I'm Jay Woods, a psychotherapist in private practice offering psychodynamic therapy in McLean, Virginia, minutes from Washington, DC, and via telehealth throughout Virginia.

I listen closely, ask questions that open things up rather than close them down, and tell you what I'm noticing. Therapy with me is a place to speak plainly, before you've worked out how to explain what's wrong. It's a place to talk more freely than you're used to, to notice what keeps happening again and again, and to get curious about the parts of yourself you've learned to keep at a distance.

Before this work, I practiced law. People sometimes ask what that has to do with sitting in a room helping someone understand their mother. More than you’d think. Law taught me to listen for what is being said, what is being argued around, and where the official version of things starts to strain. I left the law, but kept that habit of close attention: to patterns, omissions, contradictions, and the truths that often sit underneath the story a person has learned to tell.

As a queer therapist, I know the toll of being half-seen, and I bring real attention to the people who sit across from me. I work with adults from a range of backgrounds, many of whom haven't always felt understood by families, institutions, or their own inner critic. Some are sorting through questions of identity, gender, or sexuality. Some are worn down by anxiety that won't quiet. Some have spent a long time feeling like they never fit the role they were handed, without a good name for why. Whatever brings you in, we can begin with it as it actually is.

My orientation is psychodynamic and relational. I'm interested in the emotional patterns underneath the presenting problem, and in how earlier relationships keep showing up, uninvited, in present ones. We'll pay attention to the defenses you built for good reason, the conflicts that keep recurring in new costumes, and what starts to loosen once those patterns can be named out loud inside a relationship steady enough to hold them.

The work moves at its own pace. Some sessions feel exploratory, even playful; others feel slow or difficult, the kind where nothing seems to have happened until it surfaces later, on the drive home. All of that can be part of the process. My job is to hold a setting steady enough that more of you, including the parts usually edited out for other audiences, can actually show up.