I am seeking a long-term mental healthcare provider. My previous therapist, who I saw weekly for three consecutive years, just left her practice. I am juggling a lot between integrating into a new city, embarking on a new career-path, and simultaneously working through grad school.

My husband and I have both committed to regular therapy so we will never have to be the entirety of each other’s emotional support systems. Having a neutral third-party to discuss problems internal to my marriage really helps keep it stable, and I think that a therapist’s insight gets more valuable the longer we meet.

I am looking for assistance in maintenance. Also, I have never had any positive models of what a gay marriage can look like. My husband and I have a pretty good framework, but one thing I was drawn to Jamaal’s profile was that he, too, is a gay married man. I think it would be valuable to have someone else embarking on this frontier of an entirely new American institution.

I have been in therapy from June 2017 to March 2020. I started seeing a therapist to help navigate a seemingly insurmountable amount of familial homophobia in relation to my upcoming marriage to my then-boyfriend of 8 years (now 11 years). The wedding at the time, was an incredibly traumatic event. A month following, all of these things happened in the exact same week:
-I was laid off from my job unexpectedly
-I caught my parents in a cover-up wherein they were selling the childhood home to be with my brother across the country without telling me
-Callously, my father gave the car he gifted me for my college graduation to my brother
-Our roommate broke the lease and moved out.

I had to completely rebuild my entire life from the ground up, with no one around me but my husband (whose job had him traveling two weeks every month, no less).

My previous therapist helped me to understand that the only well known public representation of my experience is that of Mathew Shephard. The only difference for me was that I survived and went on to thrive. She helped me rebuild a whole new life and way of being that is better than anything I’ve ever known before.

I want to keep stable on my current path, and I want to have a knowledgeable support on hand in case I experience so drastic a collapse ever again.