I'm Jay Woods, a psychotherapist in private practice in McLean, Virginia, minutes from Washington, DC, and online throughout Virginia.

I work psychodynamically, which means I'm interested in what keeps repeating, what feels hard to say directly, and how earlier relationships continue to shape the present. In therapy with me, I listen closely, ask questions, and tell you what I'm noticing. I'm not especially interested in rushing toward a tidy explanation before we understand what the thing actually is.

Therapy can be a place to speak more plainly than you usually get to. You do not have to arrive with the problem already organized into a coherent story. Let's feel free to begin with the mess: the anxiety that will not quiet, the part of you that is tired of performing competence, the feeling that something in your life does not quite fit.

Before becoming a therapist, I practiced law. People sometimes ask what that has to do with sitting in a room helping someone understand their mother. The answer: 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 something about the cost of being half-seen. I work with adults from many backgrounds, including queer, trans, nonbinary, neurodivergent, and highly sensitive people who have spent a long time translating themselves into something easier for other people to understand. Sometimes the work is explicitly about identity, gender, sexuality, or family. Sometimes those things are simply part of the room while we talk about grief, work, desire, or the old injuries that keep finding new costumes.

My orientation is psychodynamic and relational. That means paying attention to how things happen, not just what's said: what you avoid, what you expect from other people, what you start to expect from me. Those stubborn patterns can actually move and change when they’re noticed inside a relationship steady enough to hold them. The defenses, the contradictions, the places where someone gets stuck…that's usually where the work actually starts.

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.