LGBTQ+ Therapy

“Change, when it happens, cracks everything open.”
– Dorothy Allison

Being Different isn’t Usually Celebrated

Everybody who grew up to be LGBTQ experienced feeling different. Even if your family was mainly accepting of gays and queers, we grew up in a cultural matrix that is profoundly hetero-normative and deeply invested in maintaining cisgender identities.

These experiences of being different stay with us for a long, long time. Without help, they haunt us – long after we moved out of the small towns surrounded by people with limited understandings about the beauty of rainbow sexualities.

Even more experienced folks face struggles

I remember how a patient and I were stunned as she wept. She explained how she thought she was going to hell for being queer.

She’d been out for years, and religion hadn’t played a huge role in her life.

And yet, here it was – this fundamentalist belief she’d inherited from family members who loved her but thought that her love for another woman was sinful. Haunting her.

We have struggles that straight people don’t have.

It is painful to do everything in one’s power and still not have the image in the mirror reflecting how we wish that we looked.

I see how hard it is for trans folk to come fully into an embodied gender that feels right. Even with the help of hormones and surgeries.

Many gay men point out that they no longer want to have sex because they’re so disgusted with their bodies. Bodies that cannot embody their pornified standards.

Relationships create these struggles.

I see how AFAB folk lose themselves in their relationships, especially with each other. This constant giving and attunement leads to a closeness that is initially intoxicating and then becomes stultifying. These folks reach the point where it feels impossible to have a separate life and separate desires.

Sometimes, people who are late to come out get “teased” (in ways that feel a lot like bullying) by their partners for not being “out” enough and for taking time to make these huge changes.

“Validate yourself for the strength you’ve cultivated.”
– Co-Star

Here’s how we work to address your struggles.

As an LGBTQ+ affirming therapist and as a queer person, I know many of the struggles of being queer. I am open to helping you make sense of the world and figure out how you want to navigate it. If you’re newly out, I can help normalize your experiences.

Most of my clients have been out for a long time. They appreciate not having to educate their therapist about the basics of queerness.

We will work together to help you eradicate shame and learn how to love yourself.

I am acutely aware that hiding parts of ourselves has an enormously deleterious effect. I believe in the power of being authentic as a vital antidote to shame.

You can reclaim and embrace those parts of yourself that you learned were un-loveable. The parts you desperately killed off in the mistaken belief that by eliminating them, you would become fully loved.

As RuPaul reminds us, “Dad’s love is nice, but self-love is the real name of the game.”

Let’s rediscover the incredible person you were before all that bullshit programming and shame-inducing experiences got in the way.

Pick up the phone and give me a call at (917) 687-8445.