Branching Streams Psychotherapy, LLC
Robert B. Anderson, LPC
Lake Oswego, Oregon
Robert B. Anderson
LPC · CADCIII · MA · 33 Years Experience
"Are you curious, creative, and earnestly searching?
Or are you looking for solutions to a short-term challenge?
This work is for you."
"The stream does not choose its course — it follows the contours of the land, finding its way naturally toward openness."On the nature of therapeutic work · Branching Streams Psychotherapy
Lena River Delta · Siberia · from space
About Robert
Robert B. Anderson has spent more than three decades doing the careful, unhurried work of psychotherapy — sitting with people in the full complexity of their lives, attending to what is said and what is not yet sayable. He holds a Master's degree from Antioch University (1991) and is licensed in Oregon as a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC1855).
His approach draws from the rigor of psychodynamic and depth psychology traditions, shaped by decades of clinical experience and a sustained life of practice within Zen Buddhism. A long-time student at Soto Zen seminaries — including Tassajara Mountain Center and the San Francisco Zen Center — Robert is now an active member of the Sellwood Soto Zen Center in Portland and is preparing for ordination as a lay priest. This is not a turning away from the world, but a deeper turning toward it. This sensibility infuses his clinical work: the willingness to sit with what is uncertain, to wait, to allow meaning to arise rather than forcing it.
Robert is a certified addiction counselor at the highest level (CADC III), a certified Emotionally Focused Therapist (EFT), and a certified therapist with Adoptive and Foster Families through Portland State University. He adopted his son from Russia as a toddler — an experience that informs his clinical work with adoption, attachment, and family complexity with rare personal depth and insight.
Above all, Robert's approach is yours to shape. You bring your own sense of what you need — and the work begins with a simple, open question: What kind of conversation would you like to have? Whether you are seeking short-term support around a specific challenge, or longer-term depth work exploring the patterns and questions that have shaped your life, Robert draws on a wide range of therapeutic approaches to meet you where you are. What style works best for you? Psychodynamic dialogue and depth psychology, Emotionally Focused Therapy, family systems thinking, cognitive and behavioral strategies, mindfulness-informed practice — no single framework is imposed. The psychotherapeutic relationship is a collaborative process, unique to you and your needs.
If you are intellectually alive, emotionally honest, and ready to engage thoughtfully with your own interior life — this practice may be right for you. Robert welcomes the kind of complex conversation that serious, sustained therapy makes possible. This work is not for everyone, and he would not pretend otherwise.
Areas of Practice
Depth-oriented, psychodynamic work for adults navigating depression, anxiety, grief, loss, trauma, life transitions, and the deeper questions of identity and meaning.
As a family systems thinker and as a certified Emotionally Focused Therapist (EFT), Robert works with couples and families to shift the cycles that keep couples and family members stuck — rebuilding secure emotional bonds and genuine connection.
As a CADC III — the highest level of addiction certification — Robert brings sophisticated clinical depth to substance use, dependency, and dual diagnosis. Recovery as transformation, not merely abstinence.
Certified by Portland State University and informed by his own experience adopting his son from Russia, Robert offers rare insight into attachment, identity, and the dynamics unique to adoptive and foster families.
Long-term, careful work with trauma — not symptom management alone, but the deeper reconstitution of safety, selfhood, and the capacity to live fully.
For those navigating profound change — career, relationship, identity, aging, or loss — Robert brings the dual lens of depth psychology and Zen to the question of who one is becoming.
Robert's therapeutic philosophy emerges from two deep wells: the Western tradition of psychodynamic and depth psychology, and the Eastern tradition of Zen practice. Together, they point toward the same essential quality — honest, sustained attention to what is actually here, in this moment, in this relationship.
The patterns that shape our suffering were formed long before we could name them. Depth-oriented therapy works beneath the surface — attending to unconscious currents that organize our lives, our relationships, and our sense of who we are.
Drawing on: Freud · Klein · Winnicott · Kohut
Developed by Joseph Weiss and enriched by the relational thinking of Jessica Benjamin, CMT understands psychological problems as arising from unconscious beliefs formed in early relational experience. Therapy creates the conditions in which those beliefs can be tested — and gradually, compassionately, relinquished.
Joseph Weiss · Jessica Benjamin · Harold Sampson
Zen cultivates the capacity to be fully with what is — without rushing toward resolution. This quality of presence informs how Robert sits with clients: unhurried, genuinely attentive, curious about the actual texture of each person's experience.
Soto Zen · Tassajara · San Francisco Zen Center · Sellwood Soto Zen Center
Couples & Family
His family work is grounded in Family Systems thinking: the understanding that a family is not simply a collection of individuals but an interconnected, living system. Every member is both shaped by and continuously shaping the whole — and lasting change requires attending to that whole.
Robert is a certified Emotionally Focused Therapist — one of the most rigorously researched approaches to couples work, developed by Sue Johnson. EFT identifies and shifts the negative cycles that trap partners, rebuilding the secure emotional bonds that sustain genuine intimacy.
Whether working with two partners navigating rupture, or a family system carrying unspoken pain across generations, Robert brings the same depth of presence, the same patience, and the same respect for complexity.
Who This Is For
If you are engaged with your interior life — someone who brings intellectual seriousness to your experience of the world and yourself — you may find this work deeply valuable.
Perhaps you are a creative professional, academic, writer, artist, or thinker — someone with articulate language for what you're navigating, but a sense that language alone is not enough to move through it.
Robert also works with people in recovery, with adoptive and foster families, and with couples navigating the complexity of long-term relationship — meeting you with the same quality of attentiveness and respect for depth, wherever you are.
Zen & Practice
Zen does not promise to resolve the questions of existence. It offers, instead, a way of sitting with them — alert, unhurried, without the compulsion to arrive somewhere else. You may find that quality of presence in the work here.
This is also, at its best, what good psychotherapy offers. Not a cure for the human condition, but a more honest relationship with one's own experience.
Robert brings these two traditions into conversation in his work — not as a system or doctrine, but as a lived sensibility. A willingness to be fully present with what is actually here.
How We Work
Meaningful psychological change does not follow a protocol. It emerges from the slow, patient work of understanding — in relationship, over time, at a pace that is yours.
Robert offers a free 15-minute phone consultation — an unhurried conversation to explore whether working together makes sense for you. He is direct about what he offers and honest about the limits of his approach. Good fit matters, and there is no obligation beyond the conversation itself.
Sessions are typically held once or twice weekly, at a pace that works for you. The work is open-ended and exploratory — not structured around symptom reduction alone, but aimed at something deeper: a more genuine relationship with yourself and greater freedom in how you live.
You are encouraged to speak freely — about what is troubling you, what you notice, what you feel. Robert listens carefully and brings his decades of experience to what he hears, helping illuminate the patterns that have shaped your experience, often outside your awareness. He welcomes intellectual engagement and the kind of rigor that serious inquiry demands.
Robert sees clients in-person at his Lake Oswego office, Tuesday through Saturday. Telehealth sessions are also available via FaceTime and Google Meet for clients throughout Oregon — making depth-oriented work accessible wherever you are.
Easily accessible from Portland, Tigard, Clackamas, and the greater metro area. Telehealth available statewide in Oregon.
Client Forms
To help your first session begin smoothly, please download and complete the following forms before your appointment. All forms are PDF — print and bring them, or scan and return by email. If you have any questions, just call or write.
Difficulty with a form? Call (503) 383-9144 or email robert@branching-streams.com and we will send it to you directly.
A Contemplative Lineage
Ikkyu Sojun was among the most unconventional Zen masters of 15th-century Japan — a poet, calligrapher, and abbot of Daitoku-ji whose life was a deliberate refusal of pretense. He wrote about love, mortality, desire, and awakening with equal frankness, insisting that genuine practice could not be separated from genuine living.
Robert's own Zen formation — through years of study and practice at Tassajara, the San Francisco Zen Center, and now the Sellwood Soto Zen Center in Portland, and his forthcoming lay ordination — draws on this same spirit: that sitting with what is real, however uncomfortable, is both the method and the destination. This informs how he works with clients. Not toward a tidy resolution, but toward a more honest relationship with one's own life.
"To study the self is to forget the self."
— Dōgen Zenji, informing the Soto tradition
Begin
If what you have read here resonates — if you are looking for a thoughtful, experienced therapist who will take your inner life seriously and work in a style that fits you — Robert warmly welcomes your call or message.
Send Robert a Message
Your message is confidential. Robert will respond within one business day.
Free 15-minute consultation · Tuesday – Saturday
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