Actually, fighting is a healthy sign.

In my last post, I wrote about what couples therapy is really for - not to pick sides or referee, but to help people reconnect when intimacy has gotten tangled or shut down. I spoke about the patterns that show up under stress, the power dynamics that keep partners stuck, and how I work within Terry Real’s Relational Life Therapy (RLT) framework to build something more truthful, more accountable, more alive.

But there’s one piece I want to say more about.
Because it comes up constantly.
And it scares a lot of people.

Fighting.

FPeople often come to couples therapy worried they fight too much.

But fighting isn’t always a red flag.

Sometimes, it’s a sign that both of you are actually in the room.

Not checked out.
Not compliant.
Not quietly managing your way through resentment or fear.

Fighting, in its rawest form, says: I still care.
I still want to be met.
I still want to be known.

Now, not all fighting is generative of course.

There’s a difference between conflict that brings two people into deeper truth - and conflict that protects old defenses, escalates blame, or collapses connection.

But the presence of conflict alone?

It’s not pathology.

It’s often a sign of two whole people trying to navigate intimacy honestly.

In my work with couples, I don’t try to eliminate fighting.

I try to help partners fight well - with skill, accountability, and enough slowing-down to actually hear what’s underneath the surface tension.

• We look at what each person is protecting.

• Where the patterns come from.

• How to bring more self into the room without losing each other.

Because when two full selves meet - when neither person is disappearing to keep the peace - conflict is inevitable.

The goal isn’t not: no rupture ever. The goal is repair.

• To tell the truth.

• To stay connected.

• To stop abandoning yourself or the other person in moments of stress.

Fighting means something’s alive between you.

And with the right support, that aliveness can be shaped into something more spacious. More honest. More whole.

the real work of couples therapy

Most couples don’t come to therapy because they argue (this is a whole other article that I’m working on tbh).

They come because they feel unseen.

Because the exact. same. fight. keeps erupting with ever-greater intensity.

Because closeness starts to feel dangerous, or impossible.

In the beginning, there’s often hurt. Blame. Silence.

Or two people who are so good at managing, performing, avoiding… they barely notice they’ve drifted.

My work with couples is grounded in Relational Life Therapy (RLT), a model developed by Terry Real that’s radically honest, deeply compassionate, and unafraid to name what’s not working.

It’s not about who’s right, whose wrong blah blah blah. No. It’s about a dynamic that has evolved little by little until intimacy has become badly stymied.

We look at the patterns that play out when love is under stress.

• How protection takes over.

• How early wounds show up.

• How contempt, control, or compliance keep partners from asking for what they really need.

And then we practice something different.

In couples work, I’m not a neutral mirror. I’m an active guide.

• I’ll name when someone is being grandiose, or collapsing

• I’ll speak to the power dynamics in the room

• I’ll slow the moment down enough for partners to hear themselves, and each other, without defense

The goal isn’t to have a perfect relationship.

It’s to build one rooted in connection, accountability, and truth.

A relationship where love doesn’t mean fusing or fixing, but staying present - especially when it’s hard.

Many of us weren’t modeled that kind of repair. So we build the muscle together.

We learn to speak in ways that land.

To hear feedback without shutting down.

To bring more self into the relationship - not less.

Because intimacy isn’t something we fall into. It’s a dynamic unfolding of loving, witnessing, fighting, laughing, breathing together, being together over days, weeks, months, and years. If we’re very lucky. If we put in the work.

just because it hurts doesn’t mean it’s bad

We’re taught to fear pain.

To brace against it.

To pathologize it, solve it, or at the very least, explain it away.

But pain isn’t always a sign that something is wrong. Sometimes it’s a sign that something important is stirring. Something that wants to come to the surface. To be seen, known - held.

There’s a kind of hurt that doesn’t point to trauma or dysfunction, but to transformation.

A stretching pain. The ache of shedding an old self before the new one fully arrives.

The sharp edge of a truth pressing up against the walls of a way of being that’s too small to contain it.

Some discomfort is holy.

It means you’re getting closer to something that matters. To the part of you that wants out from under the performance. To a truth that no longer fits inside denial. To the clarity that only comes after you stop pretending you’re fine.

And when we rush to make it stop - when we numb it out, avoid it, drown it in booze or other substances, or label it as something far worse than what it is - we miss the wisdom inside it.

This is especially true in deep work: in grief, in altered states, in the disorientation that comes after big insight.

Whether through talk therapy or ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, I often see people brush up against a kind of pain that doesn’t need fixing. It needs holding.

So here’s the reminder:

1) Just because it hurts doesn’t mean it’s bad.
2) It might mean you’re coming into contact with what’s true.

In Praise of Not Knowing

In Zen, there’s a teaching called “don’t-know mind.”

It’s not ignorance. It’s not helplessness.

It’s a quiet posture of not rushing to name what hasn’t yet revealed itself. It’s an approach to living fully alive, meeting each moment with curiosity.

And in therapy, this stance - this open, alert not-knowing - is often where the real work begins.

We live in a culture obsessed with answers.

• Self-help.

• Productivity.

• Diagnosis.

• Certainty.

• Action

But the psyche doesn't move on command.

It unfolds. In layers. In symbol. In silence.

The deeper truths take time to arrive.

When patients ask: “Is this normal?” or “What should I do?”

There’s often an urge - both in them and in me tbh - to do something. To answer. To rescue the unknown. To flatten the space into clarity.

But I’ve learned, over and over, that the impulse to answer too quickly can abort the deeper knowing trying to emerge.

Not-knowing is not a lack.It’s a practice.

One that honors the soul’s timing, not the ego’s timeline.

In the therapy space - and in life - “I don’t know” can be the most essential knowing.

It’s what softens the grip of premature conclusions.

What allows grief to become grief, instead of a project.

What lets desire whisper what it wants, before strategy takes over.

In psychedelic integration, too, this stance is vital. Not every image means something yet. Not every insight needs action.
Sometimes the lesson is simply this: stay with what is unclear.

Stay with what is aching to be born.

So if you're in a moment of uncertainty… If the answers aren’t landing, if the floor has fallen out from underneath your feet.

Know that you may be exactly where you’re supposed to be.

I don’t know is not a problem to solve.

It’s a doorway.

Men’s Issues in Therapy: Why Depth Work Matters

"I don't really need therapy. I just need to figure out how to not feel so angry all the time."

This is how it starts. The reluctant phone call. The half-hearted admission that something isn't working. The hope that therapy might be like going to a mechanic - drop off the broken part, get it fixed, drive away unchanged.

But anger isn't the engine problem. It's the warning light.

The Emotional Exile

Most men arrive in therapy carrying decades of emotional exile. Not because they lack feelings, but because they learned early that certain feelings were incompatible with being a guy.

Sadness became weakness.

Fear became cowardice.

Tenderness became vulnerability that others could exploit.

The full spectrum of human emotion got compressed into a narrow band of acceptable responses: anger, achievement, humor, withdrawal.

This isn't pathology. It's adaptation.

Boys learn to survive boyhood by becoming legible to a culture that has very specific ideas about what masculinity should look like.

But survival strategies that work at eight don't serve at thirty-eight.

The Performance of Strength

Traditional masculinity operates on a simple premise: strength is everything, and strength means never needing anything from anyone.

So men learn to perform competence even when they feel lost. To project confidence even when they're terrified. To solve everyone else's problems while denying they have any of their own.

This performance becomes so automatic that many men lose touch with what lies beneath it. They mistake the mask for their face. The role for their identity.

Until something breaks. A relationship ends. A career implodes. The body rebels. Depression settles in like fog that won't lift.

And suddenly, the strategies that once felt like power reveal themselves as prisons.

The Intimacy Paradox

Men often struggle with a cruel contradiction: they crave deep connection while being systematically trained to avoid the vulnerability that makes connection possible.

They want to be known but have spent years making themselves unknowable - even to themselves. They want to be loved for who they are but aren't sure who they are beneath what they do.

This shows up in relationships as emotional distance disguised as strength. As the inability to name what they're feeling. As the tendency to intellectualize rather than feel, to fix rather than witness, to withdraw rather than engage.

Their partners often describe feeling like they're in relationship with a performance rather than a person. Like they're getting the resume version instead of the human one.

The Father Wound

Many men carry what Robert Bly called "the father wound" - not necessarily because their fathers were absent or abusive, but because they received an incomplete transmission of what it means to be a man.

They learned to be providers but not partners. Protectors but not participants. Strong but not sensitive. Successful but not satisfied.

The father wound shows up as the voice that says:

• "Real men don't cry."

• "Asking for help is giving up."

• "Your worth is what you produce."

• "Love is something you earn, not something you are."

These messages weren't delivered with malice. They were passed down from fathers who received the same incomplete instructions, who were doing their best with tools that had been handed to them by men who also learned to survive by cutting themselves off from their own depth.

The Addiction to Fixing

Men are often socialized to be problem-solvers. When something's wrong, you identify the issue and fix it. This approach works well for broken appliances, and project management.

It works terribly for emotional life.

Feelings aren't problems to be solved. They're information to be felt. Relationships aren't projects to be completed. They're ongoing dances of intimacy and autonomy.

But many men enter therapy hoping for a more sophisticated version of the same approach: "Tell me what's wrong with me, and how to fix it."

The invitation of depth work is different: "Let's explore what it's like to be you. What it costs to maintain the version of yourself you think you're supposed to be. What you've had to exile in order to belong."

The Underground Life

Beneath the performance of strength lives what James Hollis calls "the underground life" - all the parts of a man that don't fit the acceptable masculine template.

The part that feels overwhelmed by responsibility. The part that wants to be taken care of sometimes. The part that grieves what was lost in the process of becoming acceptable.

The part that's tired of being strong. The part that wants permission to not know. The part that longs to be seen for his tenderness, not just his competence.

This underground life doesn't disappear because it's ignored. It finds expression through symptoms: the affairs that sabotage good marriages, the rage that feels disproportionate to the trigger, the numbness that alcohol temporarily relieves, the depression that arrives like a visitation from nowhere.

The Descent: Why Surface Solutions Don't Work

Most approaches to men's mental health focus on symptom management: anger management for rage, communication skills for relationship problems, stress reduction for anxiety.

These interventions can be helpful. But they often address the branches while leaving the root system intact.

Depth work asks a different question: not "How do we fix this behavior?" but "What is this behavior trying to communicate? What unmet need is it attempting to serve? What part of you has been exiled that's trying to return?"

This requires descent. Moving below the level of conscious strategy and rational explanation into the emotional underground where the real architecture of a life gets revealed.

The Therapeutic Relationship as Practice Ground

For many men, the therapeutic relationship becomes the first place they've ever been invited to bring their whole selves - the competent parts and the confused parts, the strong parts and the scared parts.

This can feel terrifying initially. Men often experience early therapy sessions as foreign territory where the usual rules don't apply. Where not knowing is acceptable. Where feelings are treated as valuable information rather than problems to be eliminated.

The therapist becomes a witness to parts of the man that may have never been witnessed before. The part that feels like a fraud despite external success. The part that's angry at having to carry so much responsibility. The part that's grieving the father who was physically present but emotionally absent.

Reclaiming the Exiled Parts

The work isn't about becoming less masculine. It's about expanding what masculinity can include.

It's about reclaiming the capacity for tenderness without losing strength. Developing the ability to be vulnerable without becoming passive. Learning to receive care without feeling diminished.

This requires grieving what was sacrificed in the name of becoming acceptable. The boy who was told his emotions were too much. The teenager who learned that expressing fear was social suicide. The young man who discovered that needing support was interpreted as weakness.

The grief is necessary. You can't reclaim what you won't mourn.

The Integration: Strength and Softness

The goal isn't to replace traditional masculine qualities with their opposites. It's to integrate them with the full spectrum of human experience.

Strength that can hold both power and vulnerability. Leadership that includes the wisdom to not know. Protectiveness that doesn't require emotional armor. Competence that can coexist with the acknowledgment of limits.

This integrated masculinity doesn't diminish men. It enlarges them. It allows them to be human rather than heroic. Present rather than performing. Connected rather than isolated.

The Ripple Effect

When men do this work, the impact extends far beyond their individual healing. Their relationships deepen. Their children receive a different template of what it means to be human. Their friendships move beyond competition and performance toward genuine intimacy.

They become models of a different kind of strength - one that includes rather than excludes, that holds space rather than taking up space, that can be both powerful and tender.

This isn't just personal transformation. It's cultural healing. Because the culture that teaches boys to exile their emotions is the same culture that struggles with epidemic levels of male suicide, domestic violence, and emotional isolation.

The Courage to Descend

The invitation isn't comfortable. Depth work asks men to abandon the strategies that have kept them safe and successful. To risk being seen as weak by exploring their vulnerability. To question the very definitions of strength they've organized their lives around.

But the alternative - continuing to live in emotional exile, maintaining relationships from behind a performance, achieving success while feeling empty - is a different kind of death.

The courage to descend is also the courage to ascend. To emerge from the underground life with more of themselves intact. To discover that their deepest strength comes not from what they can endure alone, but from what they can share in connection.

Because the world doesn't need more men who can suffer in silence. It needs more men who can feel deeply, love openly, and lead from a place of integrated wholeness.

The work is hard. The rewards are revolutionary.

Not just for the men who do it, but for everyone whose life they touch.

How your childhood impacts your adulthood

The Architecture of Attachment

Every child faces the same impossible task: how to stay connected to the people they need to survive while also becoming themselves.

Some children learn that love means being good. Perfect. Invisible when it's inconvenient. They discover that their needs are too much, their emotions too messy, their authentic self too risky.

Others learn that love means being dramatic. Loud. That connection only comes through crisis, that calm equals abandonment.

And some learn that love isn't reliable at all - that the safest strategy is not to need anyone too much.

These adaptations aren't pathology. They're genius. They're how small people navigate big emotions with limited options.

But genius in childhood can become prison in adulthood.

The Repetition Compulsion: Why We Choose What Hurts

Freud called it the repetition compulsion - our unconscious drive to recreate familiar dynamics, even when they cause suffering.

We don't do this because we're broken. We do it because our psyche is always trying to complete unfinished business. To master what once felt overwhelming. To finally get it right.

So the child who learned that love requires self-erasure grows up choosing partners who can't really see them. Not because they hate themselves, but because invisible love feels like home.

The child who discovered that drama equals connection finds themselves in relationships that cycle between intensity and emptiness. Not because they're addicted to chaos, but because peaceful love feels like indifference.

The child who learned to expect abandonment either clings desperately or leaves first. Not because they don't want love, but because anticipated loss feels more manageable than unexpected betrayal.

We're not choosing what we want. We're choosing what we know.

The Unconscious Contract

Every relationship operates on two levels: the conscious agreement ("we love each other and want to build a life together") and the unconscious contract - the silent, often contradictory set of roles and rules that govern how you actually interact.

These contracts are written in childhood language:

• "I'll be the perfect one if you'll never leave."

• "I'll take care of you if you'll need me."

• "I'll be fascinating if you'll be fascinated."

• "I'll expect nothing if you'll stick around."

The cruelest part? Both people are usually signing the same contract from opposite sides. The pursuer needs someone to chase. The withdrawer needs someone to pull away from. The caretaker needs someone to save. The victim needs someone to blame.

Until one person changes the terms.

The Intergenerational Relay Race

Your childhood patterns didn't begin with you. They're part of a longer story - handed down through generations like family recipes.

The mother who couldn't tolerate her own sadness raises a daughter who learns to be eternally cheerful. Who then chooses a partner who requires her to be happy all the time and panics when she inevitably breaks down.

The father who grew up starving for approval works constantly to prove his worth. His children learn that love is earned through achievement, that rest is selfish, that being is less valuable than doing.

These patterns travel with stealth precision. We don't inherit our parents' actual experiences - we inherit their strategies for survival.

Their fears about what love costs.

Their beliefs about what they deserve.

The Adult Work: Recognition Without Repetition

Here's what most relationship advice gets wrong: you can't fix what you won't acknowledge.

The patterns that govern your relationships aren't character flaws to be eliminated. They're adaptations to be understood. They served you once. They may still serve you in certain contexts.

But consciousness gives you choice.

When you notice yourself shrinking in conflict, you can ask: "How old do I feel right now?"

When you feel that familiar urge to rescue or control, you can pause: "What am I trying to prevent from happening?"

When you find yourself choosing the same types of people who reliably disappoint you, you can wonder: "What kind of love am I trying to earn?"

The goal isn't to become someone new.

It's to become someone who knows why they do what they do.

Breaking the Spell: Conscious Relationship

The most radical thing you can do in a relationship is to notice when you're not actually relating to the person in front of you - but to the ghosts of people from your past.

• When your partner comes home late and you feel that eight-year-old panic about being forgotten.

• When they need space., and you hear the echo of every door that ever closed between you and connection.

• When they express a need and you feel that familiar weight of being too much for someone you love.

These moments are invitations.

Not to judge yourself for having these responses, but to recognize them as information.

As windows into the unfinished business of your becoming.

The healing happens not in the elimination of these patterns, but in the space between recognition and reaction. In the pause where you can choose whether to respond from your adult self or your adapted child.

The Courage of Conscious Love

Growing up means learning to love with your whole history - not in spite of it.

It means bringing the wounded parts of yourself to the table without making them your partner's responsibility to heal.

It means recognizing that the person you're with is also carrying their own invisible architecture of attachment, their own unconscious contracts, their own strategies for staying safe while staying connected.

The work is not to find someone without patterns. The work is to find someone willing to make their patterns conscious. Someone who can meet your triggered child with their integrated adult. Someone who won't take your adaptation personally because they understand it as an artifact of love, not an expression of it.

This is the difference between unconscious relationship - where you mistake your patterns for the truth about love - and conscious relationship, where you recognize your patterns as the starting point for deeper intimacy.

Because the most profound intimacy happens not when you're perfect together, but when you can be imperfect together with awareness. When you can say, "I'm having that feeling again" instead of "You always make me feel this way."

When you can hold both the truth of your past and the possibility of your present. When you can love someone not because they complete your childhood story, but because they're willing to write a new one with you.

The patterns will always be there.

But once you see them, they lose their power to see for you.

And that's when real relationship begins.

Is your past playing on repeat?

You didn’t invent your intimacy issues. You inherited them.

That’s not to say you’re doomed. Only that you’re patterned—and those patterns were formed long before you had a say in the matter.

Psychodynamic therapy is about uncovering how those early experiences shaped your expectations, your defenses, your longing. And then—little by little—giving you the freedom to choose differently.

What Feels Familiar Isn’t Always What Feels Good

We tend to be drawn to the familiar. Even when the familiar hurts.

If love used to mean absence, you might find yourself chasing emotionally unavailable partners.
If love meant volatility, you might confuse calm for boredom.

In childhood, we internalize not just how love feels, but what we must do to earn it. We become adaptive. Hypervigilant. Pleasing. Distant. Angry. Quiet. Whatever it took.

Those adaptations don’t disappear when we grow up. They become the scripts we keep performing—often without realizing it.

The Past Isn’t Over. It’s Replaying.

You may think you left the past behind, but the past is clever. It doesn’t need memories to survive. It just needs patterns.

Psychodynamic therapy pays attention to those patterns:

• The way you pull away when someone gets close.

• The way you overfunction in conflict.

• The way you sabotage things that feel too good.

These aren’t flaws. They’re strategies. Old strategies that once protected you. But now? They may be keeping you from the very connection you crave.

Relationships Activate Our Earliest Wounds

Nothing evokes our deepest stuff quite like being close to someone.

Your partner says they need space, and suddenly you feel like a child left behind.
Your friend cancels plans, and you spiral into shame.
Your boss critiques your work, and it lands like rejection, not feedback.

This is called emotional transference—when old relational wounds get projected onto current people and situations.

In therapy, we slow this down. We track it. We feel it. Not to relive trauma, but to make it livable. Nameable. Changeable.

Psychodynamic Work Is a New Relationship With the Old Self

In my office, we’re not just talking about your childhood. We’re listening for it in your language, your hesitations, your dreams, your silences.

Over time, something remarkable happens:
The parts of you that had to grow up too fast finally get a place to land.
The defensive parts soften.
The younger parts feel held.
The adult parts emerge with more clarity.

This isn’t regression. It’s integration.

Healing in Sacramento, One Pattern at a Time

Whether you grew up in chaos or quiet disconnection, those early dynamics don’t have to define your future relationships.

In a city like Sacramento—where so many are juggling careers, caregiving, ambition, and burnout—slowing down to understand the deeper story is a radical act.

You don’t have to repeat the past to stay loyal to it.

Ready to Break the Pattern?

I’m a psychodynamic therapist based in Sacramento, working with individuals who want to understand themselves - and their relationships—on a deeper level. I offer in-person therapy in Midtown and telehealth across California.

Beyond gender (pun!)

Your gender identity is valid.

Full stop.

Now that we've established that - let's talk about everything else that comes with being human in a gendered world.

Most gender therapy focuses on practical support: letters, referrals, transition planning. That's crucial work. I provide it.

But psychodynamic therapy offers something additional: space to explore the full psychological landscape of living authentically in a world that often demands conformity.

This isn't about questioning your gender identity.

It's about understanding your whole self.

The Psychology of Living Authentically

Coming into your authentic gender expression - whether that involves transition or not - happens within a complex psychological context.

• How does it feel to finally be seen for who you are?

• What does it bring up to disappoint people who had other expectations for your life?

• How do you navigate relationships that change as you become more yourself?

These aren't gender questions.

They're human questions that happen to involve gender.

In psychodynamic work, we explore how living authentically intersects with everything else you carry: family dynamics, attachment patterns, trauma histories, and unconscious ways of protecting yourself that might no longer serve you.

Your Gender Lives in Relationship

Gender doesn't exist in isolation. It lives in relationship—to family, friends, partners, society, and to yourself.

Maybe you're navigating complex family reactions to your transition.

Maybe you're discovering new patterns in romantic relationships as you inhabit your authentic self.

Maybe you're working through internalized messages about what kinds of people deserve love, safety, or visibility.

These relational patterns often have deep psychological roots that extend far beyond gender.

A psychodynamic approach can help you understand and work through these patterns so they don't limit your capacity for connection and authenticity.

The Therapy Relationship as Practice Space

Here's what I notice: how someone shows up in therapy often reflects how they navigate authenticity and vulnerability in the world.

Some clients present a perfectly curated version of their gender identity - as if any complexity might undermine their credibility.

Others seem to disappear, afraid that being fully themselves might be too much.

The therapy room becomes a space to practice being all of who you are.

• What happens when you let your contradictions show?

• What parts of yourself feel safest to express?

• What parts feel most vulnerable?

This isn't about your gender identity, which is yours to define.

It's about your relationship to being seen, understood, and accepted in all your complexity.

When Authenticity Meets Family History

Living authentically often activates family-of-origin material in unexpected ways.

Maybe your decision to transition brings up old family patterns around conformity and rebellion.

Maybe supportive family reactions surprise you in ways that highlight how little safety you expected.

Maybe rejection confirms fears you didn't know you were carrying.

Psychodynamic work can help you separate your authentic self-expression from these inherited family dynamics, so you can make choices about your life and relationships from a place of clarity rather than old protective patterns.

The Body as Home

For many LGBTQIA+ people, coming home to your body - through transition, changing expression, or simply learning to inhabit yourself differently - can bring up complex feelings.

Relief and grief.

Excitement and fear.

The joy of finally feeling at home, and sadness for time spent feeling disconnected.

Your relationship to your body carries psychological history: early experiences of safety and danger, pleasure and shame, autonomy and control.

Psychodynamic work creates space to understand how these patterns might be showing up as you develop a new relationship to embodiment.

Beyond Individual Psychology

Living as an LGBTQIA+ person in this world involves navigating systems that weren't designed for you.

That's not individual pathology - that's social reality.

But sometimes the strategies we develop to survive hostile environments outlive their usefulness.

Hypervigilance that once kept you safe might now interfere with intimacy. Perfectionism that helped you prove your worth might now exhaust you.

Psychodynamic work can help you identify which protective patterns still serve you and which ones you're ready to outgrow.

What This Actually Looks Like

You might find yourself exploring:

• How does it feel to be authentically yourself in different relationships?

• What old protective patterns are you ready to release?

• How do family-of-origin dynamics show up in your current relationships?

• What does safety mean to you now that you're living more authentically?

• How do you want to navigate intimacy and vulnerability as your truest self?

We're not exploring whether your gender identity is "real" - it is.

We're exploring how to live that reality as fully and consciously as possible.

The Long View

This work honors the fact that authentic self-expression is a lifelong process, not a destination.

Your gender identity is valid and yours to define.

The psychological work involves everything else: how to sustain authenticity in a complicated world, how to build relationships that can hold all of who you are, and how to heal from whatever made authenticity feel dangerous in the first place.

In my Sacramento practice, I've worked with clients across the spectrum of gender identity and expression. What I've learned is that the bravest thing any of us can do is show up as ourselves, fully and without apology.

Psychodynamic therapy for LGBTQIA+ clients isn't about understanding your identity - you're the expert on that.

It's about understanding yourself in all your complexity, so you can live your authentic life with as much freedom and connection as possible.

Because you deserve nothing less.

Looking for a therapist in california?

Not all therapy is created equal. And not all therapists are trained to go where it hurts.

If you’re searching for a psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapist in Sacramento, you may already know: you’re not looking for someone to “fix” you.

You’re looking for someone who can help you understand yourself—deeply, symbolically, in layers.

- Someone who can hold complexity.
- Someone who won’t flinch when things get raw.

But how do you know who’s qualified? What should you be looking for?

Let’s break it down.

Look for Depth, Not Just Degrees

Many therapists have master’s degrees. Fewer have steeped themselves in analytic theory.

A strong psychodynamic clinician may not be a formally trained psychoanalyst, but they’ve often immersed themselves in depth psychology through ongoing education, supervision, personal therapy, and independent study.

Ask:

• “Do you work from a psychodynamic or psychoanalytic perspective?”

• “How do you think about the unconscious or early childhood dynamics in therapy?”

• “What kind of influences shape your work?”

You’re looking for someone who doesn’t just reference theory, but works from it. Feels with it.

Expect a Focus on Process Over Protocol

If you’re used to therapy that feels like a checklist, this will feel different.

Psychodynamic work isn’t driven by worksheets or progress trackers. It’s about process. The slow emergence of meaning. The accumulation of insight over time.

If you’re seeking this kind of work in Sacramento, look for therapists who describe their practice in terms of curiosity, symbolism, emotional truth, or relational depth - not just goals and outcomes.

We’re not measuring your life in symptom reduction. We’re listening for what your life is trying to say.

The Right Therapist Doesn’t Promise to Make You Feel Better

At least not right away.

They help you feel more - which is different.

A good psychodynamic therapist will help you sit with discomfort, trace its lineage, and understand what it’s protecting. They won’t rush to soothe it. They won’t pathologize your pain. They’ll help you metabolize it.

That’s the difference between coping and healing.

Trust Your Gut - Then Ask Questions

Therapy is intimate work. If you don’t feel a sense of trust, safety, and curiosity in the first few sessions, speak up—or keep looking.

Ask yourself:

• Do I feel emotionally safe here?

• Am I being challenged in a way that feels respectful?

• Is this therapist listening to what I say, but also what I don’t say?

You don’t have to know right away. But something in you will. And it’s okay to listen.

Looking for a Psychodynamic Therapist in Sacramento?

I’m a psychodynamic psychotherapist based in Midtown Sacramento and available for telehealth throughout California. I’m also a psychoanalytic scholar - deeply immersed in the theory, literature, and clinical sensibility that shapes this work.

The Real Trip Starts After

The mushrooms didn't heal you.

They showed you what needs healing.

Psychedelic experiences - whether from clinical trials, ceremonial settings, or personal exploration - can crack something open.

But the real work happens afterward, in the slow translation of insight into lived change.

Most integration therapy focuses on making meaning of the experience itself.

• What did you see?

• What did you learn?

• How can you apply those insights to your daily life?

That's useful, but it’s not a psychodynamic approach to the work.

Psychodynamic integration starts from a different question: What psychological patterns got activated during your experience, and how do those patterns show up in the rest of your life?

Beyond Set and Setting

"Set and setting" - your mindset and environment - shape psychedelic experiences.

Your psyche doesn't just observe the experience - it creates it.

The visions you had, the emotions that surfaced, the particular fears or insights that emerged - none of that was random.

Your psyche used the altered state to communicate something it's been trying to tell you for years.

Maybe you experienced profound connection and realized how isolated you've been.

Maybe you encountered terrifying dissolution and recognized your desperate need for control.

Maybe you felt unconditional love, and understood how harshly you've been treating yourself.

These aren't just effects of the substance you took.

They're psychological material surfacing under different conditions.

Psychodynamic integration treats your psychedelic experience as a dream might be treated in therapy - rich symbolic material that reveals unconscious patterns, conflicts, and longings.

The Therapeutic Relationship as Integration Space

Here's what I notice: how someone talks about their psychedelic experience often mirrors their psychological defenses.

Some clients intellectualize everything - turning mystical encounters into philosophical frameworks - spiritual experiences into self-help strategies.

Others romanticize the experience, treating it as the solution to problems that actually require sustained psychological work.

Others are simply masters at spiritual bypassing.

The therapy relationship becomes a place to notice these patterns.

• How do you protect yourself from difficult feelings?

• What do you do when insight threatens to change something fundamental about how you live?

Your relationship to integration - whether you resist it, rush it, or try to control it - reveals the same psychological patterns that shape your relationships with people.

What the Unconscious Shows You

Psychedelic experiences often involve encounters with parts of yourself you don't usually access.

The harsh inner critic appears as a demonic figure.

The grieving child shows up as overwhelming sadness.

The wise, integrated self emerges as light, love, or cosmic connection.

In psychodynamic work, we explore these encounters as projections of internal psychological material. Not to reduce them to "just" psychology, but to understand what your psyche was communicating through symbol and metaphor.

That terrifying shadow figure? It might represent aspects of yourself you've been disowning.

The divine light? It could be your innate capacity for self-compassion finally breaking through defenses.

The goal isn't to interpret your experience away.

It's to understand what it's pointing toward.

Family Ghosts in Altered States

Psychedelic experiences often activate family-of-origin material in unexpected ways.

You might encounter your father's rage, your mother's anxiety, or generational trauma you didn't know you were carrying.

You might experience yourself as the hurt child you once were, or feel the weight of expectations you never chose.

Sometimes people have breakthrough experiences of self-love, only to discover afterward that they have no idea how to sustain that feeling in relationships shaped by early patterns of criticism or neglect.

Psychodynamic integration helps you understand how family dynamics show up in altered states, and how they continue to show up in your daily life.

The Integration That Doesn't Integrate

Not everything from a psychedelic experience is meant to be integrated into ordinary consciousness.

Some insights are too large for everyday life.

Some spiritual experiences can't be translated into practical action.

Some emotional releases need to happen without becoming life strategies.

But here's what does need integrating: the psychological patterns that the experience revealed.

If you discovered how defended you are against vulnerability, that's workable in therapy.

If you realized how much shame you carry about your needs, that's psychological material to explore.

If you encountered your capacity for unconditional self-acceptance, that's a relationship to develop over time.

Psychodynamic integration focuses on sustainable psychological change rather than trying to recreate peak experiences.

The Long View of Consciousness Change

Real integration takes years, not months.

Psychedelic experiences can catalyze psychological work, but they don't do the work itself. The insights need to be lived, practiced, and integrated into your actual relationships and life circumstances.

This is where psychodynamic therapy excels.

Instead of focusing on the dramatic moments of breakthrough, we focus on the subtle, ongoing work of changing unconscious patterns.

What This Looks Like in Practice

You might find yourself exploring:

• What psychological material surfaced during your experience, and how does that material show up in your relationships?

• What defenses did the experience challenge, and how do you protect yourself in everyday life?

• What family patterns got activated, and how do those patterns limit your current relationships?

• What insights felt transformative in the moment, and what's preventing you from living them now?

• How do you relate to altered states of consciousness, and what does that reveal about your relationship to surrender, control, or the unknown?

• How do you feel about spirituality now?

We're not trying to recreate your psychedelic experience.

We're trying to understand what it revealed about your psychological landscape, and how to work with that landscape more consciously.

When Integration Meets Resistance

Sometimes the biggest barrier to integration isn't lack of insight - it's unconscious resistance to change.

Your psychedelic experience might have shown you exactly what needs to shift in your life.

But actually making those changes threatens psychological patterns that have been protecting you for decades.

Psychodynamic work helps you understand, and work through this resistance rather than trying to override it with spiritual bypassing or forced positivity.

Because real integration isn't about becoming the person your psychedelic experience showed you.

It's about becoming more conscious of who you actually are…including the parts that resist growth, fear change, and prefer familiar suffering to unknown freedom.

In my Sacramento practice, I work with clients who want to honor their psychedelic experiences without making them into something they're not.

These experiences can be profound catalysts for psychological work, but they're not shortcuts to emotional maturity.

The real magic happens in the slow, sustained work of bringing unconscious patterns into consciousness - whether those patterns got revealed through psilocybin, ayahuasca, clinical ketamine, MDMA, DMT, LSD, holotropic breathing, or just the ordinary altered state of deep therapy.

Because consciousness change isn't an event.

It's a practice.

This kind of therapy takes time

We live in a world that prizes speed. Fast relief. Instant results. Same-day delivery.

So it’s no surprise that many people come to therapy hoping for a fix. A formula. A timeline.

But psychodynamic therapy doesn’t move on a clock. It moves with the psyche.

And the psyche doesn’t care about your calendar.

Depth Can’t Be Rushed

You can’t hurry trust. You can’t schedule a breakthrough.

Psychodynamic therapy is rooted in the belief that change happens not just from insight, but from the experience of being seen over time. It’s not about giving you answers. It’s about helping you learn how to hear your own.

That takes time. Not because you’re slow. But because you’re complex.

Insight Isn’t a Lightbulb. It’s a Dimmer Switch.

Sometimes people say, “I already know where this comes from - why do I still feel stuck?”

Because intellectual insight isn’t the same as emotional integration.

In psychodynamic work, we return to patterns again and again - not to wallow, but to metabolize. To bring what’s unconscious into consciousness. To let the wound feel what it couldn’t feel before.

It’s less like flipping a switch and more like slowly turning up the light in a room you’ve been afraid to enter.

The Therapeutic Relationship Is the Treatment

In psychodynamic therapy, the relationship between therapist and patient isn’t just the backdrop - it’s the alchemical vessel.

Old relational patterns show up. Defenses emerge. Attachments play out.

And together, we work through them. Not just talk about them.

This process - called transference and countertransference - takes time to unfold. It’s sacred, messy, and deeply reparative when honored instead of rushed.

In Sacramento, Time Is Its Own Kind of Rebellion

In a city that’s both state-capital fast and river-town slow, therapy becomes a strange kind of rebellion.

To pause. To feel. To not optimize every hour for productivity. To show up each week and make space for the parts of you that don’t want to be seen.

That’s not avoidance. That’s healing.

Why the Long Haul Matters

You don’t undo a lifetime of conditioning in 6 sessions.

You don’t build self-trust overnight.

Psychodynamic therapy takes time because it honors your interior world. It’s not concerned with how quickly you can appear to be better. It’s concerned with what kind of relationship you’re building with yourself - and whether it can hold you when things fall apart again.

Because they will. That’s life. And therapy isn’t about avoiding rupture. It’s about increasing your capacity to move through it with grace, clarity, and a bit more choice.

Looking for a Psychodynamic Therapist in Sacramento?

If you’re drawn to depth, to insight, to work that unfolds slowly and intentionally - I’d be honored to walk with you. I see patients both in-person in Sacramento and via telehealth across California.

When you're ready, we can begin.

This is not CBT.

Psychodynamic therapy is not about quick fixes. It’s about going deeper—into memory, into meaning, into the patterns that live beneath our awareness but run the show.

If you’ve Googled “therapist in Sacramento,” chances are you've come across a buffet of modalities - CBT, EMDR, DBT, ACT. Acronyms promising solutions. Tools. Techniques.

But psychodynamic therapy doesn’t promise tools. It promises transformation.

So what is it, really? And how is it different from something like CBT?

Psychodynamic Therapy Isn’t Focused on Symptom Relief

CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is often structured, goal-oriented, and symptom-focused. It’s the therapy of to-do lists and thought records. For many, it works beautifully—especially for targeted issues like phobias or test anxiety.

But psychodynamic therapy isn’t interested in putting a Band-Aid on a festering wound.

It asks:

• Why is this wound here at all?

• Who taught you to keep reopening it?

• What part of you thinks you deserve it?

CBT may help you reframe the thought, but psychodynamic work invites you to feel the original pain, make sense of it, and let it move through—so you don’t keep living it out unconsciously.

It’s Not About Managing the Inner Critic. It’s About Meeting Them.

You can’t out-logic a voice that was never logical to begin with.

That part of you that says you’re not enough didn’t come from nowhere. It has a history. It has a tone. It sounds like someone. In psychodynamic work, we listen to that voice. We trace its roots. And slowly, we change the relationship—not just the message.

This isn’t about “fixing” your self-talk. It’s about understanding who you had to become in order to survive. And whether you still need to be that person.

The Unconscious

In psychodynamic therapy, we don’t just focus on what you know. We pay attention to what you almost said, the dream you had, the way your body tensed when we hit something close to home.

That’s the unconscious at work.

We all have an emotional history that lives inside us—shaping how we love, fight, retreat, and long. Psychodynamic therapy gives that history space to be seen.

And when we bring the unconscious into consciousness? That’s when real, lasting change begins.

The Work Takes Time - But It’s Built to Last

Quick relief is not the same as deep change.

CBT often runs 6–12 weeks. Psychodynamic therapy can take longer. Not because it’s slow, but because it honors the complexity of being human.

We are not spreadsheets.

We are not symptoms to be reduced.

We are stories—layered, symbolic, unfolding.

In Sacramento, where the pace of life can feel like a tug-of-war between burnout and stillness, there is something radical about going slow. About making space for what’s been pushed down.

Psychodynamic Therapy in Sacramento

If you’re searching for a psychodynamic therapist in Sacramento, you’re looking for someone who understands the depth of this work - who sees therapy not as advice-giving, but as a collaborative excavation of meaning.

Not every therapist practices this way. And not every patient is ready for it. But if you’ve tried surface-level approaches and found them lacking—this may be the next right door.

Ready to Begin?

I’m a psychodynamic psychotherapist based in Sacramento (I am available for telehealth anywhere in California), working with individuals who want something more than symptom relief. If you’re drawn to depth, meaning, and the slow unfolding of insight -I’d be honored to meet you there.

Ancestral fears

The hand that steadies you is also the one that wounds you.

A recent NYT piece suggests that therapy culture - our collective turn inward, toward diagnosis, language, trauma as currency - may be one reason Millennials (aka The Spice Girl Generation? [finger’s crossed that moniker sticks]) and Gen Z are having fewer children.

Not just because of money. Or climate. Or Roe.

But because we are fluent now in harm.

Because we’ve been trained to fear our inheritance.

And worse - our capacity to pass it on.

Therapy has changed how we name hurt.

We’ve gotten good at tracing pain backwards.

We fear becoming the very people who loved us in the only way they knew how — even if it wasn’t the way we needed.

It’s a compelling thesis. Also, a comfort.

Because it suggests that if we heal long enough, name things precisely enough, we might one day be safe to become parents.

Safe to love someone we might damage.

But I don’t think that kind of safety exists.

And I don’t think the answer is retreat. Or avoidance. Or narrating our suffering like it might save us.

Fear is not a problem we can solve with language.

Some things don’t get resolved.

They just get lived through.

If you’ve chosen not to have children because it’s right for your body, your life, your joy -I support you without hesitation.

This is about autonomy. Not obligation.

What I’m speaking to is something else:
The decision not to try.

Not because you don’t want to.

Because you’re afraid you’ll fail.

Because you believe brokenness disqualifies you from loving. From raising up.

Because you’ve mistaken the ache of being human for a personal defect.

But life will break you open no matter what.

You will hurt people you love.

You will be hurt by people who love you.

And parenting - if it finds you - will gut you in both directions.

That’s not failure.

That’s the deal.

We don’t parent because we’re whole.

Wholeness is a myth.

We parent because we are willing to be undone by something greater than ourselves.

What unsettles me most is not that we’re afraid of hurting the people we love.

Of course we are.

But that we’ve convinced ourselves we won’t survive it.

That feels like a child’s fantasy.

“You’re It!” Your fave childhood game (and adult coping mechanism)

When was the last time you called someone a narcissist?

Many of our loudest judgments - the quick disgust, the moral outrage, the eye-rolls, the “can you believe they...” - aren’t just about other people.

They’re about us.

Welcome to the shadow.

Jung taught that the shadow accusations we hurl at others are often confessions waiting to be made about ourselves.

The shadow refers to the parts of ourselves we repress, deny, or disown - usually because they conflict with the image we want to present to the world.

But disowning those parts doesn’t erase them. It just pushes them underground, where they begin to project.

So instead of owning envy, we call someone arrogant.

Instead of recognizing our own manipulations, we fixate on how controlling others are.

Instead of admitting our capacity for rage, we label someone toxic.

These accusations might not be wrong. But they’re rarely clean.

The shadow loves to hide behind righteousness.

Want to meet your shadow? Ask your ex.

Right now, shadow work is trending - all over TikTok, Instagram, and spiritual wellness spaces.

It’s being sold as a kind of DIY enlightenment: journal prompts, tarot spreads, inner child memes.

But here’s the truth: shadow work isn’t just a vibe. It’s an excavation.

And done without support, it can be destabilizing - even dangerous.

Because the shadow doesn’t show up in clear reflections.

It distorts, exaggerates, and resists being seen. It’s symbolic, slippery, and emotionally loaded.

This work - done well - requires containment. It needs space for contradiction, grief, nuance.

And often, it needs the presence of someone trained to hold those depths with you. A therapist. A guide.

So yes, be curious when judgment arises:

• Instead of:“They’re so fake” Try:“Where am I not being real?”

• Instead of:“They’re a narcissist” Try:“Where do I feel unseen or small in their presence?”

• Instead of:“They’re manipulative” Try:“Where am I bending truth to stay in control?”

You’re likely to meet a version of yourself you’ve never dared to look at - but always suspected was there, just beneath the surface.

And that is the beginning of living more consciously.

But not necessarily more comfortably.

Start slow. Go deep. And don’t go it alone.

Clarity in the Age of Algorithms

“The price of civilization is neurosis.” - Carl Jung 

We keep saying things are getting worse. 

That the world is more chaotic, more fractured, more fake than ever. 

But I don’t think that’s quite accurate.

What we’re experiencing is a loss of insulation - a dropping away of the illusion that the future would reward stability with more stability.

We’re in the age of algorithms - where every impulse is tracked and reflected back to us in distorted form. 

We know way too much about what everyone else is thinking!

We scroll through the entire archive of human civilization before breakfast. 

We were not built for this much input.

Algorithms isolate us into feedback loops that feel like reality, then make us wonder if we’re losing our minds. It’s chaos!

But chaos isn’t the exception. It’s the baseline. 

The myth that things were ever stable, orderly, or under control is a privilege of modernity. 

As if we were “over” surviving ourselves. 

As if we didn’t build cities on tectonic faults, economies on debt, and digital lives on surveillance engines. 

What’s crumbling isn’t reality - it’s the fantasy that we’d transcended our nature.

Jung suggested that civilization itself produces neurosis: the repression of instinct, the denial of death, the demand that we stay composed while the unconscious roils underneath. 

In many ways, this moment - glitchy, overwhelming, unspeakably strange - is a reckoning with that repression. 

The veils are lifting. We’re not more broken than we used to be - we’re just closer to the surface of things.

I think this is why so many people feel foggy, disoriented, and unmoored. 

Not because we’re descending into madness, but because we’re waking up inside a long-delayed honesty. 

It’s disorienting to live in a time where the stakes are exposed, the violence isn’t outsourced, and the contradictions are harder to rationalize away. 

But there’s also something clarifying in it. Something that reminds me I’m alive. Reminder: YOU ARE ALIVE RIGHT NOW.

The phone doesn’t cause the chaos - it accelerates our encounter with it. 

AI doesn’t invent unreality - it exaggerates the one we’ve built. 

We are not being ruined by the times. We’re being revealed by them.

And maybe that’s the work now. 

Not to restore a vanished normal, but to develop the capacity to live without the anesthesia. 

To be here, in this jagged, breathless moment, and not look away. 

Not to transcend our primate instincts, but to see them clearly, and choose differently.

The world has always been like this. 

Violent and beautiful. Terrible and tender. 

But maybe now, finally, it’s honest. 

And maybe, beneath the noise, we are too.

Loneliness Is Not a Symptom. It’s a Signal.

We’re told we’re in a loneliness epidemic - as if loneliness were a virus we caught from too much time alone.

But loneliness isn’t new. And it isn’t a flaw.

It’s a deeply human response to disconnection - from others, but also from ourselves.

There’s a kind of loneliness no amount of scrolling can touch.

It arrives quietly - between sips of tea, on the drive home, just after the book ends.

It’s not about being alone. It’s about a lack of resonance.

The sense that no one is quite with you, even when they’re around.

In a world built to distract you from yourself, that feeling gets labeled pathological.

But it’s not a symptom. It’s a signal.

Biologically, loneliness is a distress call. A primal urge for reconnection. 

The nervous system doesn’t distinguish between emotional isolation and physical threat - the brain codes both as danger. 

That tightening in your chest? It’s your body asking: Where is my pack?

Wolves howl to locate each other. 

A lone wolf isn’t powerful. It’s at risk.

Many of us are living like lone wolves now. 

Not by choice, but by design - cut off by culture, by trauma, by algorithms that replace communion with commentary.

In therapy, I often hear:

“I shouldn’t feel this lonely. I have people.”
“I don’t belong anywhere.”
“I can’t tell who I am when I’m with others.”

These aren’t just clinical patterns. They’re deep human truths.

We live in a culture that prizes performance over presence.

That mistakes constant contact for true connection.

So when loneliness shows up, it may not mean something’s wrong.

It may mean you’re coming into contact with what matters.

Loneliness often signals the end of pretending.

The point where performance gives way to longing.

Where the need for something real outweighs the comfort of the familiar.

That you're ready to be met, not just mirrored.

To connect, not just to cope.

That’s a good place to start. 

You’re Not Broken. You’re Becoming.

One of the best things you can do for the health of your plant is to stress it out. In order to be healthy, the plant must suffer at times.

Suffering grows humans too.

I’m not on TikTok or Instagram, but if those platforms are anything like they were when I left - there are still plenty of people hawking the Secret to Wholeness™.

There is no secret. But there is a trick. I’ll get to that.

There is no such thing as wholeness. Wholeness is a product sold by the health and wellness industry meant to make you feel you are broken and that the $79 pack of adaptogenic whatevers is JUST the thing to cure you of your malaise. Your ills. Your fatal flaws. 

There is growth, or there is death. And growth is stressful. And growth is ultimately fatal - all things must pass. 

Gardeners know the secret to a healthy bloom in springtime is to stress the fuck out of the plant coming out of dormancy. A plant’s natural lifecycle is one of dormancy, stress, growth, bloom, and decay. Each phase as necessary as the last.

As a psychotherapist I have seen many people who just want the quick fix answer to all that ails them (uh, me too). As a psychoanalytic scholar, and veritable expert on all strain of existential crisis I’m here to tell you that the best of us suffer intensely. 

The trick is - recognizing when you cannot hold it all on your own, and asking for help before suffering becomes your identity. 

The goal of therapy is not to disappear the pain, but rather, to so well-callous the hand that holds the pain, that suddenly the red-hot thing (traumatic memory, root pain, primal fear) is able to be held - and understood.

It’s only by going over and over and over again the painful bits… building up tolerance and consciousness… experiencing stressful growth bit by bit - that we earn the ability to move more consciously in our lives. To not be governed by the inner destructive forces that would keep us suffering in the dark.

That we finally earn our peace.

Gender Isn’t a Problem to Solve

The political arena in America has more in common with the failed spectacle of the Arena Football League than with the serious business of running government. So trust me when I say - I’m not here to contend with your belief system around who should and should not be in power. That’s for a political science geek, I’m a psychology geek.

But I am writing about power. 

Power thrives in the otherwise sick soil of grandiosity and narcissism.

Narcissism feeds on rigidity. It leaves no room for nuance, for contradiction, for anyone else's experience. That’s how we arrive at the grotesque notion that Transwomen are just men in dresses, or that Transmen are failed dykes… or whatever the hate-speech catch of the day is.

Narcissists have no room for anything other than their own impressions, senses of themselves - they are rigid, and they are terrified, and they certainly make interesting patients.

Let’s touch some grass, and sink into our human roots for a moment:

Banana Slugs: No hierarchy, no gods, no masters

Banana slugs are hermaphroditic. Each slug possesses both male and female reproductive organs. When two slugs mate, both can fertilize and be fertilized, often simultaneously.

Willow Trees: Gender is seasonal

Some willow species can switch between producing male and female flowers from year to year. They're known as labile in sex expression - meaning gendered traits aren’t fixed, even within the same organism. For willow trees gender is not a core identity, but a fluid role.

Ancient Human Cultures: Gender non-conforming gods

The goddess Inanna was worshipped in ancient Mesopotamia with priests who were assigned male at birth but lived as women - early examples of institutionalized gender fluidity within religious systems. Divinity made space for complexity. Gender was mystical, not medical.

How can you argue with nature? Human nature? The nature of the gods? 

You could try to of course. Millions do. An army of narcissists shaking their terrified fists from their porches saying, “There’s only two genders!”, isn’t just pathetic, it’s inaccurate. 

There are not only two genders. 

There is only one reality - and that reality contains multitudes.