Avel Gordly Center For Healing

Although my experience with Avel Gordly was usually pleasant and I would recommend it to anyone, I do have to say Ben’s review does not surprise me at all.
After my old therapist left I was reassigned a new one: Dolores Teller. I only had one session with her and I will never forget it because it was probably the only therapy session I have ever had in my life that left me soaked in my own tears out of pure frustration.
She told me her method of treatment was not to focus on the past as some of her colleagues do but to recount daily occurrences that frustrate her patients as they happen because they can be tied back to issues we have faced in our past anyway. So I told her what was most recently making me feel hopeless: I had just been kicked out with 7 days notice (illegal in OR) during finals week and had to skip one of my Finals. I moved to Portland on my own and have no family on the West Coast so this was particularly stressful and I didn’t know where I would go. I wont readers with the whole story, but I was a wreck.
Dolores told me to stop blaming things on other people and that I made the choice to stay. I could have stood even as she changed the locks on me. She told me her patients like her because she «tells it like it is» and some people cant handle that. I never went to her again.
I spoke to one of the managers there; she listened to my story, assessed my situation and recommended me to someone who was spot on. So overall I like this place a lot; everyone is really kind and professional. Accessible location in a beautiful building as well. Just dont go to Dolores.

In the course of a month of treatment with Sally Van Meter, she cancelled more than half of our appointments, each time with less than two hours of notice. That would be the primary objective evidence that this therapist may not be a good match for patients seeking support with a chronic issue. Subjectively, I felt that Van Meter was dismissive of my concerns and had a tendency to treat me as hostile when I calmly questioned or asked her to clarify her methods and conclusions, even though I was entirely cooperative with her advice and ‘homework’.
Several odd diagnoses stand out in my mind, I’ll share just one that particularly concerned me: I mentioned that my wife was interested in knowing whether there was any advice Van Meter could offer about the best way to support me during the therapeutic process, Van Meter told me that my wife «was not going to solve my depression for me» and suggested that my wife seek out a codependency group. I was willing to consider the possibility that I was in a codependent relationship without realizing it, but as the subject of my wife had not entered our discussions prior to this and I had said almost nothing about her besides her willingness to be supportive during the process, I was at a loss to understand how Van Meter came to this diagnosis.
I am mild-​mannered and non-​confrontational to a fault, so I tolerated this treatment for a month before finally asking her if there was intended to be some therapeutic value in the mild verbal abuse that I felt I was consistently receiving from her. She said there was not and declined to elaborate, then gave me a two page worksheet meant to evaluate my self-​esteem, which to me seemed like a meager workload for a full week between sessions. Evidently it was intended to occupy two weeks, as she cancelled the next session, as always with scant notice. Perhaps my self-​esteem is higher than I thought, because I decided that I deserved better than this and cancelled all future treatment with her.
I have worked with a number of therapists to try to improve my depression, and while it is natural that many have not been a good ‘fit,’ my time with Van Meter was the most negative experience I have had to date, generally leaving me more confused and hopeless after a session than before.