Clinical Psychology · Licensed since 2009 · Portland, OR
Dr. Sue Malley provides depth-oriented psychotherapy for adults navigating anxiety, grief, life transitions, and the longer questions of selfhood. Sessions are held in person in Northwest Portland and online across Oregon and Washington.
About the practice
A letter from the chair
I came to psychology by way of literature — reading Dostoevsky and Toni Morrison alongside Freud and Bowlby, convinced that the inner life deserves the same patience we give to a difficult novel. That conviction still shapes the room.
The people I see are rarely in crisis, though crisis is sometimes what brings them to the door. More often, they are quietly tired — of a pattern they cannot name, of relationships that repeat, of a self that feels slightly out of reach. My work is to sit with them in the not-yet-understood, and to help language catch up to experience.
Sessions here are fifty minutes, weekly, and rarely brief in course. I do not offer streamlined programs or six-week interventions. The frame is old-fashioned on purpose: one clinician, one patient, one room, and the time it takes.
— S. Malley, Psy.D.
Licensed Clinical Psychologist
Approach
These are not techniques applied to a patient, but the assumptions I carry into each session. They are old ideas, refined by clinicians across generations, and they remain the most honest frame I know for the work.
Much of what shapes us was laid down before language. Symptoms, repetitions, and stuck patterns are not failures of will — they are attempts by an older part of the self to be heard. The work is to listen, not to correct.
What happens between two people in a room — what is said, what is felt, what is survived — is itself the treatment. Techniques serve the relationship; they do not replace it. The frame of weekly sessions is held so that this can develop.
Tension, fatigue, restlessness, and the small gestures of a session are not side effects — they are data. I attend to what the body is doing while the mind is talking, and we follow both.
Loss — of a person, a role, a future imagined — does not respond to optimization. It asks to be witnessed, often more than once, often for longer than feels reasonable. I do not move patients through grief; I sit with them inside it.
Understanding oneself matters; it is also not enough. The work asks for both — the naming of a pattern and the slow practice of relating to it differently. I track insight against lived change, in the room and outside it.
What is said in this room stays in this room. Not as a compliance line, but as the condition under which the deeper material becomes sayable. I hold this with the seriousness it deserves, and I explain its limits before we begin.
Services
The kind that lives in the chest, that wakes you at 4 a.m., that turns small decisions into long internal arguments. We trace its origins, listen to what it is protecting, and slowly reduce its grip on the daily.
Death of a person, but also the loss of a role, a marriage, a future imagined, a self that no longer fits. Grief work is not a stage process here — it is the slow integration of what has changed.
The disorientation that comes after a move, a promotion, a departure, a child, or a long-anticipated ending. Transitions reveal what was always structurally there; we make room to understand it.
For those quietly asking who they are beneath the roles they have lived inside. Often the slowest work, and often the most consequential — a rewriting of the inner narrative, not a rebranding of the outer one.
Weekly supervision for unlicensed postdoctoral psychologists pursuing depth training. Limited to four supervisees at a time. Letters of readiness provided when the work supports them.
"The cure of the soul is not a program. It is the patient attention of one person to another, across many Wednesdays."— from the practice brief, 2023
Credentials
Selected to supervise four postdoctoral clinicians through their final year of pre-licensure hours, with an emphasis on psychodynamic case formulation.
Guest lecturer in the Clinical Psychology program on the topic of contemporary psychodynamic formulation. Two seminars per year, ongoing.
Solo private practice established at the Lovejoy Street location. Twenty-session weekly caseload, deliberately capped to preserve session quality and clinical writing time.
License #2634. Active and in good standing. Continuing education credits consistently exceed state minimums, with focus on depth psychology, ethics, and clinical supervision.
Two-year fellowship in psychodynamic psychotherapy with emerging adults. Co-led the clinic's grief support program and developed its first formal supervision manual.
Doctoral dissertation on the role of silence in the therapeutic hour. Awarded the Spigner Fellowship in clinical ethics, 2007 — 2009.
Undergraduate work on the Russian novel and psychoanalytic theory. Senior thesis on Dostoevsky and the pre-Freudian unconscious.
Notes & writing
A short essay on the relationship between session frequency and the kind of material that becomes sayable. The frame, I argue, is not a logistical preference but a clinical one — and most depth work will not surface in its absence.
Read · 6 min →A reflection on the well-documented but rarely-discussed clinical reality of grief: that the numbness of the first year often gives way to a more honest, and therefore more difficult, encounter with absence in the second.
Read · 9 min →An extended meditation on the role of silence in the therapeutic hour — drawn from my doctoral dissertation and refined by fifteen years of practice. Silence is not absence; it is often where the work is happening most.
Read · 12 min →From those who have sat here
I came to Dr. Malley exhausted by my own patterns and unable to name them. Three years later I can describe what I am doing, why, and — more importantly — when I am not yet ready to do it differently. That capacity has changed everything else.
She is the rare clinician who treats the relationship as the work itself, not the vehicle for it. I have been in therapy before; this was a different thing entirely. Slower, harder, and worth every Wednesday for two years.
Practical questions
The practice operates on a private-pay basis to preserve session length and clinical autonomy. A monthly superbill is provided for those seeking out-of-network reimbursement through their insurer. I am happy to discuss the sliding-scale option during the consultation.
Depth work is rarely brief. Most individuals come weekly for a minimum of six months; many continue for two years or longer as the work deepens. We will revisit the frame together at regular intervals, but I do not push for closure before the material has been properly worked through.
Yes. Online sessions are available for residents of Oregon and Washington, conducted through a HIPAA-compliant platform. The first consultation is always held in person when feasible; ongoing sessions may be in person or online depending on what serves the work.
Adults, ages 24 and older. I do not see adolescents or children, and I do not work with couples or families. When the presenting concern falls outside my scope, I will refer you to a clinician whose practice fits your needs.
Write to [email protected] with a brief note about what brings you to therapy. I respond personally, usually within five business days, and we schedule a 90-minute initial consultation. There is no intake form; the first conversation happens in the room.
Begin the work
I read every intake note personally and respond within five business days. The first session is a 90-minute consultation — long enough for a careful history, and for both of us to sense whether the fit is right.