Executive Director & Founder
Location: Portland, OR
Values: Grace, Trust, Self-Awareness
Education: B.A., Psychology · M.A., Counseling Psychology
Certifications: MAC · CRAFT · Invitation to Change · Seeking Safety
Jennifer Tarzia is the Founder of Doyen Consulting Group, a concierge behavioral health consulting and family advisory group. She works with families — and the advisors around them — navigating severe mental illness, substance use, and disordered eating, nationally and discreetly.
Raised in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Jennifer came to this work early, and later walked the road herself as a family member. That experience taught her the fear, uncertainty, and determination it takes to stand beside someone in crisis.
Nineteen-plus years inside treatment environments have made her precise about fit. Families come to Jennifer for level-of-care matching: not only the right level of care, but the specific therapeutic setting most likely to hold a particular person. She also serves as trust protector and mental-health distributor within special-needs trusts, managing distributions against an agreed budget so the family isn’t the one saying no.
She approaches interventions differently. Trained in CRAFT and Invitation to Change, Jennifer works alongside the person at the center rather than confronting them — presence over pressure, and the conditions for someone to feel genuinely seen. Teaching that model to families, and practicing it inside Doyen’s team, has produced lasting change in circumstances others had written off.
Jennifer lives in Portland with her family, with a forest for a backyard. Becoming a mother deepened her belief that healing belongs to anyone willing to reach for it.
Too often, our industry fails the people it claims to serve—not because they cannot heal, but because they are placed too quickly, without anyone truly understanding the full picture of who they are. They leave feeling like the failure, when the failure was never theirs. Families lose faith in the possibility of help.
Quality placement is not a logistical task. It is the first act of care, and the one I refuse to rush. Every case at Doyen is led by someone with clinical training. We interview the people who actually see the client day-to-day—siblings, friends, coaches, teachers, co-workers—because the most useful information rarely lives where you’d expect. We study what has been tried before, and we don’t move forward until we can name why this plan will be different.
I tell families our goal is to leave at least one person in the system better off than when they came to us—and it isn’t always the person they reached out about. Every person deserves to find their happiness and protect their self-love, regardless of what is happening around them.
Sometimes the deepest work is helping someone accept that they cannot change the will of another—only the shape of their own life.