Therapy for LGBTQIA+ Adults
Living as a queer and/or trans person in this world can feel uniquely isolating and confusing. You’ve likely been told by your family, at church, at school, or on the internet that living as your authentic self is wrong, sinful, or unnatural. Whether you’re just now questioning your sexual or gender identity, scared to come out, or have been living openly as LGBTQIA+ for years, the constant onslaught of societal and interpersonal judgement may invade your sense of self against your will.
I will support you in lessening feelings of shame, reprocessing traumatic and oppressive experiences in an identity-affirming way, and living a balanced, healthy life in a world that can be undeniably unsupportive or dangerous. To meet your unique needs, I’ll use a combination of evidence-based treatment approaches, clinical wisdom from a decade of practicing therapy with queer and trans clients, and my own life experience as a queer woman with a transgender spouse.
-
Healing from sexual assault and intimate partner violence can feel extra complicated for LGBTQIA+ folks, especially when you’ve survived trauma perpetrated by members of the community itself. You want to remain connected to your queer and trans social network but it feels impossible to do so without encountering a mine-field of triggers that make it hard to feel safe. Those triggers prompt you to feel “shut down” and dissociative some of the time while feeling hyper-vigilant and uncomfortably reactive other times. I use a combination of EMDR, IFS-informed parts work, and narrative therapies to help de-activate those emotional buttons that feel constantly pressed. With me, you’ll develop tools to cope with moments of emotional overwhelm or dissociation, you’ll disentangle your view of yourself and your future from the grips of your past experiences, and you’ll dive into how you can navigate your social life with openness, discernment, and trust in yourself.
-
The process by which one comes to understand their own sexual and gender identities is deeply personal. Therapy is an opportunity to express and explore your own desires and needs so that if and when you want to express them to other people, you can do so with clarity and confidence. Therapy can also be a space to engage in problem solving around how you want to approach your own coming out process. Some questions we may ponder together in therapy could be: Who in your life do you imagine will be supportive and how can you bolster that support? How will you care for yourself as you navigate this process? How might you balance the realities of an unpredictable social environment with your very real need for authenticity and love? There often aren’t black and white answers to these questions, but therapy can help you build trust in yourself to take whatever your next step might be.
-
I offer letters of support at no additional cost for active clients who desire to pursue gender-affirming medical care, including surgery. Using my background in medical social work, I also offer support in navigating the ever-changing medical systems that offer gender-affirming medical care. Please note that your insurance or surgeon’s office may require more than one letter of support OR may require letters of support from different types of medical providers (including MDs and Psychologists) in addition to what I can offer.