What would it feel like to sit with a therapist who already gets it, so you never have to explain who you are?
This is therapy for LGBTQIA+ teens and adults who are tired of spending session time managing their provider’s discomfort. For people navigating the intersection of queerness, mental health, and a world that still regularly asks them to justify their existence. For anyone whose identity has been treated as the problem rather than as something worth genuinely affirming.
At Embodied Therapy, your identity is not a topic to be handled carefully. It is just part of who you are.
If you recognized yourself in any of these, you are in the right place.
Being LGBTQIA+ in a world that still defaults to straightness and cisgender normativity is a particular kind of exhausting. It is the small moments as much as the large ones. The constant calibration of how much of yourself to show in which context. The vigilance. The grief. The specific loneliness of being in a room full of people and still feeling like you have to hide something.
Minority stress is a real, clinically documented phenomenon. The chronic stress of navigating a world that frequently marginalizes, misunderstands, or actively harms LGBTQIA+ people has measurable effects on mental health. This is not weakness. It is a completely normal response to an abnormal amount of sustained pressure.
Therapy here does not treat your identity as the problem. It treats the world’s response to your identity as a real and serious stressor that deserves real and serious attention.
Affirming therapy is therapy that does not pathologize LGBTQIA+ identities. It does not treat queerness or gender diversity as symptoms, disorders, or problems to address. It starts from the premise that you are not broken.
That might sound like a low bar. In the best clinical settings, it should be. But for many LGBTQIA+ people, finding a provider who is genuinely affirming rather than merely tolerant is not easy to do.
Affirming therapy at Embodied Therapy means:
Research consistently shows that LGBTQIA+ people experience depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and suicidality at significantly higher rates than the general population. These disparities are not caused by queerness. They are caused by the chronic stress of navigating a world that frequently marginalizes LGBTQIA+ people.
Minority stress theory describes the ongoing, socially based stress that marginalized groups experience. For LGBTQIA+ people, this includes experiences of discrimination, internalized homophobia or transphobia, the constant vigilance of deciding how much of yourself to reveal, and the cumulative weight of existing in spaces that were not designed with you in mind.
Understanding mental health struggles in this context does not mean the struggles are not real or do not need treatment. It means that treatment which ignores this context is incomplete.
Coming out is not a single event. It is an ongoing process that happens in new relationships, new contexts, and new parts of the self across a lifetime. Therapy can hold the complexity and the courage of that process at any stage.
Navigating gender identity, exploring what transition looks like or does not look like, and working with the distress that comes from inhabiting a body or social role that does not fit. Therapy here supports you in finding clarity, not in arriving at any particular predetermined destination.
The grief and the liberation of having a family of origin that does not understand or accept who you are. Building and sustaining the chosen family structures that are more honest and more sustaining.
The particularly painful intersection of faith and LGBTQIA+ identity. See our religious trauma page for more on this specific intersection.
Navigating non-monogamous, polyamorous, or other non-traditional relationship structures in a world that does not always provide frameworks for them. Without judgment, and without a predetermined idea of what healthy looks like.
The beliefs about yourself that got installed by a world that told you your identity was wrong. Therapy helps examine and rebuild those beliefs over time without shame.
The specific experience of being queer and neurodivergent, queer and chronically ill, queer and navigating racism, queer and processing religious harm. These intersections are not exceptional. They are the actual texture of many people's lives, and they deserve care that holds all of it.
LGBTQIA+ clients who do this work often find they are able to:
Approaches are chosen together based on what actually fits each person’s brain, nervous system, and life. There is no single method that works for everyone.
The foundation of everything here. Your identity is not the problem. Therapy is built around genuine affirmation and a structural understanding of how systems have contributed to harm.
A clinical lens that takes seriously the specific stressors LGBTQIA+ people navigate and situates mental health challenges in that context rather than treating them as purely individual problems.
Works with the body-based experience of minority stress, chronic vigilance, and identity-based harm. Helpful for the nervous system effects of living as a queer person in a world that is often unkind.
Explores the parts that developed in response to a world that was not affirming. The part that hides. The part that is angry. The part that is grieving. The part that is finally ready to come forward.
Practical tools for managing the emotional intensity that comes with navigating minority stress, family conflict, and the specific kind of grief that queer people often carry.
Helps LGBTQIA+ clients clarify their own values and build a life oriented around them, even in a world that sometimes pushes back hard.
For the traumatic experiences that frequently accumulate in LGBTQIA+ lives, including family rejection, discrimination, hate-based incidents, and religious harm.
Rebuilds trust with your body's cues and removes weight from the equation. Health at Every Size is not about ignoring health — it is about separating health from body size and moral worth.
This may be a good fit if you:
Our founder is a queer, gender non-conforming, neurodivergent clinician. They are not a straight therapist who is open to working with LGBTQIA+ clients. They are member of this community, and that distinction matters to the people who are looking for it.
We see clients virtually. Our therapist is licensed in New Mexico, Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Oregon, Texas, and Washington.
Our founder, Allison VanGordon (they/she), is a queer, gender non-conforming therapist who has provided LGBTQIA2S+ affirming care since the beginning of their clinical career. Their ongoing continuing education keeps them current on the clinical literature and community standards related to queer and gender-diverse communities. Their PhD research includes a focus on marginalized communities and the ways mental health systems have historically failed LGBTQIA2S+ people.
Embodied Therapy is an explicitly affirming practice. That means the affirmation is not dependent on any one individual clinician. It is built into how the practice operates and who it serves.
Read more about Embodied Therapy here and read more about Allison here.
An affirming therapist does not pathologize LGBTQIA+ identities, does not treat queerness or gender diversity as a problem to be resolved, and holds genuine clinical competency in LGBTQIA+ mental health rather than just an attitude of openness. At Embodied Therapy, our therapist is LGBTQIA+ herself. That is a meaningful difference for the people looking for it.
Yes. Teens who are questioning their gender or sexuality deserve a space to explore without pressure toward any particular answer. We support the exploration, not a predetermined destination.
Confidentiality applies here as in any therapy context. We talk through what privacy looks like for you at the start of treatment. If you are a minor, we discuss what your parents will and will not be told.
Yes, without judgment and without a predetermined standard for what healthy relationships look like. If your relationship structure is part of what brings you to therapy, it is welcome here.
These frequently co-occur. LGBTQIA2S+ people experience eating disorders, anxiety, depression, and trauma at higher rates. We are equipped to hold all of it without treating your identity as secondary to the clinical concern, or the clinical concern as secondary to your identity.
The intake session is $250.
Ongoing individual therapy sessions range from $85 to $155, depending on need and availability.
Family and parent support sessions range from $105 to $175.
Sliding scale options are available. You can check your eligibility instantly below — no phone calls, no hassle.
You do not have to explain yourself before you reach out. A free consultation is just a conversation.
A free consultation is just a conversation. You ask questions. We ask questions. Together we figure out whether this feels like the right fit before anyone commits to anything.
