Identity & Belonging
Who you are, and who you have not had permission to be.
LGBTQ+ adults, bicultural and first-generation adults, and anyone whose belonging has required hiding part of themselves.
At a Glance
What this page is about: Identity and belonging for LGBTQ+ adults, bicultural and first-generation adults, and anyone working out who they are now.
How I think about it: Identity has been shaped, and often compressed, by what you were allowed to be in the rooms you have had to live in. The work is to widen how much of your life you get to own.
Who tends to find this page: LGBTQ+ adults, bicultural and first-generation adults, and anyone whose belonging has required hiding part of themselves.
Who this is for: Adults
Therapist: Christian Molina, MA, LPC, NCC
License: Texas Licensed Professional Counselor #96254
Format: Telehealth, anywhere in Texas
Languages: English and Spanish
Fees: $135 intake, $120 individual, $175 couples. First call free, fifteen minutes.
Insurance: In-network with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas, including Texas state Health Select, and with Curative. Superbills available for other plans. HSA and FSA eligible.
What this looks like in your life
You have been a specific version of yourself for a long time. The version your family recognized. The version that was understandable in the country you grew up in, or the country you moved to, or the rooms you have had to be acceptable in.
That version got you here. It is not nothing.
And there are parts of you that did not fit it. Parts that have not been welcomed, or have only been welcomed in certain rooms, or have not been allowed to develop in the first place because there was no language for them where you came from. You have managed those parts the way you have managed everything else: privately, and well enough that most people would not know.
Sometimes the parts that did not fit are about who you love or how you want to be in a body. Sometimes they are about a language, a country, or a religious tradition that you are not sure is yours anymore. Sometimes they are about a neurotype you have been compensating for since you were old enough to know it was different. Sometimes they are about a role in a family or a community that you stopped fitting cleanly a while ago, and the cost of staying inside it has been quieter than people see.
You are looking for more room.
What I notice clients carry
Most people who come in for identity work already have a relationship to who they are. What they are trying to figure out is how to live with the parts of themselves that have not had room.
Some are carrying the cost of being out in some spaces and not in others, and the constant calculation of which room they are in. Some are carrying the weight of family systems that did not get easier with time, that still expect a version of you that you have outgrown, or never were. Some are carrying the experience of being understood in English and a different person in Spanish, or vice versa, and not being sure which one is the real one. Some are carrying years of masking a neurotype that the world did not make space for, until the masking became its own kind of identity.
For LGBTQ+ adults specifically, there is often a layer of vigilance that does not announce itself. The mind tracks who is safe and who is not. The body holds tension in rooms where being fully yourself is not welcome. Over time, that vigilance takes its own toll. The same is true for bicultural clients carrying the weight of being the cultural bridge, and for neurodivergent adults carrying the weight of constant translation.
When more than one of these is happening at once, they layer. A queer Latine adult in a Catholic family. A bicultural neurodivergent adult masking in multiple directions at once. A trans adult whose family of origin still uses the wrong language.
How I think about this work
I grew up gay in a Catholic, Mexican family in a border town. I knew who I was early and had no word for it. I know what it costs to be one version of yourself in one room and another in the next.
You probably know more about who you are than people give you credit for. The work is to make room for the parts that have not had room.
Sometimes that includes coming out. Sometimes a label becomes useful along the way. What we keep asking is how much of your life you get to live as yours, and what would need to be true for that to happen.
For some clients, this work involves naming things they have known for a long time but have not had a place to say. For some, it involves grieving the version of themselves they had to be for too long. For some, it involves working out what to do with family or cultural systems that have not made room for more of them. For some, it involves recognizing that some of the parts they have been compressing are not parts they need to keep compressed.
I am not in the business of telling you who you are. I am in the business of widening how much of your life you get to own.
What the work looks like
We start by understanding what version of yourself you have been living as, in which rooms, and what the cost has been. What we are looking at is whether it still fits, and what is being held back.
We work with the rooms and the relationships. Identity happens in families, in workplaces, in communities, in countries. Some of the work is internal, about what you give yourself permission to be. Some of the work is relational, about what you say to whom and when. Both matter, and they do not always move at the same speed.
We work bilingually when it serves the work. Some things only have the right words in one language. Some parts of yourself only come forward when you can speak from the language that grew you. Trabajamos en español cuando el trabajo lo pide. For clients whose life runs across more than one language, that is part of how identity work happens.
We work with the body when it has things to say. What has been compressed often shows up in the body before it shows up in words: tension, and the physical experience of being in rooms where you cannot be fully yourself. That is part of identity work too.
And we work with what shows up when there is more room. Some of it you expected. Some of it you did not. The work is to make room for what you find, not for the self you were told you should find.
Not sure if this is the right fit?
The first call is free and fifteen minutes long. We can talk about what is bringing you here and whether this practice is the right place for you.