LGBTQ+ Affirming Therapy in Cincinnati
For the parts of yourself that have spent too long bracing for someone else's reaction.
You deserve a therapist who doesn't just tolerate who you are, but genuinely understands your experience. At Lumenso, we don't treat your identity as a footnote. It's part of the whole picture, and it deserves to be honored in the room.
Maybe you've worked with affirming therapists before and something still felt off, like you were having to translate, explain, or educate. Maybe you're considering therapy for the first time and you want to know, before you ever sit down, that the person across from you actually gets it. Maybe what you're carrying isn't even about being LGBTQ+ on the surface, but you know the experience of moving through the world as queer is woven into all of it.
Wherever you are, you don't have to make yourself smaller to fit into therapy here.
What "Affirming" Actually Means
The word "affirming" gets used a lot. It shows up in directories, on therapist profiles, in marketing copy. And too often, it means very little, just that someone is willing to work with LGBTQ+ clients without judgment.
That's not enough. Tolerance isn't the same as understanding. A rainbow on the website doesn't tell you whether your therapist actually grasps the experience of growing up with the quiet certainty that something about you was wrong, or what it does to a nervous system to spend years scanning every room for safety, or why "just being yourself" can feel terrifying when being yourself has historically come at a cost.
At Lumenso, affirming care means something specific:
We understand minority stress as a clinical reality, not a buzzword. The chronic stress of stigma, discrimination, and concealment shapes the body and mind in measurable ways, and it shows up in therapy whether you name it or not.
We've done the work to recognize internalized homophobia and transphobia, the messages you absorbed before you ever had a choice about absorbing them, and how those messages still show up in self-criticism, shame, perfectionism, or difficulty receiving care.
We take family rejection, religious harm, and identity-based trauma seriously, not as side issues to your "real" presenting concern, but as central to how your nervous system learned to operate.
You won't have to educate your therapist on what microaggressions cost. You won't have to explain why current legislative threats affect your day-to-day. You won't have to defend your identity, your relationship structure, your pronouns, your name. We start from a place of knowing.
What We Specialize In
We work with adults across the LGBTQ+ spectrum navigating:
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Whether you're 19, 49, or 69, the process of acknowledging who you are to yourself and to others is significant. We hold space for the loss, the relief, the fear, the freedom, all of it.
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Not everyone arrives in therapy with a clear label for who they are or who they love. Sometimes the work is about giving yourself permission to question, to feel, to not know yet. We don't push you toward conclusions. We help you listen to yourself.
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The particular wound of being told often by people who claimed to love you that who you are is incompatible with God, with goodness, with belonging. This shapes shame, attachment, and the nervous system in ways that don't resolve just by leaving the church.
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The voice that says you're too much, not enough, wrong, broken even when you intellectually know none of that is true. The work is about understanding where that voice came from and helping it loosen its grip.
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The particular textures of queer relationships, including non-monogamy, polyamory, navigating partnerships across different stages of outness, dating after coming out later in life, and the patterns that get inherited from growing up without queer relational models.
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Whether that's chosen distance, ongoing tension, the grief of a relationship that never became what you needed, or the work of deciding what kind of contact (if any) is sustainable for you.
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We provide affirming, knowledgeable care for trans and nonbinary clients across all stages of self-discovery and transition. Letters for gender-affirming care are available where appropriate.
And the everyday concerns: anxiety, depression, trauma, life transitions that affect everyone, but show up in particular ways when filtered through the experience of being LGBTQ+ in this moment, in this country, in this body.
Our Approach
We don't believe in surface-level work, and we don't believe affirming care means simply nodding along. Real healing requires going underneath the patterns that have been protecting you, with someone who understands why those patterns formed in the first place.
Our therapists draw from several evidence-based modalities, integrated to fit your particular system:
Internal Family Systems (IFS): IFS is especially powerful for LGBTQ+ clients. Many of us carry parts that absorbed shame young, parts that learned to perform, parts that protect us from rejection by anticipating it before it happens. IFS helps you build a relationship with these parts rather than fighting them, and gradually reach the younger, wounded parts they've been guarding.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR): For specific traumatic experiences, the conversion therapy session, the family rejection, the moment you realized you weren't safe at home, the hate incident, EMDR helps your brain reprocess what's still stuck in your nervous system, so it stops running the present.
Jungian depth work: Identity, meaning, and the self are central concerns of Jungian therapy. For clients exploring questions of who they are, what their experience means, or how to integrate parts of themselves that have been long buried, this approach offers a particularly resonant framework.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): ACT helps you build a life guided by your values rather than by fear, internalized rules, or other people's expectations which is often exactly the work LGBTQ+ clients are doing, whether or not we name it that way.
The right combination depends on you. We'll figure it out together.
What to Expect
Your first session is a conversation, not an interrogation. You don't have to have it all figured out. You don't need to lead with your identity, or explain your history, or prove that what you're feeling is "really" about being LGBTQ+. You can come in with whatever's most present, and we'll work from there.
Some clients come to Lumenso specifically for LGBTQ+-focused work. Others come for anxiety, trauma, or depression, and identity ends up being one of the threads we work with. Both are completely normal.
You set the pace. You decide what to share, when to share it, and how deep to go. We follow you.
Sessions are available in-office at our Cincinnati location or virtually in Ohio, Kentucky, Minnesota, and Arizona.
Drew Simri, LPCC-S, LICDC-CS
Yvette Nepper, LPCC
Sara Krueger, LPC
Frequently Asked Questions
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Beyond the labels in their bio, look for whether they can speak specifically about minority stress, internalized stigma, religious trauma, and the particular dynamics of queer relationships and family systems. Affirming therapists understand these as clinical realities, not lifestyle topics. You should never feel like you're educating your therapist about your own experience, or having to justify your identity in the room.
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Yes. We provide affirming, knowledgeable care for trans and nonbinary clients across all stages of identity exploration, social transition, and medical transition. Letters for gender-affirming care are available where appropriate.
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This is one of the most common and most painful concerns clients bring to us. We work with the grief, the anger, the ambivalence, and the practical questions of what kind of contact, distance, or boundaries make sense for you, without telling you what the answer should be. The right answer is the one that's sustainable for your wellbeing.
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At Lumenso, the same depth-oriented, evidence-based modalities we use with all clients (IFS, EMDR, Jungian, ACT) are tailored specifically when working with LGBTQ+ clients to account for minority stress, identity formation, religious trauma, and the lived experience of moving through a world that hasn't always been safe. The framework is the same. The understanding is specific.
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We are out-of-network with all insurance providers. Sessions are $125 to $175 depending on your provider. We can provide a superbill for you to submit to your insurance for potential out-of-network reimbursement. Many clients receive partial reimbursement this way.
You don't have to keep translating yourself.
You've done enough explaining, enough bracing, enough making yourself legible to people who weren't going to fully understand anyway. Therapy can be the place where you stop doing that where someone meets you where you actually are, and where the work goes as deep as you're ready to go.