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Your LGBTQIA+ Identity Is Safe Here


LGBTQIA+ Affirmative Therapy in Agoura Hills, Los Angeles

There are so many layers to the queer experience, and you deserve a therapist who intimately understands that.

  • That rejection was much more clear cut. It may have been family members or other places in your community that kicked you out or forced you to suppress who you were to be accepted. Maybe you faced abuse or bullying because of your identity.      
                                               
  • Your experience was staying closeted to protect yourself. You saw how the environments around you treated queer people, and you knew (consciously or subconsciously) to keep this part of identity to yourself to get by.    
           
  • You just had virtually no one around you who was like you, making it harder to even figure out for yourself how to put words to your experience.

  • You are around non-queer people who are trying to be supportive, but they haven’t quite learned enough to avoid saying and doing things that are hurtful to you.


Maybe for you...

While it may seem like the world is becoming more friendly to the LGBTQIA+ community, so many of us still have laundry lists of ways we have been misunderstood or rejected for who we are. 



However this misunderstanding and rejection around your LGBTQIA+ identity is showing up, it really takes a toll. 

A lot of us are walking around with negative core beliefs about ourselves that we are bad or unworthy, or even that this world isn’t built for us. Those beliefs can be fertile ground for many mental health concerns to pop up, and you may be finding yourself experiencing many kinds of mental health struggles, including anxiety, depression, trouble trusting people, and having an overall sense of being alienated. This so easily spills over into effecting relationships with other people, making school and work harder, and just overall making day to day activities less manageable. 

All the struggle really builds up, and you are searching for some relief.

The Layers of LGBTQIA+ Affirmative Therapy

You’ve been misunderstood and getting by for long enough, and it’s time to choose yourself. Giving yourself the opportunity to be seen and valued for who you are is one of the best gifts you can give yourself, and will afford you the opportunity to walk through life in a more empowered way. 


Our LGBTQIA+ Affirmative Care includes care for the whole sexuality and gender spectrum, and other relational identities such as poly, ENM, kink. We see the entire spectrum of queer identities as valid and worthy of specialized, well informed support. Wherever you are in your coming out process (from closeted to out for decades), we offer the space to continue to explore your identity and explore how your identity impacts how you experience the world around you. 

Our LGBTQIA+ affirmative care is social justice oriented, liberation focused, and inclusive of all the pieces of your unique intersectionality.

 We offer the space to explore not just how your queer identity has impacted you, but also how the other aspects of your identity (religion, race/ethnicity, ability/disability experience, cultural experience, and more) have come together with your queer identity to shape who you are and how your mental health is today.


There are infinite possibilities of how each of us have emotionally experienced our queerness, and we’re here to unpack your unique experience with you.

  • Deepening their self understanding of their sexuality, gender, or other aspect of their queer identity

  • Putting their queerness into context with the other facets of their identity

  • Deprogramming the impact of any queerphobias that have negatively impacted their mental health

  • Brainstorming ways to live a more queer affirmative life

  • Learning to hold any of the emotions that come with living in a queerphobic society

  • Coming out of hiding and moving towards fully celebrate their identities

Together we can focus on whatever you need in order to move towards a sense of wholeness and wellness within your queer experience.

You’ll probably come to therapy with specific goals in mind, but here’s what our clients typically achieve with our LGBTQIA+ affirmative care:

For Allies to Queer Loved Ones

You may have made it to this page because you have a loved one in the LGBTQIA+ community. Having supportive and affirmative people in a queer person’s life can make drastic positive impacts on the queer person’s mental health and overall wellbeing.

To assist in making that a reality for more queer people, we also support the family members and loved ones of those in the queer community.

In both individual and family therapy, together we can explore:






  • Your initial challenging reaction to finding out your loved one identifies as LGBTQIA+, and what to do next

  • “LGBTQIA+ 101” information to help you understand the community better   
        
  • The factors in your own life that have lead you to believe what you do about queer identities 
                 
  • Gaining more understanding into your loved one’s triggers related to their queer identity

  • Your worries about your loved one’s gender transition, including reservations about certain gender affirming care procedures 

  • Improving your level of allyship so your loved one can perceive themselves as being loved, supported, and seen by you

Let’s get started in unpacking your experience.

Whether you’re queer yourself or here to better support your loved one, we’re happy you are here. 

book a free consultation →

Frequently asked questions

Do you write gender affirmative care letters?

For those seeking gender affirmative care, care also can include referrals to medical resources for gender health care (Hormone Replacement Therapy, Hormone Blockers, Gender Affirmation Surgeries, etc). We provide letters to those who are in individual therapy services, and the letters are included in the price of an individual therapy session. In order to provide letters that are more accurate and written from a deeper understanding, we prefer to provide letters to those who have been doing individual therapy with us for at least a few months. That is not required, but helps us to better meet the standards of a solid letter.

What do LGBTQIA+ affirmative sessions actually look like?

To help you explore and heal from your trauma, we utilize three trauma informed modalities between the two of us: Compassionate Inquiry, EMDR, and Internal Family Systems. All three of these modalities can help you access memories or parts of yourself that you haven’t been able to access consciously. Being able to access typically unconscious information in your nervous system allows for a deeper healing experience.

There are so many different things we can do together in session! Sessions can include any of the following:

  • Allowing you the space to just be heard, without any fancy therapeutic bells and whistles. We’re here to listen compassionately. 

  • Unpacking trauma related to your queer identity, where we can tap into our trauma modalities. Click here to learn more.

  • Planning or brainstorming ideas for how to live a more affirmative life. We’re here to provide a solution-focused space.

  • Exploring your specific lens of how you view the world around you because of your queerness. Bring your philosophies, your politics, and your hot takes on this cis-heteronormative society. 

  • Celebrating your wins for moving towards a place of queer wellness.

If you feel pretty confident in your queer identity, you may just want a queer therapist to be understood on that personal level. We love that and are happy to have you! We can spend time unpacking other aspects of your experience through the queer lens.


I’m the family member of a queer person really struggling with their identity, but worried you’ll judge me. Will I be safe with you?

We hear you. Just taking a step back for a moment, we acknowledge we are all products of our environments. For better or worse, we don’t choose a lot of the perspectives ingrained in us from a young age. 

We understand that more than likely (especially if you’ve made it to a therapist page like this), you aren’t showing up in your relationship with your queer loved one in a malicious way. There can be a lot of confusion, misunderstanding and fear at the root of this struggle with accepting your loved one’s identity (and expression of that identity) and we’re here to unpack it with you. 

Our hope is that your loved one gets to live a more affirmed life where they don’t need to hide. With that said, we may compassionately challenge you on any instincts to drive them into hiding or self suppression. If we can see that your intention is for your loved one to be happy, healthy, and supported, we are more that happy to hold the space for you to explore and clear anything that is blocking that intention from manifesting. We are also here to answer any logistical concerns you may have about supporting a queer loved one.

This can be a super vulnerable experience to work through and getting started can seem daunting. If you’d like to check out some self-help resources to get you started, we have a whole LGBTQIA+ section in our Healing Resources page. Check those out here.