Trans Affirming Couples Therapy in Portland, OR: What to Expect
Whether you're in a trans/trans or trans/cis relationship, looking for a queer and trans affirming couples therapist can feel a little daunting. Will this person understand me or my partner? Will they understand the unique stress we face? Can we talk about sex and intimacy comfortably with this therapist? Trans affirming couples counseling is the bare minimum. The couples therapists here at Empowered Fulfillment understand and celebrate relationships that are beyond the gender binary.
“When we choose to love we choose to move against fear — against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect — to find ourselves in the other.” - bell hooks
It’s likely you and your partner are not just dealing with challenges within the relationship, but you may also face real stress and harm from medical care (or lack of access to care), family systems, experiences with past mental health support, and pathologizing or cisnormative frameworks. So if you’re coming into couples therapy, or coming to your relationship exhausted, guarded, over or underfunctioning or already doing damage control, that makes so much sense.
When you come to couples therapy, you need more than a safe, supportive environment. You deserve a space that can hold your complex experiences, interrupt harmful cycles, and name the real-world pressures that impact your relationship. A space that understands how stress, fear, trauma, and systems of harm can show up in your bodies and your nervous systems.
“There’s magic in being seen by people who understand — it gives you permission to keep going.”
We also work from an understanding that queer and trans relationships are part of much larger stories. Stories that include joy, creativity, and deep resilience. We honor the histories you come from, the communities that shaped you, and the future you’re building together. Our work is not only about getting through hard things, but about helping you create a life and relationship that feels alive, joyful, and connected.
What Sessions Actually Look Like:
We often work with a couple’s conflict cycle along with the protective strategies each partner has learned along the way. We might take a look at how desire, shutdown, anger, or avoidance make sense in your unique context. These can give us insight into how to rebuild safety, trust, connection, play, and desire between you.
A great couples therapist will interrupt when things get stuck or heated, and know how to slow you down. We’ll also ask about what’s happening inside, not just what happened. We can help translate between partners and help you notice patterns.
When discussing sex and intimacy we’ll always center safety, consent, curiosity and can work with you to rebuild trust in the body and the relationship. Nothing is off the table, we’re comfortable exploring bodies, dysphoria, desire, shutdown, shame, and changes in attraction, and conversations about non-monogamy, kink, and different relationship structures.
“Gender pleasure /noun/ : The pleasure one can feel in one’s embodied experience of gender, whether that’s feeling affirmed in one’s gender within social, sexual, or intimate contexts—or just feeling yummy in one’s body at a given moment. ”
Therapy can be relieving, challenging, emotional, and slow, especially for couples who have been carrying a lot of stress, vigilance, or past harm. You’ll find that change often happens in small moments and through regular practice. By understanding the patterns and cycles that formed in response to pressure, and by practicing new ways of staying present and connected, you can build a relationship that feels alive, supportive, and connected.
If you’re wondering if couples therapy is for you, keep in mind:
You don’t have to be in crisis to start couples therapy.
You don’t have to have the language yet.
You don’t have to agree on everything.
You do deserve support that understands both your relationship and the world it has had to survive in.
Many of the couples therapists at Empowered Fulfillment have attended unique training with Lucie Fielding (author of Trans Sex) and Damon Constantinides (author of Sex Therapy with Erotically Marginalized Clients) in order to better support trans and nonbinary clients.
