What is LGBTQ+ affirming therapy?
To affirm means to state something publicly and positively as a fact - to express strong support. It comes from the Latin affirmare: literally, to make firm.
In the context of LGBTQ+ affirming therapy, that word carries weight.
Pride month is a useful reminder that rainbow flags and visibility, whilst meaningful, are only part of the picture. Pride began as a protest, not just a parade - a space to come together, to remember those who came before us, and to acknowledge the challenges people have endured, overcome, and continue to face. Visibility and acceptance are not the same thing.
It is well documented that LGBTQ+ people experience significantly higher rates of mental health difficulties - including anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicidality - largely as a result of minority stress: the chronic strain of navigating discrimination, stigma, and marginalisation. Whilst representation of gay and lesbian people in media and public life has widened and become more accepting in many contexts, we continue to see erasure of bisexual identities, and an intensification of discrimination, questioning, and open disdain directed at trans and gender diverse people and communities. The challenges facing the LGBTQ+ community are not uniform, and an affirming therapist holds that range.
So what does LGBTQ+ affirming therapy actually mean?
In its simplest form: your identity, your expression, and your experience are not up for debate. You may arrive with curiosities or questions about yourself - things you're trying to understand better, to explore, or to name - and that is welcome. But it is not the therapist's role to question your identity or to position it as something requiring justification or explanation.
An LGBTQ+ affirming therapist holds you in your entirety. A radical acceptance of the structures you design for yourself - your relationships, your gender, your sexuality, your community, however that looks.
Queer and trans people, and LGBTQ+ people more broadly, are often by necessity living creatively. Navigating discrimination, erasure, and harm requires a particular kind of resourcefulness, resilience, and courage. An affirming therapist recognises both the weight of those challenges and the extraordinary creativity they can prompt. This is sometimes referred to as a strengths-based approach: seeing not only the pressures a person carries, but also what those pressures have called forth in them.
Whilst it is entirely natural to want to ease tension, distress, or points of pressure - and that is always valid - it is equally important to make space for queer joy. Trans joy. The vibrancy, humour, depth, and community that LGBTQ+ individuals and communities bring, and where that shows up in a person's life. An affirming therapist holds both.
LGBTQ+ affirming therapy also means holding the internal and the external together. Your feelings, your history, your relational patterns - alongside the wider systemic pressures, injustices, and structures that shape your experience. Difficulties that arise in the context of discrimination or marginalisation are not personal failings. An affirming therapist knows the difference.
If you are looking for LGBTQ+ affirming counselling - whether you identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, trans, non-binary, or are still figuring out what feels right - you deserve a space where you don't have to explain yourself before the work can begin.
That space is what I try to offer.