LGBTQ+ Affirming
Virtual Therapy in California
When You’ve Had to Hide Parts of Yourself
Are you struggling with coming out, belonging, or deciding where it feels safe to be fully yourself? Maybe you’ve learned to hide parts of your gender or sexuality from family, friends, culture, or community because being fully seen has not always felt safe. You may have affirming LGBTQ+ people in your life while still navigating spaces where you feel pressure to conform, stay quiet, or make yourself unnoticed. Having to move between these worlds, I can really relate with how painful the sense of disconnection and emptiness this can feel.
When Hate Gets Internalized
When we repeatedly receive messages that certain identities, relationships, bodies, or ways of being are less acceptable, those messages can become internalized. You may have learned to silence or distance yourself from parts of your gender or sexuality in order to maintain connection or belonging within your family or community. This is not a failure on your part. This was your body's a survival response to systems that have not made room for your full humanity. Together, we can explore these messages without blaming yourself for having learned them.
Reclaiming Your Identity, Belong & Liberate
If any of this sounds familiar, you’ve come to the right place. You deserve a therapeutic space where all of you is welcomed, affirmed, and honored. As an LGBTQ+ therapist of color and trauma therapist, I approach our work through an anti-oppressive, liberation-focused, and intersectional lens. We can explore how racism, heterosexism, cisnormativity, gender norms, family expectations, and other systems of oppression may have shaped your experiences of identity and belonging. My hope is to support you in reclaiming your voice, challenging internalized oppression, reconnecting with the parts of yourself you’ve had to hide, and creating a life where you don’t have to choose between belonging and being fully yourself.
