Stephanie Bain, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist

I work with thoughtful, emotionally aware adults and couples who keep noticing the same patterns showing up in love, work, and their own inner worlds. Many of my clients are queer, creative, analytical, emotionally intense, or “the strong one” for everyone else. You might be quietly struggling with anxiety, shame, burnout, attachment wounds, trauma, or the aftershocks of complex relationships. You want depth, honesty, and therapy that actually goes somewhere. I offer therapy for people ready to understand themselves in a more meaningful way. In sessions, we will explore the deeper aspects of your experience, collaborate on the practical problems in your life, increase awareness, get unstuck from unhelpful patterns, soothe anxieties, strengthen relationships, and learn to set boundaries and communicate. My style is direct, warm, humorous, and, at times, challenging.

My approach is psychodynamic and relational: we get curious about patterns, attachment, and the emotional logic underneath what feels stuck. I also integrate EMDR, parts work, and practical tools. Therapy with me is collaborative, engaged, and real. We think together, feel together, and work toward more flexibility, self-trust, and satisfying relationships.

I work with individuals who have been told they\'re ?too sensitive? or ?too much,? feel misunderstood, or feel alienated from the mainstream. I work with non-traditional families or partners looking for a therapist who \"gets it.\" The number one reason clients reach out is they are experiencing some kind of distress--and they would like to experience less of it. This distress may arise from our relationships with friends, family, partners, jobs, school, systems, or from our emotions and thoughts, or from our behavior. Many want to make a change but are not sure how--therapy is great for that. Others simply want to deepen their connection with themselves, their community, and the world around them--therapy is great for that, too.

Drawing on your internal resources, we will increase awareness, get unstuck from unhelpful patterns, build a greater understanding of yourself, heal and strengthen relationships, calm anxieties, soothe depression, and learn to set boundaries and communicate effectively. My job is to collaborate with you, uncovering your own personal toolkit and strategies to help you show up in your life the way you want to. I will be there with you to support, challenge, ask guiding questions, provide resources, teach skills, share patterns I see, and notice what is happening in our relationship. ? Working together, we will collaborate on the practical problems arising in your life and the deeper aspects of your experience. We will hold space for the traumas you have personally experienced as well as traumas that happen in community-specific and global ways. This would include looking at your family dynamics, your history of experiencing oppression, your beliefs, how you show up in relationships, your feelings, your dreams, and your understanding of the world around you. We will also look to the ?here and now? experience by exploring active feelings, sensations, imagination, and our relationship. Together we will attempt to understand, tend to, and create meaning for these aspects of your experience.

Inclusive + Affirming Psychotherapy. I enthusiastically welcome activists, LGBTQIA+, poly + kinky folks, artists + dreamers, highly sensitive + emotionally intense types, people who experience marginalization, and general misfits. It is also important to me to bring humility and accountability to my role as a therapist in sharing my intersections of privilege and marginalization. I am of European ancestry, descended from settlers living on colonized land. I\'m a queer, able-bodied, city-living, millennial raised in a working class family. I\'m dedicated to equity in my relationships and fighting for it systematically.?