therapy supporting GENDER & SEXUAL DIVERSITY
It’s our specialty.
WE PRACTICE Affirming Therapy in Brooklyn & Virtual Across New York State
At Groundwork Therapy, our Brooklyn-based therapists provide affirming, depth-oriented therapy for LGBTQIA+ individuals, couples, and partnerships, with in-person sessions available in Brooklyn and virtual therapy offered throughout New York State.
We understand that finding the right therapist often means finding someone who already understands the context you’re living in. Someone who doesn’t require explanation before support can begin. As queer-affirming therapists in Brooklyn, we offer therapy grounded in respect, cultural competence, and an understanding of the complexities that often come with gender identity, sexuality, relationships, family dynamics, and belonging.
This is a space where your identity is not something to defend, simplify, or educate around. It is a space where you can arrive fully.
Our Approach to Affirmative Therapy
Affirmative therapy is more than acceptance.
It means your therapist understands how systems, relationships, culture, and lived experiences can shape the way you move through the world. It means therapy is not centered around questioning the validity of your identity, but around supporting your emotional life, relationships, and growth within it. Working with an LGBTQIA+ therapist can make a meaningful difference in the therapeutic process.
Many queer and trans clients come to therapy carrying experiences of misunderstanding, invisibility, or the exhaustion of constantly translating themselves for others. Therapy should not become another place where you have to explain basic parts of who you are before meaningful work can begin.
Our therapists bring experience supporting clients through:
Identity exploration
Coming out processes
Gender questioning and transition-related experiences
Family rejection or conditional acceptance
Relationship and intimacy concerns
Religious trauma or shame
Navigating systemic oppression and minority stress
Exploring nontraditional relationship structures
We approach this work with openness, nuance, and care, not assumption.
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Therapy to Support Coming Out
Coming out is often spoken about as a single moment, but in reality, it can be an ongoing process shaped by safety, relationships, culture, and readiness.
For some people, coming out feels liberating. For others, it brings fear, grief, uncertainty, or complicated family dynamics. Many experience all of these emotions at once. We offer therapy to support your coming out journey in a way that honors your pace and your emotional reality.
This work may include:
Exploring fears around rejection or loss
Processing internalized shame or self-doubt
Navigating conversations with family, partners, or community
Building confidence and self-trust
Creating emotional support systems
Processing grief tied to relationships or identities that shift
Coming out is not something you owe anyone. Therapy is a place to explore what authenticity means to you, not what others expect from you.
Therapy can support and help prepare you for the vulnerable, scary, and sometimes risky conversations with family, co-workers, friends, and/or partners. Whether to tell, who to tell, when to tell, and how to tell is ALWAYS up to you.
Your therapist creates the safe space to make these decisions at your pace, as well as lean in for emotional support around the outcomes.
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Therapy that Makes Room for Exploration
Identity is not always linear or easily defined.
For some people, therapy begins with certainty. For others, it begins with questions. You may be exploring your sexuality for the first time. You may be questioning your gender identity after years of silence. You may feel disconnected from labels entirely but still know something inside you is asking for attention.
Working with a gender and identity therapist offers space to slow down and explore those questions without pressure to arrive at immediate answers.
Therapy can become a place to ask:
Who am I when I’m not performing for others?
What parts of myself have I learned to hide?
What feels authentic to me versus expected of me?
What would it feel like to live more honestly?
There is no “correct” timeline for identity exploration. You are allowed to move slowly. You are allowed to change. You are allowed to not know yet.
Therapy provides you that safe, private, judgment-free, unconditionally-supportive space in which you can explore all depths of who you are and what you feel. This exploration may lead to a new discovery, clarification, or self-affirmation of what you already felt to be true about yourself.
Therapy can help you try out different labels and ways of understanding yourself with the goal of finding what reflects you fully and fits you accurately.
Or it can help you reject labels and boxes altogether and develop greater comfort living authentically in the in-between, fluid, or non-binary space. Learn more about our general therapy approach.
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Our therapists do relationship therapy (traditionally called “couples therapy”) with partnerships of all configurations: poly, non-monogamous, open, married, engaged, newly committed, straight, queer, and so on.
Relationship therapy with your partner can address a whole host of issues and challenges in your dynamic. (Read more about our general approach to Couples Therapy and our approach to therapy with queer partners below.)
We can also help you navigate unique challenges that queer couples face such as:
Gender Roles Within Your Relationship ~ Fertility Issues ~ Gender Transition of One Partner ~ Parenting
Preparing to open Up a Relationship ~ Issues with Trust and/or Jealousy in Open Relationships
Challenges with External Family Relationships ~ Queer Family Planning
Gender-Affirming Therapy in Brooklyn
For many trans, nonbinary, gender expansive, and questioning individuals, therapy can feel vulnerable in ways that go beyond the usual challenges of opening up.
Working with providers who genuinely understand gender diversity matters. As providers of gender-affirming therapy in Brooklyn, we support clients navigating:
Gender identity exploration
Social, medical, or relational transitions
Dysphoria and body-related distress
Family or relationship challenges
Questions around visibility and safety
Identity development and self-understanding
Affirming therapy is not about pushing someone toward a particular identity or outcome. It is about creating a space where your experience is respected, explored thoughtfully, and supported without judgment.
You deserve therapy where your identity is treated as real from the beginning.
More Than Affirmation
Being affirming is not just about using the right language, though language matters deeply. It is about understanding how identity intersects with emotional life, relationships, safety, belonging, and self-worth.
As LGBTIA+ therapists, we recognize that queer and trans experiences are not defined solely by struggle. There is joy here too. Creativity. Expansion. Community. Love.
Therapy should make room for all of it. Not just survival, but possibility.
queer relationship & couples therapy
with queer therapists
For queer couples and partnerships, including those in nontraditional or non-monogamous relationship structures, working with a therapist who specializes in gender and sexuality offers a more affirming and informed foundation for the therapeutic process.
Our therapists bring an understanding of the diverse ways people experience and express identity, intimacy, connection and commitment informed by our work with queer couples across Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the broader New York City area, which is especially important for those navigating dynamics outside of heteronormative or monogamous frameworks.
an affirmative approach
Our therapists work with couples across a wide range of relationship structures, including:
Same-gender partnerships
Polyamorous and consensually non-monogamous relationships
Open relationships
Queerplatonic partnerships
Chosen family systems
Co-parenting dynamics
Working with a queer-affirming therapist means your relationships are not filtered through assumptions about what connection, commitment, or family “should” look like. You also don’t have to educate us on what your queer relationship looks like.
Instead, therapy focuses on helping you define your relationship for yourself.
Together, we may explore:
Communication and conflict patterns
Attachment dynamics
Trust and emotional safety
Intimacy and connection
Boundaries and relational agreements
Navigating external stressors impacting the relationship
The goal is not to fit your relationship into a predefined structure. It is to help you build relationships that feel sustainable, connected, and aligned with your values.
Therapy in brooklyn & across new york state
We offer in-person sessions in Brooklyn, creating a grounded and supportive environment for deeper therapeutic work.
For clients elsewhere in New York State, virtual therapy provides the same level of care, collaboration, and affirming support with added flexibility and accessibility.
Whether you’re seeking support around identity exploration, relationships, coming out, or simply wanting to work with someone who understands the nuances of queer experience, therapy can become a space where you feel more fully seen.
begin where you are
You do not need to have your identity fully figured out before beginning therapy. You do not need the “right” language. You do not need certainty. You do not need permission.
You only need a space where exploration is possible.
As queer-affirming therapists in Brooklyn, we’re here to help create that space, one grounded in curiosity, respect, and the belief that you deserve to be known fully, not partially.