LGBTQ+ Affirming Therapy
Celebrating the beautiful complexity of who you truly are.
Therapy for Queer People
You shouldn’t have to worry about whether or not your therapist will affirm your queer identity.
LGBTQ+ affirmative therapy helps you focus on healing what’s actually hurting (such as anxiety or depression) and strengthening what’s already helping.
Being queer in the South is beautiful and really hard.
Maybe you’ve come out to yourself and are exploring your authentic self - yay! You’ve felt the relief that comes with knowing “this is who I am”.
And….there’s a cost to being fully out and about.
So maybe you’re still hiding parts of yourself from your family, friends, or work, doing a delicate and energy-consuming balancing act, always a little on guard to make sure you don’t accidentally reveal something you’d rather keep hidden.
Your inner critic hates this tension, telling you you’re weak or a fraud for staying in the closet. Which, frankly, just makes the shame worse.
Or maybe you have come out and you’re now feeling the fall-out you were afraid of.
Your parents don’t understand why you’re “messing up your life”.
Your friends keep fumbling around with pronouns and misgendering you, and you worry you’re a “burden” to them. And relationships you thought were unconditional have ended.
On top of this, you’re still trying to manage the anxiety, depression, imposter syndrome, burnout, and feelings of being overwhelmed that are part of being a human trying to survive a pandemic and the patriarchy.
As you think about asking for help in therapy, not only are you wondering, “Can you help with my anxiety?” you also have to worry
Will you affirm me as I am?
Will you understand my experience as a queer person?
Will you shame me for being in the closet?
It shouldn’t be this hard to find an affirming therapist who you can be authentic and in-progress with. However, while Nashville has made a lot of progress, the reality is it’s still challenging.
I meet you where you are, without shame and without pressure to change.
I welcome all the parts of you, and help you integrate, make peace with and celebrate the beautiful complexity of who you truly are.
A note on LGBTQ+ affirming therapy:
Sometimes folks express concern about LGBTQ+ therapy going one of two ways:
“Will you make me* gay?” (*or my child)
or
“Will you make me* not be gay?” (*or my child)
The answer to both is a solid “No”.
If you suspect you’re gay (or queer, or anywhere on the LGBTQ+ rainbow) but don’t want to be, we’ll explore both aspects with an open, non-coercive approach.
I don’t practice “conversion therapy” (therapy that explicitly seeks to change a person’s sexual or gender identity to cis-hetero) for many reasons, the primary being that it’s cruel (Google how it’s done) and it doesn't work anyway. We have much better things to do with our lives than torture ourselves.
When I say I’m LGBTQ+ affirming, I mean that I affirm these (and other) identities & practices: queer, gay, lesbian, bisexual, heterosexual, pansexual, demisexual, trans, non-binary, gender queer, gender-fluid, questioning, intersex, cis-gender, asexual, polyamory, ENM (ethical non-monogamy), CNM (consensual non-monogamy), consensual monogamy, sex workers, kink
Let’s talk!
Schedule a free 20-minute consultation to see if we’re a good fit.