Therapy for Divorce and Breakups
LGBTQIA+ Affirming Therapy
Sacramento and online in California
After ending a relationship, you may find yourself asking:
Will this pain ever go away?
Who am I without this relationship?
Was this the right decision? What happened?
Why do I keep repeating the same patterns?
How can I ever trust myself again?
The end of a relationship can feel like a major disruption to your life. Your relationship may have been a big part of your life and your identity.
Andy Price, LMFT provides supporting people navigating divorce and breakups in Sacramento and online across California.
The end of a relationship can bring feelings of grief. It can cause you to second guess your decisions or wonder how you can ever trust someone again. It may present new opportunities for how you want to live your life.
Therapy for divorce and breakups can help you make sense of what happened, rebuild your sense of self, and find a path forward.
Going Beneath the Surface
Many forms of therapy focus on learning coping skills or managing symptoms. These approaches can be incredibly helpful, especially when you’re feeling overwhelmed.
But sometimes people reach a point where they want to go deeper than coping skills or symptom management.
Therapy with Andy Price, LMFT can help you understand the patterns that are continuing to show up in your life, build a sense of self, find purpose, and create new experiences to help you feel deep, lasting change.
Approach to Therapy
-
We’ll explore how past life experiences, relationships, and unconscious patterns continue to shape your life. This work can help you recognize and change patterns that continue to show up in your relationships. You’ll be guided to make sense of these experiences and increase your ability to live your life in a more authentic way.
-
Attachment experiences (our early childhood and past relationship experiences) impact how we experience relationships, conflict, vulnerability, and safety. We'll work to understand the emotional patterns that developed in relationships and begin creating new ways of connecting with others.
-
Parts work, informed by internal family systems, can help you understand the different parts of you that took on protective roles to help you survive. This may include parts that feel self-critical, avoidant, or perfectionist.
Underneath these protective parts are more vulnerable parts of you, parts that often carry the pain of your experiences.
In therapy, we’ll work to increase compassion for your protective parts and build the emotional safety to connect with the more vulnerable parts of your experience.
-
Experiential therapy helps you create new emotional experiences. Instead of just telling a narrative of events and analyzing (or intellectualizing) them, you’ll be guided to explore what is happening on an emotional level. Over time, you’ll be guided to express the emotions you’ve been holding inside (in other words, feeling your feelings)
-
Relationships can often feel like an important part of our life story. You may have been accustomed viewing yourself as a person in a relationship and are now struggling to know how to exist as a single person. In therapy, we can work to reshape the story of your life and strengthen your new sense of identity.
Therapy for divorce and breakups can help address:
Grief about the relationship
Healing from betrayal, affairs, or breaches of trust
Shame and guilt
Adapting to life as a single person
Setting boundaries
Healing from abusive relationships
LGBTQIA+ relationship dynamics
Rumination and thought spirals
Exploring new opportunities
A New Path Forward. A stronger sense of self.
-
Healing New and Old Wounds
Divorce and breakups can bring up old wounds, or feelings you have about your past experiences. Therapy can help you not only heal from the end of the relationship, but also help you heal from other past experiences.
Through therapy, you can feel confident and equipped to navigate whatever comes next in life.
-
Seeing What Has Previously Been Unseen
Many of the patterns showing up in our lives happen outside our conscious awareness.
In therapy, we’ll slow things down to notice:
The stories you automatically tell yourself
The expectations you’ve been carrying
The emotions underneath those stories and expectations
-
Feeling Instead of Avoiding
Past life experiences have often left the impression that certain emotions aren’t safe to feel. You may have learned to hide your sadness, push away your anger, or ignore your own needs. During the end of a relationship, these feelings may be coming to the surface.
Through therapy, you can build the emotional safety to make space to express these emotions.
As you learn that you can experience these more vulnerable emotions without it feeling overwhelming, you’ll be able to move through the emotions, rather than continuing to carry the weight of them.
FAQs
-
This practice is a good fit for adults seeking trauma therapy that goes beyond coping skills and symptom management, and instead delves deep into their experiences. Many of my clients are looking for an LGBTQ+ affirming therapist, are recovering from relational or childhood trauma, and want to understand and change long-standing emotional and relationship patterns.
-
My style is compassionate, authentic, honest, and direct.
We’ll begin by getting to know you, exploring your history, your relationships, and beginning to recognize the ways you’ve learned to survive.
As we get to know each other, I’ll point out things you may not be noticing yourself. When helpful, I believe in the power of care-frontation: being direct and challenging you in a way that comes from care, compassion, and curiosity.
-
This practice may not be the best fit if you’re currently experiencing an acute mental health crisis or need intensive structure and stabilization. Please see my Resources page for a list of support that can better serve your current needs.
-
Yes! I am experienced with supporting non-monogamous and polyamorous relationships and can help you navigate the ending of any form of relationship.
-
Andy Price provides LGBTQ+ affirming trauma therapy in person in Sacramento and online across California.
-
I offer convenient online scheduling. If you’re ready to get started, go here to schedule your first session. If you have any questions, feel free to email me at andy@andypricetherapy.com
Hi, I’m Andy (they/them)
I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. I am passionate about helping people build authentic, connected, and affirming relationships—with themselves, their partners, and their communities.
I specialize in working with queer and trans individuals, couples, and non-monogamous relationships, supporting them as they navigate challenges of identity, sex and intimacy, relationships, political stressors, and life’s tough moments.
Beyond my clinical work, I’m a researcher and speaker. My research centers queer and trans well-being and relationships. I have presented at professional and academic conferences on topics such as gender identity, LGBTQIA+ chosen family, and experiential and narrative therapy.
I value authentically showing up as myself, which means I’ll show you my personality, share my sense of humor with you, and also sit with you in moments of pain. I hope that authentically showing up as myself empowers you to authentically be yourself.