Therapy can be hard to seek when you are used to being misread, flattened, politicized, or asked to explain yourself before you can be cared for.

I offer queer-affirming psychodynamic therapy for adults in McLean, Virginia, near Vienna and Tysons Corner, with telehealth available throughout Virginia. My practice welcomes LGBTQIA+, trans, nonbinary, questioning, and neurodivergent adults who want therapy that can hold complexity without rushing toward easy answers.

Many of the people I work with are carrying some mix of anxiety, depression, trauma, shame, grief, relationship pain, family-of-origin wounds, religious or cultural injury, or the exhaustion of masking. Sometimes the problem is not only what happened, but all the ways you had to adapt around it: becoming careful, pleasing, watchful, hidden, impressive, self-contained, or hard to reach.

My work is psychodynamic and relational. That means we pay attention to patterns: what keeps repeating, what feels hard to say directly, what gets stirred up in relationships, and how older experiences still shape the present. We might talk about identity, desire, anger, grief, family, sex, gender, loneliness, belonging, envy, shame, dissociation, or the parts of yourself that have had to stay out of view.

I am not here to make you more palatable. I am interested in helping you become more honest with yourself, less alone with what you carry, and more able to live from a fuller sense of who you are.

As a queer clinician, I know how important it can be to sit with someone who does not need the basics explained before the real work can begin. At the same time, therapy is never one-size-fits-all. Queer and trans people are not a category of identical experiences. Your race, class, culture, religion, disability, neurodivergence, family history, body, relationships, and lived experience all matter.

Therapy with me tends to be thoughtful, warm, direct, and open-ended. We will not reduce your life to symptoms, coping skills, or a tidy story of resilience. We will make room for what is unresolved, contradictory, painful, funny, tender, and still becoming.

Woods Psychotherapy offers in-person queer-affirming therapy in McLean, VA, near Vienna, Tysons Corner, Falls Church, and Arlington, and online therapy throughout Virginia.

I offer a brief consultation so we can talk about what brings you in and whether working together may be a good fit.