LGBTQ+ Affirming Therapy in Los Angeles & Pasadena, CA
Therapy led by a clinician who prioritizes an environment that validates, supports and advocates for the experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals is the primary goal of LGBTQ+ affirmative therapy. As a queer, LGBTQ+ affirming therapist I understand the challenge and importance of connecting with someone who not only hears what you’re saying but understands how your identity has impacted your life.
Finding a therapist who genuinely gets it changes everything.
As a queer therapist, I bring lived understanding to the territory my LGBTQ+ clients are navigating — the layered work of identity, the particular calibration of being out (or not) in different rooms, the ambient exhaustion of living in an increasingly polarized world, and the specific kinds of trauma that get folded into a queer life and rarely get named as trauma at all.
WHAT WE WORK ON
The clients I see often arrive carrying some combination of:
Coming out — and the long tail that follows it, even years later
Identity exploration around sexuality, gender, or relationship structure
Family-of-origin wounds tied to acceptance, conditional love, or estrangement
The cumulative weight of minority stress, microaggressions, and political climate
Relationship patterns shaped by hiding, performing, or shrinking yourself
Internalized shame that has outlived its usefulness
Trauma that happens to queer people because they are queer
HOW I WORK
LGBTQ+ affirming care, the way I practice it, is not a content area — it’s a baseline. From there, the actual work draws on EMDR, IFS, somatic integration, and attachment-focused therapy depending on what your nervous system and history need. Whether you’re arriving in crisis, in transition, or simply ready to stop carrying something you’ve carried for too long, the work is built around you.
RESOURCES
If you’re looking for affirming medical providers, legal support, crisis resources, or LGBTQ+ community groups, I keep an active list and am glad to share referrals.
Who I Work With
"LGBTQ+" covers a lot of ground, and the work changes shape depending on who's in the room. The clients I see include:
Trans and nonbinary clients, however that shows up for you. There's no required arc here — some clients are questioning, some are actively transitioning, some are years past it, and some are living their gender fully without medical or social transition being part of their path. All of it is valid, and all of it is welcome. Some of the work is gender-related and some of it isn't, and I follow your lead on which is which.
Queer people in non-monogamous, polyamorous, or kink-aware relationships. Whether you're solo poly, in a long-standing triad, opening a relationship, or navigating kink dynamics, your structure isn't the problem we're solving — it's the context the work happens in.
Queer parents and chosen-family caregivers. Parenting as a queer person carries its own layers: donor and surrogacy decisions, navigating institutions that weren't built for your family, modeling something for your kids that you didn't have modeled for you.
Queer people of color, navigating intersecting identities at home, in queer community, and in predominantly white spaces. The fatigue of being legible in multiple worlds and fully seen in none is real, and it's worth naming directly.
Queer people from religious or high-control backgrounds. Religious trauma and queerness often show up tangled together, and untangling them takes time. I work with clients deconstructing, reconstructing, or sitting in the complexity of what faith meant and means.
Late-in-life coming out. Coming out at 40 or 60 is its own thing — grief for the years you didn't have, joy that surprises you, confusion about who you are now. The texture is different from coming out at 20, and it deserves space that meets it.
Gender Affirming Letter Writing
If you need a letter to access gender-affirming healthcare, gender-affirming surgery, or to update your name or gender marker on legal documents, I write these in accordance with approved WPATH Standards of Care and California state guidelines, accepted by both medical providers and insurance companies.
For existing clients, letters are written as part of our ongoing work at no additional cost. For people who aren't current clients but need a letter, I offer a small number of dedicated sessions for assessment and letter writing — typically one to two sessions depending on the type of letter needed.
I work from an informed-consent framework. My role isn't to gatekeep your care. It's to make sure the letter does what it needs to do: that it speaks the language insurance companies and surgeons need to see, that it's specific where it needs to be specific, and that you're not stuck waiting because of a paperwork problem.
If you're not sure what kind of letter you need, or whether you need one at all, reach out and we can figure it out together.
coming out challenges
For some of us, the process of coming out can be a daunting one. What is most important is that you have support throughout your journey to ensure you never feel alone.
identity exploration
Whether you are exploring your sexuality, your gender, or simply defining what makes you, I am here to support you every step of the way.
resources
If you need assistance seeking affirmative medical care providers, crisis support, legal issues, or are in search of LGBTQ+ support groups, I have access to an abundance of resources prioritizing the LGBTQ+ community that will be helpful for you.
gender affirming letter writing
If you are in need of a letter in order to access gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy and/or transition-related medical care, I provide these at no cost to you, in accordance with California state guidelines for use with both providers and insurance companies.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Affirming, the way I practice it, means I don't treat your queerness or your gender as the thing to be worked on. The work is whatever you bring — anxiety, relationship patterns, trauma, family stuff — and your identity is part of who you are, not a clinical issue. Friendly often means tolerant. Affirming means I've done my own learning so you don't have to teach me. Most importantly, I bring my lived experience as a queer person to my work without taking the focus away from you in our work.
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No. Plenty of the queer clients I see are functioning well by every external measure and still feel something pulling underneath — old shame, exhausted hypervigilance, relationship patterns that don't quite make sense. You don't have to wait for things to get bad enough to justify the call.
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With pace, and without an agenda. Some clients come in with a clear sense of where they're headed and want support through transition. Others arrive with questions and need a place where exploring doesn't mean committing. I hold space for both, and for the in-between where most of the actual work happens.
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Yes. I work with clients across a range of relationship structures and don't treat non-monogamy or kink as pathology. We work on the same things any couple or individual works on — communication, attachment, jealousy, sex, repair — without me needing your relationship to look a particular way for the work to make sense.
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A lot of the trauma in queer lives happens slowly and gets normalized — the constant recalibration of who you are in which room, the comments at family dinners, the years of not being seen. EMDR helps the nervous system finish processing experiences that never got fully metabolized. IFS gives language and care to the parts of you that learned to hide, perform, or shrink to survive. Used together, they reach the layered material that talk therapy alone often can't.
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We talk. I ask what brought you in, what's worked and what hasn't in past therapy, and what you're hoping to feel different. There's no intake interrogation — the goal of the first session is for both of us to figure out whether this feels like a fit. From there, we'd map out what the actual work might look like.