Working With an LGBTQ+ Affirming Therapist in Los Angeles
Affirming is a word that gets used loosely. In practice it means you should not have to spend the first several sessions educating your therapist, defending the legitimacy of your relationship structure, or bracing for the moment your identity gets treated as the presenting problem when you came in about your job.
Michael Nee, M.A., LMFT (#89379) has worked with LGBTQ+ individuals, couples and families since before 2010, from an office in Mar Vista at 13101 W. Washington Boulevard, Suite 454, Los Angeles, CA 90066, and by telehealth throughout California.
Relationships That Do Not Fit One Template
Long-term commitment now takes a wide range of shapes, and plenty of them never involve paperwork. Couples work here covers married and unmarried partners, monogamous and open relationships, polyamorous arrangements and throuples, and the negotiations that come with each. What works for one couple is not automatically transferable to the next.
What holds across all of them is the same: honesty, trust and mutual acceptance are what make a relationship durable. See couples therapy.
Sexuality, Identity and a Certified Sex Therapist
Uncertainty about orientation, questions about identity, desire that does not match what you were told it should be, kink, or a sexual life that changed after transition, medication or illness — these are ordinary topics here rather than referrals elsewhere. Michael is a certified sex therapist, an AASECT member since 2021 and a member of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality since 2020, and began a PhD in sexology in 2021.
See sex and sexuality and sex therapy for couples.
What Else Gets Worked On
Coming out, at any age, including to adult children or ageing parents. Family estrangement and repair. Minority stress and the exhaustion of constant low-level vigilance. Grief that a wider circle does not recognise. And the entirely ordinary reasons anyone sees a therapist — anxiety, depression, adult ADHD, grief and life transitions — without those being read through your identity.
Book a Free Consultation
The first step is a free 15 to 40 minute phone consultation so both of us can judge the fit. Call (310) 927-1755, email michael@michaelneetherapy.com, or use the contact page.