Sometimes clients seek me out because they want a gay, queer, and LGBTQIA+ identified therapist. Other times, it's the same struggles anyone brings to therapy like a lot of change, relationship concerns and questions, anxiety, depression, grief, and life transitions. For LGBTQIA+ folks, these are often compounded by sexual orientation and gender identity. Here are some specific topics LGBTQIA+ clients focus on in therapy:

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• Coming out and authenticity: Coming out at any stage of life, navigating coming out as an ongoing process rather than a one-time event, living authentically rather than hiding or performing, and figuring out what integrity looks and feels like in action  when the world doesn't always feel safe.

• Family dynamics and communication: Navigating family relationships and communication dynamics, managing family expectations, boundaries and relationship repair, processing rejection and grief, bringing partners into family spaces, aging parents.

• Peer and romantic relationships: Navigating the complexities of same-sex/gender relationships, managing friendships with people you're attracted to, working on communication and intimacy in relationships.

• Sex and sexual health: Addressing specific areas of concern or "problems" as well as discussing your experiences, exploration, and relationship with sexuality. See the Sex Therapy page for additional topics invited into your therapy.

• Feeling excluded within the LGBTQIA+ community: Feeling unwelcome or like an outcast even within gay/queer spaces, pressure to conform to community norms, experiencing exclusion based on body size or race, and navigating internalized homophobia that shows up in community dynamics.

• Internalized homophobia and transphobia: Working through internalized shame even after coming out, examining how internalized homophobia or transphobia shows up in self-talk, relationships, views of others, and what you believe you deserve.

• Trauma: Addressing trauma from families, schools, religious organizations, violence, rejection, bullying, and discrimination, integrating how this trauma has impacted you, moving toward a sense of trauma recovery.

• Religious trauma and spirituality: Deconstructing shame and experiences around sexuality and spirituality, and figuring out if and how you can be both queer and spiritual in whatever ways that has meaning for you.

• Exploring queerness and sexuality: Exploring what queerness means to you and your relationship to sexual orientation, gender, sex, sexuality, relationship structures.

• Political stress and anxiety: Processing the stress of legislative and political attacks, threats to rights, and public debates about our existence and access to healthcare, navigating exhaustion from the political climate, and managing the trauma that comes from living in a world that debates your humanity.

• Intersecting identities: Navigating multiple marginalized identities at once (i.e., being queer and Black, queer and of size, queer and religious, queer and disabled), processing challenges specific to holding multiple identities, and making sense of how these identities intersect and shape your experience.

• Examining privilege and being an ally: For LGBTQIA+ folks with privilege in other areas (whiteness, cisgender identity, ability), examining that privilege in order to be anti-racist and practice solidarity with oppressed communities, recognizing that being oppressed in one way doesn't mean you're not holding privilege in others.​

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All of this matters. All of this is worth bringing to therapy. And all of it is part of the work we can do together.