Sexuality, Gender and Relationships

Maybe you’re working something out about your sexuality or your gender. Maybe you’re carrying shame that’s older than you are. Maybe you want to talk about your relationships, or about kink, without spending the first three sessions explaining the basics to someone.

I identify as a queer gay man, and this isn’t an abstract specialism for me. I’ve lived my own version of the questions people bring here: coming out, working out who I was outside what was expected of me, shame, and learning to be at home in my own body and my own desires. Your story won’t be mine. But I’m not looking at this from the outside, and there is a particular kind of relief in being met by someone who has been somewhere near it.

Much of what we carry in this part of life has roots beyond us – in families, cultures and systems that weren’t built with us in mind. I hold that context alongside you, rather than treating what you feel as though it started with you.

LGBTQIA+ identity, coming out and gender

Some of what people bring to this work:

• Coming out, or working out whether you want to, and to whom
• Coming out later in life, after a marriage, a career, or years of not saying it
• Shame about being gay, lesbian, bisexual, or asexual that has quietly become part of how you see yourself
• Questioning your gender, or living as trans or non-binary somewhere that makes that costly
• Family, culture or religion pulling hard against who you are
• Being the only queer person in your workplace, your family, or your town
• Dating, intimacy and connection, and what gets in the way of them
• Bringing all of this into one sense of yourself, rather than a self that’s kept in separate compartments

You don’t need to arrive with a label, or with any clarity at all. Not knowing is a reasonable place to start.

Kink, BDSM and alternative sexual practices

You won’t need to explain kink, fetish or BDSM to me before we can get to the work. I know the territory, and I’m not going to treat your desires as a symptom of something that went wrong.

That doesn’t mean nothing is ever worth looking at. If something about how you’re practising is troubling you – the way it interacts with shame, or consent, or your sense of control – we can look at it properly. The difference is that we start from curiosity rather than from a diagnosis.

Non-monogamy and relationship diversity

Polyamory, open relationships, and other non-monogamous arrangements are as workable as monogamy, and I don’t treat them as a phase or as evidence of avoidance. What matters is what’s actually happening for you inside your relationships: jealousy you didn’t expect, agreements that stopped fitting, being the person who wanted this less, or the loneliness that can sit oddly alongside having several people in your life. We will look at what you want, what you’re afraid to say, what you keep agreeing to.

Sexuality more broadly

Not everything here is about identity. I also work with desire and its absence, pleasure, body confidence, sexual difficulties, and sex after trauma, through the same non-judgemental, body-aware lens.

How I work

A lot of this happens through talking, but not only. What we carry about sexuality and identity tends to live in the body before it reaches words: as tension, bracing, or a kind of disconnection that thinking alone doesn’t touch. So I bring a body-based approach alongside the conversation, which often gets somewhere more useful, more quickly, than talking on its own.

Where earlier experiences, such as rejection, assault, a difficult coming-out, are still actively shaping how you relate to yourself now, I draw on EMDR as part of the work.

My training here is specific rather than incidental: EMDR, training as a Somatic Sexuality Practitioner, and further training in therapy with sexual minority clients. I have also reviewed for the Journal of Homosexuality and lectured to trainee psychologists and therapists on the subject.

Sessions are online, in English, and I also work in Maltese. If you’re more comfortable in Spanish or Italian, that’s usually workable too.

Ready to talk?

If this sounds like the kind of support you’re after, I offer a free initial call – a chance to say what’s bringing you, ask anything, and see whether we’re a good fit.
No obligation either way.

Book a free call