Jennifer Davies

Associate Marriage and Family Therapist|Clinically Supervised

My personal identities and lived experiences meaningfully inform the way I show up as a therapist. As someone who is queer, gender-nonconforming, late-identified autistic, and partnered with a trans person, I bring a nuanced understanding of what it means to navigate the world from the margins of dominant norms. These experiences help me approach clients’ identities with deep respect, curiosity, and cultural humility. They’ve taught me how vital it is to have therapeutic spaces where people don’t have to explain or justify who they are, and where their complexity is not only welcomed but expected. Having deconstructed and ultimately left a religious community gives me particular sensitivity to clients who are disentangling themselves from belief systems, communities, or family expectations. I understand the mixture of grief, liberation, disorientation, and rebuilding that can accompany these transitions. This helps me support clients in exploring their own spiritual, existential, or identity shifts without presumption or agenda. Growing up with a drug-dependent parent and experiencing the loss of both parents has also shaped my therapeutic presence. These experiences taught me early about ambivalence in relationships, the impact of instability, and the ways grief can ripple across a lifetime. They help me hold space for clients’ pain and resilience without rushing their process or minimizing their realities. Together, these aspects of my life deepen my empathy and attunement. They guide me toward a practice that is anti-pathologizing, trauma-informed, queer-affirming, and grounded in the belief that people are always doing the best they can within the contexts and constraints they’ve lived through. My own story helps me honor the stories my clients bring—with respect, humility, and a commitment to supporting their agency, identity, and preferred ways of being in the world.

I don't take myself too seriously. I will make jokes. They may be corny. I had to google whether to use may or might in that last sentence because that is the type of autism I have. Details matter to me. Precision and efficiency matter to me. Being understood and understanding others is incredibly important to me and I believe it influences my work in a very authentic and empathetic way.

Narrative therapy, informed by queer theory, forms the foundation of my clinical practice because it aligns deeply with my core beliefs about people, power, and the meanings we make of our lives. I approach therapy with the conviction that identities are not fixed categories but evolving stories shaped by culture, systems, and lived experience. Narrative therapy allows me to honor clients as experts in their own lives and to collaboratively explore the stories that have supported them, constrained them, or been imposed on them. Queer theory further enriches this approach by challenging the assumption that there is one “right” or “normal” way to be, relate, or move through the world. It helps me stay attentive to the ways dominant narratives—about gender, sexuality, ability, productivity, family, and more—can marginalize or invisibilize people. Together, narrative therapy and queer theory guide me to create a space where clients can question inherited narratives, reclaim authorship of their identities, and build more expansive possibilities for their lives. These frameworks resonate with my personal philosophy: that people thrive when they are supported in naming their truth, resisting oppressive stories, and imagining themselves beyond limiting scripts. My role is not to interpret clients but to walk alongside them as they rewrite, re-author, and re-vision their preferred stories with agency, dignity, and creativity.