Affirming Care for LGBTQIA+ Clients, Kink and Non-Monogamy in Philadelphia and Newtown, PA
You Should Not Have to Audition for Your Own Therapist
Most people who open a page like this one are not browsing. They are screening. They have either been in therapy before and watched a therapist's face change when they said the word "polyamory," or they have thought about going for years and decided, every time, that it was not worth finding out. Some of them have explained what FetLife is to someone with a graduate degree in mental health. Some have been asked, within the first ten minutes, how they "became" this way, as though the question has an answer and they owe it.
If any of that sounds familiar, you are not describing something rare; there is a lapse in care. You should not have to invest in therapy sessions before finding out whether your therapist can hold space for you, your interests and preferences, and your relationships.
What It’s Like To Be A Client Here
You will be believed. Not tolerated, not accommodated, not accepted despite ourselves. Believed in the sense that your account of your own life is the starting point rather than the thing to be verified. If you tell us your relationship is good, we will proceed as though it is good and focus on what you came in about.
You will not have to teach us. This is the part we feel most strongly about, and it is the reason this page exists separately from our other service area pages (Individual Therapy, Couples Therapy, Sex Therapy, and Family Therapy) rather than being folded into it. You are paying for a trained therapist, not a seminar. Explaining your own identity to your therapist is unpaid labor, and for a lot of people it is the precise reason they stop going. If we do not know something specific to your situation, your local community, your particular dynamic, the vocabulary your people use, we will ask you directly and briefly, and then we will go read about it on our own time.
You will not be asked to justify the structure. There is a particular kind of lazy clinical reasoning that shows up constantly with non-monogamous, kinky and LGBTQIA+ clients: the assumption that the identity is the pathology. When a monogamous couple argues about the dishes, nobody concludes that monogamy caused it. When a non-monogamous couple argues about the dishes, that inference happens all the time. We do not make it. Relationship structure is not a meaningful predictor of psychological or relational wellbeing, the research on this is consistent and has been for years, and we treat it that way. You will not be asked who hurt you. This is aimed specifically at kinky clients, because the assumption that kink must trace back to abuse is one of the most common and most corrosive things that happens in a therapy room. Unless you bring a trauma history into the room yourself, we will not go looking for one behind your desires.
You will set the pace. Nothing here is required. You will not be asked to disclose a kink, a partner, a history, or a body detail in order to be taken seriously or respected as a client. You can work on your anxiety for six months and never mention any of the rest of it. That is a legitimate use of therapy and we will not treat it as withholding. You will be told the truth, including when it is inconvenient. We are candid by name and by temperament. If we think you are avoiding something, we will say so. If we think a plan is not working, we will say that too. If we are not the right fit for what you need, we will tell you that and help you find someone who is, rather than merely keep you on the schedule.
What We Already Know & What We Will Not Do
We know that non-monogamy is not one thing. Open relationships, swinging, polyamory, solo polyamory, relationship anarchy, hierarchical and non-hierarchical structures, and relationship configurations that do not have a tidy name are all different, and the differences matter clinically. We know that a primary partner is a choice rather than a default, and that telling a client to prioritize their primary is not neutral advice. We know that jealousy is information rather than evidence of failure, that compersion is not required, and that a client who does not feel compersion is not doing non-monogamy wrong. We know that agreements are living documents, that renegotiation is normal rather than a sign of collapse, and that the hardest version of this work is usually not jealousy at all, it is time, energy, logistics, and the quiet arithmetic of who gets to be tired. We know that kink is not abuse, and that consent is the line between them. We know that plenty of kink involves no sexual activity at all, that a scene can be carefully negotiated and still spontaneous, that sub drop and top drop are real physiological and emotional states, and that aftercare is part of the practice rather than a special favor. We know that risk-aware consensual kink is a different framework from safe, sane and consensual, and that clients have strong and reasonable preferences about which language describes their practice. We will use yours. We know that a kink present in a client's fantasy life is not the same as a kink they want to act on, and that a great many people never act on any of it and are perfectly content. We know that sexual orientation and gender identity are separate things, that bisexuality is not a phase or a stopping point, that the ace spectrum is an orientation rather than a dysfunction, and that a client's transition is not automatically the reason they came in. We know that coming out is not one event. It is a recurring decision, made over and over, in different rooms, with different calculations, for the rest of a person's life. We know that internalized stigma does not resolve just because someone has been out for a decade, that chosen family is family, and that religious and cultural rejection can be more complicated to grieve than outright cruelty, because there is often real love tangled up in it. Where those threads intersect with family expectations and generational pressure, we work with them directly, that is the same ground covered on our Family Therapy page. We know that LGBTQIA+ people are not automatically seeking therapy about being LGBTQIA+. It is one part of a whole life, and we will follow your lead about how much room it takes up.
We will not treat your identity, your structure or your desires as the diagnosis. That is the single most common failure in this work and it is disqualifying. What the literature actually shows is that non-monogamous relationships report comparable levels of satisfaction, commitment, trust and longevity to monogamous ones. Where your difficulties are about your relationship, we will treat the relationship. Where they are about your job, your childhood or your sleep, we will treat that. This practice does not provide, and will not refer you to anyone who provides sexual orientation or gender identity change efforts. Those practices are discredited, opposed by every major mental health and medical organization, and associated with measurable harm. If you are looking for that, we are not your practice. We will not require abstinence from your practice as the price of care. You will not be told to stop going to events, or to pause a relationship, or to set aside a kink, before we will work with you. We will not assume monogamy, and we will not assume you are struggling with a structure because you mentioned it. Our intake asks about relationship structure directly, because assuming is how the problem starts. We will not make you educate us about a marginalization we should already understand. And we will not ask you to do the emotional work of managing discomfort.
LGBTQIA+ affirming care
Affirming care is not a specialty, it is a baseline. It means we are not working from a model that treats a client's orientation or gender as the thing to be resolved, and it means we have done the reading and the unlearning that makes that possible in practice rather than only on a website.
In practice, this looks like exploring identity at whatever tempo suits you. It looks like working through coming out, whether that be to a partner, to parents, to colleagues, to yourself. It looks like working on internalized stigma, which rarely moves in response to logic and responds much better to saying the thing out loud in a room where nothing terrible happens. It looks like addressing the exhaustion of minority stress, which is cumulative, and which is rarely named by clients as a stressor because it has simply always been there.
It looks like understanding that gender dysphoria and sexual function interact. That a changing body changes sex, and that grief about that is common and does not need to be argued away. It looks like holding space for a partner whose spouse is transitioning, or for a couple navigating a shift in one person's orientation, or for someone whose identity is arriving late and unsettling a life they like. It looks like acknowledging the specific weight of medical systems that have historically made LGBTQIA+ people prove themselves to receive care, and not reproducing that dynamic in our practice.
Kink and Fetish Exploration
The work here is often “less exotic” than people expect. It is frequently about shame, the kind that formed quietly and got reinforced by a broader culture that treats a wide range of desires as alarming. That shame does real damage. Shame is what stops people from negotiating clearly, from naming limits, from asking a partner for something and hearing the answer. Reducing it is not indulgence. It is risk reduction.
The work is also practical. Deciding whether and how to tell a partner something you have never said out loud to anyone. Working out how to introduce a desire without it landing as an accusation or a confession. Negotiating a scene with someone, with the specific vocabulary your community uses rather than the vocabulary a textbook supplied. Distinguishing a limit from a fear. Recognizing red flags in a partner (like controlling behavior, rigidity, a refusal to hear no) and green ones (like reflective listening, empathy, flexibility, mutuality). Supporting someone who has just come out of a bad experience in a community that is overwhelmingly made of good ones. And the work sometimes has nothing to do with kink at all. A lot of kinky clients come to therapy about their careers, their families, their sleep, and tell us about the rest of it in passing, and the entire value of being in a kink-affirming practice is that telling us in passing does not require a decision about whether it is safe. Kink is common. What is uncommon is a clinician who knows and agrees with that.
Non-Monogamy, ENM & Polyamory
Our practice is non-monogamy-competent, not merely tolerant. Tolerance is the thing you are trying to get away from. Competence means we can be useful.
Being useful looks like knowing the difference between jealousy and envy, and that neither is a verdict on your relationship. Knowing that time and energy, not sex, are where most non-monogamous relationships actually strain. Knowing that disclosure decisions with family, employers and children are a distinct and recurring source of stress that monogamous clients never have to make. Knowing that one partner's experience of an open relationship can be genuinely different from the other's, that the same arrangement can be liberating for one person and quietly corrosive for another, and that both accounts are true and neither is a failure of the structure. It looks like helping with agreements that actually work… where they are specific enough to be usable but flexible enough to survive contact with real life, and revisited on purpose rather than only after something has gone wrong. It looks like working through a rupture that happened inside a structure that is already under scrutiny, where the client is carrying both the injury and the fear that the injury proves something. And it looks like working with people who are opening up a relationship for the first time at forty, or at sixty, and who need to hear that the uncertainty they feel is not a warning sign. It also means taking the request seriously when the thing you actually want help with is logistics, or a calendar, or how to tell your mother.
Wherever You Are
Affirming therapy is not only for people who are certain, out, or in a stable structure. A large share of the clients who find their way here are somewhere less resolved than that. If you are questioning, that is enough of a reason to start. You do not need a label to begin, and the process is not designed to produce one. If you have known for a long time and told almost nobody, that is a different kind of work, and the pace is yours. If you are newly out and mostly relieved, you may find that therapy is about holding the good parts rather than solving a problem. If you have been out for twenty years and are tired of being resilient, that is worth bringing in too.
If you are in a mixed-orientation relationship, or a couple where one person's identity has shifted and the other's has not, that is genuinely difficult territory and it is not solved by one partner being right. We work with all people. If you are solo and non-monogamous, or have multiple partners, we will do that. If you are kinky and monogamous, you are welcome here… the two are not the same population and we do not treat them as though they are. If you are here because a partner is, and you have your own reservations about any of this, we can work with the reservations. A therapist who can only help people who already agree with each other is not much use to a couple. You do not need to arrive with your identity resolved, your vocabulary polished, or your story organized. You especially do not need to arrive having already decided that this is fine.
Practical Details
Lauren Whitehouse is a Licensed Professional Counselor, licensed in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey. That is the reason this practice can work with clients across both states, and it is the boundary of where we can work. Because licensure follows your physical location during a session, clients need to be in Pennsylvania or New Jersey at the time of the appointment, whether that is an office in one of our locations or your living room.
We see clients in person at two offices. The Old City office in Philadelphia sits a few blocks from the 8th & Market and 2nd Street transit stops, which suits Center City commuters, students, and clients coming from Northern Liberties, Fishtown, Queen Village and South Philly who would rather take SEPTA than drive. The Newtown office in Bucks County is a few blocks off State Street and is the easier option for families, for evening appointments, and for anyone coming from Doylestown, Yardley, Langhorne or Richboro.
Secure video sessions are available throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey, which means you are not limited to the two office locations if you are in Allentown, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Jersey City, Cherry Hill, Princeton, or anywhere else in either state. Telehealth is a real session, not a lesser version of one, and plenty of clients here work entirely that way.
This is an out-of-network, private-pay practice. The standard rate is $175 for a 50-minute session, with longer sessions available. You are not choosing that structure because it is convenient for us; it is because when insurance pays, insurance decides how many sessions you get, what diagnosis goes into your permanent medical record, and whether a reviewer who has never met you approves the plan. It also routinely excludes sex therapy, couples therapy and family therapy, because none of those fit a diagnosis-based model. Working outside it is what allows us to treat a client's relationship or sexual concerns without pathologizing anyone, which would be difficult to do while also attaching a diagnosis to it.
Many plans reimburse part of what you pay. We can provide a superbill which is an itemized statement with the codes and license information your insurer needs and you submit it yourself. Sessions are HSA- and FSA-eligible, and under the No Surprises Act you will receive a written Good Faith Estimate before you begin. Cost is a real barrier for a lot of people, and we hold a limited number of reduced-fee slots. If money is the thing standing between you and a first conversation, say so and we will tell you honestly what we can do. There is no charge for the first conversation. It is a 15-minute phone or video call, and it is a conversation rather than a formal intake. You can ask whether we have worked with what you are bringing, how we would approach it, what it costs, and anything else you want to know before deciding. You do not have to disclose anything you are not ready to disclose in order to have it. We reply to inquiries within one business day, and if you would rather not talk on the phone at all, say so and we will handle everything by email.
Questions People Ask Before They Reach Out
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No. Questioning is a specific and valid reason to seek therapy, and you will not be pushed toward a conclusion.
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No. The research does not support that conclusion, and neither do we. If something in the structure is creating distress, we will work on the specific thing rather than the structure as a whole.
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No. You decide what is relevant. Many clients work on unrelated concerns and never bring it up, and that is a legitimate way to use therapy.
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Yes. Kink and non-monogamy overlap heavily but they are separate, and we work with both independently.
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Yes, and it is better to come in than to keep debating it at home. We do not assume both people should end up in the same place, and we will not push you toward agreement you do not actually have.
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No. Sex therapy at Candid Therapy and Counseling is talk therapy. There is no physical contact of any kind between therapist and client, no nudity, no examination and no observation.
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That depends on what you need and it is worth asking on the first call so there is no confusion later. We will tell you directly whether it is something we provide or whether you need a different kind of provider for it.
If you want to know how this would actually go, the first step is a free 15-minute consultation. You can bring as much or as little as you want to it, and if it turns out we are not the right fit, we will say so and help you find someone who is.