Connection is a skill. Let’s practice!

LGBTQ Relationship Counseling

Affirming therapy for LGBTQ+ individuals and couples

Relationships can be deeply rewarding—and also deeply challenging. For LGBTQ+ people in Salt Lake City, those challenges often carry extra weight: navigating minority stress, family rejection, religious or cultural trauma, and the pressure of living in a world that doesn’t always affirm your identity.

LGBTQ relationship counseling in Salt Lake City, Utah provides a safe, affirming space to strengthen intimacy, resolve conflict, and build resilience—whether you come alone, as a couple, or as part of a nontraditional relationship.

Why LGBTQ+ Counseling Matters

Mainstream therapy often assumes relationships are heterosexual, cisgender, and monogamous. That can leave queer clients feeling unseen, misunderstood, or even pathologized.

LGBTQ+ counseling is different because it:

Recognizes the real impact of minority stress, discrimination, and microaggressions.

Helps heal wounds from family rejection, cultural isolation, or conditional acceptance.

Supports people at every stage of coming out, transition, or identity integration.

Creates space for gender identity, evolving pronouns, or role changes within partnerships.

Affirms polyamory, open relationships, kink, and chosen family as valid forms of connection and commitment.

Here, your identity and your relationships are never something to be justified — they’re something to be understood, honored, and strengthened.

What LGBTQ+ Affirmative Therapy Means

Affirmative therapy goes beyond tolerance — it celebrates who you are.

You can expect counseling that:

Actively validates LGBTQ+ identities, bodies, and love languages.

Challenges heteronormative and cisnormative assumptions that can harm connection.

Helps you move beyond internalized shame or fear rooted in early invalidation.

Normalizes diverse relationship models and expressions of desire.

Offers practical tools for communication, boundaries, intimacy, and trust.

My goal is to help you and your partner(s) feel at home in your connection — safe to be authentic, curious, and emotionally alive together.

Integrated Approach: Individual & Couples Work

LGBTQ+ relationship therapy often weaves together both individual and joint sessions.
Many relational struggles are deeply linked to personal histories of identity, belonging, and trauma — and true change happens when both the self and the relationship system are supported.

The process usually unfolds in three parts:

Initial Joint Session — We meet together to clarify goals, history, and current stressors.

One Individual Session with Each Partner — To explore your personal experiences, attachment style, and identity background in a confidential space.

Ongoing Couples Work — Where new insight becomes practice through guided dialogue, emotional regulation, and embodied repair.

Additional individual sessions may be recommended along the way to deepen trauma processing or emotional regulation work that supports the relationship.

This holistic model honors the full complexity of queer lives — where self-discovery, embodiment, and connection overlap.

My Approach

I use an integrative, evidence-based approach that blends structure, depth, and body awareness.

Drawing from multiple modalities, I tailor sessions to your needs:

Imago Relationship Therapy

Structured dialogue to turn conflict into connection.

Gestalt Therapy

Present-moment awareness to uncover patterns and expand choice.

Somatic & Polyvagal Work

Nervous system regulation and trauma integration.

Emotion-Imagery Techniques

Symbolic and visual exploration to access deep emotional material.

Developmental Model for LGBTQIA2S+ Clinicians

A framework that centers difference as growth, not a problem.

CBT & DBT Skills

Practical tools for emotional regulation and communication.

My work is grounded in an attachment and trauma-informed lens, always attuned to how the body holds emotion, memory, and connection.

Through somatic exploration, mindfulness, and guided imagery, you’ll learn to track your own regulation and communicate from a more centered, embodied place.

Why Work With Me

I’m a queer therapist, married to a woman, with lived understanding of LGBTQ+ identity and relationship dynamics.

I have advanced training in Imago, Gestalt, somatic, trauma, and LGBTQIA2S+ relational models.

My practice is inclusive of polyamory, open relationships, kink, and chosen family.

I offer a direct, compassionate style that blends affirmation with honest feedback and actionable strategies.

Support for dating, relationships, and personal growth alike.

My goal is to help you not just understand your patterns, but actually experience change — in how you listen, repair, and show up for each other.

LGBTQ+ Workshops and Intensives

Queer-Centered Relationship Support

These LGBTQ+ workshops and intensives in Salt Lake City, Utah are designed specifically for queer, trans, and gender-diverse couples who want practical relationship skills in a space that truly understands their lived reality. This is not standard couples therapy with inclusive language layered on — the structure, assumptions, and pace of the work are built around LGBTQ+ experience from the ground up.

We recognize that many LGBTQ+ relationships develop without clear cultural templates, and that minority stress, visibility concerns, family rejection or conditional acceptance, and internalized shame can deeply affect communication, emotional regulation, and conflict.

LGBTQ+ Intensives

Queer-Centered Relationship Support

These LGBTQ+ couples intensives in Salt Lake City, Utah are designed for queer, trans, and gender-diverse couples who want focused, affirming relationship support in a space that fully understands the realities shaping their lives. This is not standard couples therapy with more inclusive language — the work itself is built around LGBTQ+ experience, with attention to the specific pressures, patterns, and relational dynamics that can emerge over time.

Many LGBTQ+ couples are navigating connection without reliable social templates, while also carrying the impact of minority stress. Visibility concerns, family rejection or conditional acceptance, and internalized shame can all shape emotional safety, conflict, closeness, and the ability to stay connected under pressure.

WHAT MAKES THIS LGBTQ AFFIRMATIVE

Not Based on Heteronormative Relationship Models

Your relationship is not being evaluated through straight, cisgender, or traditional norms. We do not assume fixed roles, one linear path, monogamy as the automatic standard, or a single “right” way to build a partnership.
These intensive and workshops are designed to work with your relationship as it actually exists.

Minority Stress Is Explicitly Addressed

These intensives and workshops make space for the ways minority stress can affect a couple’s emotional system — including hypervigilance, shutdown, escalation, people-pleasing, fear of being “too much,” or fear of causing harm.
You do not need to spend your time educating your therapist or defending why these patterns matter.

Affirming of Queer, Trans, and Non-Traditional Relationships

Your relationship gets to define itself — not conform to external expectations.

These intensives and workshops are designed to support:

queer, trans, and gender-diverse couples
couples outside traditional relationship scripts
partners navigating identity, visibility, safety, or family dynamics

Your relationship deserves support that honors who you are, rather than asking you to fit an outside model.

Facilitated by a Queer Therapist

This work is facilitated by a therapist who identifies as a lesbian / queer person. You are not being filtered through a heteronormative framework or subtly pushed toward someone else’s definition of relationship health. That allows the work to move with more precision, more trust, and less self-protection.

Religious Trauma & Faith Transition Support

I work with clients healing from religious trauma, high-control faith systems, purity culture, and identity-based spiritual harm. My approach is grounded, trauma-informed, and LGBTQ+ affirming. Whether you’re questioning, deconstructing, or rebuilding your connection to spirituality, you don’t have to do it alone.

You Deserve to Feel Seen, Heard, and Supported

Whether you’re exploring your identity, navigating relationships, or seeking a safe space to talk — you don’t have to do it alone. LGBTQ+ affirming counseling can help you feel more grounded and confident in who you are.