’s reaction. You say what you mean, want what you want, and let someone disagree without treating it like proof you’ve done something wrong.
You start trusting your voice, taking up more space, going after the relationships and dreams that matter to you, and realizing there are possibilities for your life no one ever showed you.
Your life stops being organized around who you were expected to be and starts feeling like something you actually get to create.
Why Blue Agate Counseling?
I’m not going to reduce all of this to “you need better boundaries.” I care deeply about the ways trauma, patriarchy and the people it privileges, unhealed women, family systems, religion, and generations of survival can teach women to stay quiet, doubt themselves, and make everyone else more important.
As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, a feminist, and someone who has always had a strong sense of justice, I’m not just interested in helping you understand what happened. I want to help you reclaim the voice, choices, confidence, and possibility that got buried underneath it.
I’ll bring warmth, humor, real talk, and a whole lot of big sis encouragement while you figure out what you’re leaving behind and who you want to become next.
Bethany’s Specialties
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Healing Childhood Trauma & Dysfunctional Family Relationships for Women
Untangle the old wounds and family patterns, and reclaim your sense of self.
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People-Pleasing & Boundaries Therapy for Women
Stop organizing your life around everyone else and start trusting your own needs, voice, and choices.
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LGBTQIA+ Affirming Therapy
Therapy for your whole life where you can take up space, explore what you want, and be fully yourself.
What healing looks like:
› You trust your own voice.
› You stop needing everyone else to agree before you believe yourself.
› You say the thing.
› Your needs, opinions, boundaries, and feelings stop making you feel guilty and start feeling empowering.
› You want things again. Relationships, goals, adventures, dreams, joy.
› You start living for you.
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My approach is relational, feminist informed, trauma informed, LGBTQIA+ affirming, and rooted in understanding the family and generational patterns that shaped you.
About 1 in 5 women report four or more adverse childhood experiences, and LGBTQIA+ people are five times more likely than non-LGBTQIA+ people to experience violent victimization.
Depending on what you need, our work may include EMDR, reparenting, boundary work, and exploring the beliefs and survival roles still showing up in your life.
Meet the Clinician
Hey, I’m Bethany Bickel, LCSW. I’m so glad you’re here.
Professional? Absolutely. Stuffy? Not even a little.
There’s room here to laugh, cry, swear, say the thing you’re embarrassed to admit, and still do very real work.
I’ll cheer ridiculously hard when you choose yourself, bring plenty of “you are absolutely capable of this” energy, remember the details, and thoughtfully point out the patterns keeping you stuck.
You don’t need to know exactly who you’re becoming yet. Part of the fun is getting to find out.