Therapy for Bisexual Adults & Couples in Durham, NC
I offer therapy to bisexual adults and couples in Durham and online throughout North Carolina — individual work, couples work, and the questions of identity, love, and belonging that can run through both.
Bisexuality is often treated as a way station: something to be explained, outgrown, or resolved into a tidier category. It is asked to prove itself in ways other identities are not — to the straight world, which reads you by the partner on your arm, and sometimes to the gay world, which can do the same.
Many bisexual people become fluent in a particular kind of quiet: letting an assumption stand because correcting it costs too much, coming out again to people who keep filing you elsewhere, or feeling a part of your life go unseen inside a relationship that is, in every other way, home.
Therapy does not need to make anything of your bisexuality. It can simply be true — not a phase, not a compromise, not a question awaiting settlement — while we attend to whatever you actually came to talk about.
What Brings People In
Some bisexual clients come with concerns that have little to do with orientation — anxiety, depression, grief, work, family, relationships, meaning — and want a therapist with whom this part of life will not require translation.
Others come with questions closer to identity itself: a coming out that is recent, late, partial, or still under consideration; the experience of being read incorrectly by nearly everyone; or the particular grief of an invisibility that follows you into rooms where you expected to be seen.
For bisexual people of color, and for those whose lives cross more than one line of difference, being misread or filed elsewhere can happen in several directions at once. My approach to multicultural counseling takes that complexity seriously rather than treating any part of who you are as a footnote.
And some come because desire, identity, and commitment are having a conversation that deserves an unhurried hearing: what it means for an identity to persist whether or not a relationship displays it, and how to live honestly inside a life that holds more than it shows.
Therapy for Couples
A partner’s gender does not settle anyone’s orientation, though the world will assume it does — and sometimes a partner assumes it too.
In couples therapy, bisexuality may be in the room as a subject: a disclosure that landed hard, an insecurity that keeps surfacing as an argument about something else, or a mixed-orientation relationship trying to find steadier ground. Questions about visibility, commitment, monogamy, desire, or belonging may need somewhere they can be spoken without accusation or embarrassment.
Just as often, bisexuality is simply part of who one of you is — present, unremarkable, and deserving of a therapist who will not treat it as the hidden explanation for every difficulty between you.
The work is not to defend an identity or force reassurance. It is to understand what each person is experiencing, what has become difficult to say, and what would make more honesty and security possible between you.
How I Work
I am a Harvard-trained therapist with over twenty years of experience, and I have worked with LGBTQ+ individuals and couples throughout my career.
My approach is grounded in psychodynamic therapy: listening for the history beneath a pattern, the protection inside a way of coping, and what takes shape between us in the room. In couples work, I also draw from Emotionally Focused Therapy, the Gottman Method, Imago Therapy, and discernment counseling, using each as a lens or tool rather than a script.
With bisexual clients, that listening includes what the world has made of your identity: the dismissals absorbed so early they begin to feel like facts, the vigilance that may outlive its usefulness, and the distance between who you are and who you have been permitted to be.
But bisexuality need not become the organizing subject of therapy. It is part of the life in the room, not an explanation imposed upon it.
Begin
You do not need a settled account of your identity to begin. Uncertainty is a fine place to start a conversation, and so is clarity.
We can begin with whatever is most present and see where the conversation leads.
Serving Durham · Chapel Hill · Raleigh · Hillsborough · Online across North Carolina
