Gender, Sexuality, Culture

While I enjoy a diverse psychotherapy practice, I have a particular interest in gender, sexuality, and culture. Many people come to me for accompaniment as they process these aspects of their identity and experience.

Gender

Are you thoughtful about your experience with ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’?  Perhaps wanting to consider more deeply what these concepts have meant to you and how you’ve navigated them in your world?  We might try to know more about what it’s been like for you to live amidst a gender binary, to feel sometimes like you fit quite comfortably here, or to feel the pain of the binary’s constraints while you work hard to break free of them. I try to see the phenomenon called ‘gender’ everywhere, in all of us, regardless of the names and identities we have for ourselves. I’ll be curious with you about how you and ‘gender’ have lived and made meaning together, both consciously and unconsciously, in your relationships, families, communities, and wider social worlds. You may have a sense that your relationship to gender is intimately involved with some of your anxieties, fears, wishes, longings, bodily experience, and the reasons you’re seeking therapy. You also may have done some significant work for yourself around your relationship to gender already, and the identity piece of it, for example, would like to be left alone, respectfully. We can certainly do this.

I work with adolescents and adults of all gender identities, including those without a name for their identity.  I also have extensive experience working with transgender and non-binary folks as a knowledgable and affirming provider.

Sexuality

Sexuality and gender are, for many, intimately related. I have a specialty in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis with folks identifying somewhere along the LGBTQ spectrum.  However, like with gender, I can think with you about sexuality beyond its identity or ‘orientation,’ beyond your experience of naming yourself and living that name in the world (i.e. as lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, straight, etc.). How might sexuality enliven the dynamics in your relationships with others, guide your ambitions, or shape your inhibitions? For many, sexuality also has been involved in past traumas, the reverberations of which are still felt today.  Psychotherapy can offer a safe, private, and non-judgmental place to explore your experiences with and questions about sexuality.

I work with adults in a wide variety of relationship configurations and with diverse desires.  I am comfortable and knowledgeable working with the poly and kink communities and offer an open-minded space for all to engage the issues and questions that bring them to therapy.

Culture

With gender and sexuality in mind, as well as other intersecting aspects of social identity, I tend to feel quite attuned to the power of cultural norms. They are rife with unacknowledged assumptions about the foundations of identity. We can feel constrained, alienated, and ‘othered’ by these norms, and we can find a home in them, a family. Cultural norms tell us what it means and looks like to call oneself a girl or a boy, upper middle class or working class, a young trans lesbian in your community, a second generation Italian Catholic boy born and raised in the North End, or a Turkish Muslim woman adjusting from rural life in her country of origin to an American city. We are all so much more than the norms in our midst and, in some complex ways, we are made up of them. For as long as I can remember, and before I had the words to say so, I’ve been interested in how we each come to see, name, and respond to these norms – negotiate with them in some very personal and idiosyncratic manner – oftentimes with great creativity and resiliency. In our work together, I will likely look with you for how you do this, wittingly and unwittingly. If you’re interested, we might think about how you can do this more consciously, so that you might come more fully into being – your being, in your world.

I have a diverse psychotherapy practice in many ways.  I enjoy seeing folks from newer immigrant backgrounds, international students, third culture kids, adults in cross-cultural relationships, and others for whom their social identities are at the forefront of their experience in the world.  All are welcome.