Trauma-informed therapy for the North Carolina and South Carolina LGBTQIA+ Community
Queerness isn’t just about sexuality.
It’s also about honoring the creativity, sensitivity, resistance, and curiosity required to live as someone different - and not only survive, but thrive. Your queerness is incredible! You deserve space to explore, grow, and express freely! And, if you’ve made it to this page you probably already know that just existing in the world as an LGBTQIA+ person can create real friction. Too often, that friction wears us down. But who we are shouldn’t have to feel like a burden. If you’re looking for trauma-informed LGBTQIA+ affirming therapy with a therapist who actually gets what it’s like to live in the world as a queer person,
you’re in the right place.
Here are just a few things we might talk about in our time together:
Sexuality
Coming out, navigating dating, identity exploration, body image and sex, self-confidence, community and belonging, grief (relationships, possibilities, versions of self) and more!
Gender and Identity Shifts
Gender exploration, gender transition, gender dysphoria, gender-affirming medical care, coming out, belonging and acceptance, dating as a trans person, gender euphoria, and more!
Asexual and Aromantic Experiences
Not interested in sex or romance? Great! There is nothing wrong with that, and nothing wrong with you. I’m here to help you build meaning, purpose, relationships, and community that works for you, not to try and get you in line with dominant societal expectations about how you “should” be.
Sex Positive Approach
Our work together is about dismantling shame and stigma, remember? In therapy with me you can talk about your sexual identity or expression without bracing for judgement or criticism.
But Chelsea, does this mean I have to talk about sex in therapy? Nope, absolutely not! It’s ALWAYS up to do what you feel comfortable delving into. A sex positive approach just means that the foundation of my work with therapy-seekers includes the understanding and acceptance that human sexuality is a vastly diverse experience, and your experience deserves to be met with curiosity and openness. There’s a lot of negative messages about sexuality in wider cultural discourse, and I try to counterbalance that by creating a therapeutic space that welcomes exploration of your whole experience.
Societal Friction
Let’s be real. We live in a world that is very cis+het normative. And when that’s not our experience, it can leave us feeling like we’re constantly swimming against the current.
In our time together we might talk about navigating questions of gender and sexuality in the workplace, with family, in relationships at all levels (from the most intimate to the most public facing), the impact of representation (or lack thereof) in pop culture and in your own environment, and what it is to build relative safety for ourselves in a world that can feel inherently unsafe.
But Chelsea, I identify as LGBTQIA+ and that’s part of who I am and my world, but it’s not everything. I want to talk about other parts of my life without it always coming back to being queer. Can we still work together?
Yes, absolutely! It’s okay if the things you want to work on don’t have anything to do with being queer. Sometimes it’s just nice to work with a therapist who gets it, and to not have to be perpetually explaining and educating about a core part of who you are or how your life is.
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.
― bell hooks
