LGBTQIA+ Affirming Therapy in Brooklyn | Therapy for Queer, Trans, and LGBTQIA+ Adults in NYC
“‘Queer’ not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
You might be someone who is grounded in your queer identity, or you may be in the middle of figuring it out and questioning. You might be navigating questions about your gender or sexuality, or you may be seeking a therapist for issues that have nothing to do with your queerness, but it just would be nice to work with a therapist who is part of the community.
For many of the people I work with, queerness intersects with other parts of their identity: living in a racialized body, being an immigrant or first-generation adult, or someone from a religious or a cultural background where their identity was not given room. Very often, people I work with come in with a lived experience of compartmentalizing themselves to find belonging: some parts feel at home within communities of color, other parts feel kinship in queer spaces, other parts are still looking for moments of recognition.
Reconnecting with parts of yourself, your culture, and your history can be daunting, particularly when there hasn't been room for expansiveness. I hope for us to figure it out together, creating a future that is more loving to us all.
As a queer therapist with lived experience navigating queerness across cultural contexts, I offer a space where:
being queer is not treated as the issue we are managing; your identity is not the clinical problem, and the work is not organized around helping you adjust to a world that has not adjusted to you
your relationship to your body, your gender, and your sense of self is held without assumptions about what your experience should look like or where it should lead
your sexual orientation, gender identity, and relationship structure are welcomed without question: whether you are gay, bi, pan, lesbian, queer, asexual, or still figuring it out; whether you are monogamous, in a polycule, non-monogamous, or not partnered
internalized shame and burdens from growing up in a world that said something about you needed to change are approached with care rather than urgency to simply move past it
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Some of the people I work with have been in therapy before, have a strong sense of their own history and patterns, and are wondering why understanding everything has not been enough to change it. If you are a queer adult in New York who has already done the reading, the journaling, the previous rounds of therapy, we can use body-based and “bottom up” approaches to address deeper issues.
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Not yet! At this time, I only see individual clients, but I am increasing my competency and training in couples and partners therapy in order to offer this service in the future.
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I pay close attention to your nervous system and your pace. A significant part of my work, especially early on as we are building rapport, is helping you build inner resources: think of it as different tools that increase your capacity to sit with difficult emotions without being overwhelmed by them. The goal is to expand your window of capacity with your consent, not blow it open when you least expect it. Of course, sometimes a memory can feel overwhelming out of nowhere and the window gets blown open anyway. If this is your concern, let’s talk about it right away, and establish some safe guards so you feel more prepared.
In our work together, you can expect to:
understand where internalized messages around your queerness come from and reduce their impact on what you see as possible, what you allow yourself to want, and how you treat yourself
develop a clearer and more settled sense of your own identity and what it means to you
work with the parts of yourself that learned to hide, manage, or perform, understanding what they were protecting and what it would mean to give them more options
spend less energy on self-monitoring and the ongoing calculation of how you are being perceived, so that energy goes somewhere else
process specific experiences and trauma held in the body
Use EMDR, IFS (parts work), and art therapy to process memories, images, and body sensations that feel stuck—whether they’re tied to migration, identity‑based harm, family conflicts, or earlier experiences—so they feel a little less overwhelming in the present.
build more capacity for genuine connection in your relationships: queer friendships, romantic partnerships, community, family, and others