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Written by Bridget Bertrand, LMFT

Today, I invite you into creativity. I hope you will join me. Before you keep reading, go grab some paper, pencils, pens, or any art supplies you have nearby.

When I start a creative practice, I have no idea where it will go. When I am dancing, there is no choreography. With pencil, watercolor, and marker, I go with the flow. Maybe, it’s all those years in dance class when I was young, with choreography and precision being the goal; now I would rather be free to move wherever, and however I want. I am letting my body, mind, and spirit be in flow.

There is something powerful happening in the brain when we create this way. Expressive creative practice can quiet the overactive, analytical parts of the mind and engage sensory and emotional networks, helping us regulate our nervous system. Research suggests that creative practices can lower stress hormones, increase dopamine, and support integration between the left and right hemispheres—essentially helping us feel more whole.

For years, I have been using watercolor and other materials to process and check in with myself in the morning. I have been writing more about this process, and I notice my thinking is somewhat slower—in a positive way. My thoughts and feelings typically come very quickly as someone with ADHD. Being a therapist and a facilitator has helped me slow down and reflect deeply on these experiences. This is a good time to take three of your biggest breaths of the day. I hope these words help you regulate. Take that paper and make a squiggle, a box to fill in with thoughts you want to let go of. Draw a shape that inspires you to return to the intention you are calling in. 

My meditation practice has deepened my inner slowness. I consider creative practices to be a form of meditation. In fact, when we are immersed in art-making or creative practice, we often enter a “flow state,” where the brain shifts away from rumination and into present-moment awareness. This state is associated with increased well-being and reduced anxiety.

Recently, a few comments about my work have stayed with me and are helping me craft and re-craft the messages of my offerings.

One friend asked, “Do you ever make art for art’s sake?” I think the question was also asking whether I create art to sell or because I see something I want to make—in my mind’s eye or in the world. The answer is almost always a complete nope. I can count the number of pieces I’ve made to represent a specific object, like flowers or a vista. I do have some consistent shapes in my work: hearts, rainbows, waves, clouds, and infinity symbols.

I deeply love questions about the things I create. I see my friends trying to understand what is happening in these messy, unpredictable, expressive arts practices. I also show my clients how messy and abstract this kind of creativity can be.  When I engage in a dance practice to a favorite song, I return to my off-Broadway theatre roots. Those shows were not linear, but like the abstract paintings I create most days. 

I remember clearly a wildly talented painter in a person-centered expressive arts training saying—and I paraphrase— “the movement scares me like the painting scares you.” After a decade of being out of the closet (yes, I am a late-in-life queer) and doing art weekly, neither painting nor moving scares me anymore. Painting feels like second nature, just like dance and movement. Putting them into the world does not scare me anymore, either. So, I invite you to make a creation, pick up that old craft discarded and gathering dust bunnies. 

You might be thinking, “I want to create something that looks like something in my mind.” That is completely fine. All I offer is that you create a space of compassion for yourself as you create.

If you are a dancer and want to paint your next movement piece, I encourage you to try it. Do all the things that help you get into your body and away from screens. Your nervous system will thank you. These times we are in call us to slow down, create for ourselves, share with our beloveds, and gather in community as we create. 

A second question that has stayed with me over the years from one of my clients: “Adults do that?” When I shared what expressive arts can look like in therapy sessions, I said, “Yes.” Do adults love committing to art in session? Do they dive in like kids? Not always. But they can play. Adults can play too.  We need to play in all forms, so I hope this short blog has inspired you.

I have said this for a decade: this stuff works. Art heals. When we create, we are not just making something—we are reorganizing our internal world, building new neural pathways, and giving form to what might otherwise stay stuck inside. Let’s live a little more in the moment—in color, in paint, in music, and in collage. Any Gaylesta member can book a free 30-minute creative session with me. My passion is sharing how creativity can support us now more than ever. 

About the author:

I am Bridget Bertrand (any pronouns), a queer parent with training in expressive arts practice, mindfulness, and embodied social justice. I grew up in the U.S. South, attended undergraduate there, and earned a degree in Theater Arts with a minor in Education. After graduation, Imoved to New York City, where I taught theater in four of the five boroughs and did acting along the way.

After years of parent meetings that felt a lot like therapy, I turned to a career in psychology while raising a child. I am thrilled to offer expressive arts and mindfulness sessions WORLDWIDE. It is an honor to walk along with clients, and I hope to inspire folks to find their own unique path toward healing. I have completed 150 hours of coursework centered on social justice and mindfulness at the Embody Lab and with the folks at MINDFL. All these courses are rooted in somatic healing. I am committed to creating mutual aid relationships with members of my community. Additionally, I am a Board Member at Large for Gaylesta and am on the Social and Membership committees.

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Written by Lisette Lahana, LCSW

Healthy communication matters in every relationship, but LGBTQIA+ partners often have an extra layer of lived experience shaping how we talk and connect. Identity, minority stress, dysphoria, neurodivergence, safety concerns, and cultural or family expectations weave into the way queer and trans people show up in love relationships. Strengthening communication in LGBTQIA+ relationships begins with warmth, safety, and a willingness to understand each other’s stories. The following are LGBTQIA communication tools to help your relationships toward resilience.

Begin With Safety

Conversations tend to go better when both partners feel grounded emotionally, and physically. Sometimes this means choosing a calmer moment to bring up something tender. Other times it looks like a gentle check-in: “Is now a good time to talk?” When having these conversations you may use fidgets, weighted blankets, or other sensory tools that help you settle.

Creating this sense of safety is not about being perfect. It is about giving yourselves the best chance to stay connected while navigating something vulnerable. If you like more structure, the Gottman Institute offers research-backed ideas, self-help books and workbooks that many people in relationships find helpful.

Talk About Identity

Identity deeply shapes how we learn to communicate. Partners may have very different coming-out journeys, levels of family acceptance, relationships to gender, or experiences with dysphoria or racism. These differences can affect everything, from how comfortable someone feels expressing emotion to how quickly they shut down during conflict.

You might recognize patterns from childhood. Maybe you watched a parent, often a mother in some cultural contexts, quiet her own needs to keep the peace. Without meaning to, you might find yourself doing the same in your adult relationships. On the other hand, some cis men, trans men, and nonbinary trans masc folks carry internal pressure around masculinity and work hard to avoid communication styles that feel harmful or toxic.

Learning and talking about where your communication habits come from helps your partner understand you with more compassion. It also creates space to grow together.

Validate Each Other

For many LGBTQIA+ people, having feelings or identities dismissed has been a painful and repeated experience. This makes feeling validated within a relationship particularly powerful. When your partner truly listens and reflects that they understand, it can feel settling, like letting go of an exhale you did not know you were holding.

Validation does not mean agreeing with everything. It means offering emotional presence. Simply sitting with a partner and saying, “I believe you” or “I hear you” can be helpful.

A few additional examples:

“Your feelings make sense given what you have been through.”

“Thank you for trusting me with this.”

“I can see why that was hurtful.”

These small moments soften conversations and make it easier for partners to stay open to one another. Try starting with validation before adding hard feedback. It can help the other person feel safe enough to hear you.

Repair Quickly and Gently

There is conflict in most relationships. What matters most is how you come back together after something has gone wrong or off kilter. Repair can be especially meaningful for LGBTQIA+ partners who carry the weight of discrimination, family rejection, or the fear of being misunderstood.

Repairs do not need to be dramatic or perfect. The heart of repair is simple: turn toward your partner with care and begin a conversation.

You might say:

“Let me try that again. I really want to understand you better.”

“I hear how that hurt you.”

“Can we slow down and try to reset?”

“I care about us, and I want to reconnect.”

Repair is most effective when it happens early, before there is too much distance. These efforts at repair build trust and help your relationship stay resilient, even during stressful times.

Use Rituals

Rituals can bring a sense of steadiness and comfort to our LGBTQIA+ relationships. They do not have to be big or time-consuming; they just need to be intentional and consistent. Rituals communicate, “We are choosing to nurture our connection.”

A weekly check-in, a shared gratitude practice, or a sensory-friendly bonding ritual can give you a predictable place to return to each other. Maybe Sunday mornings become a time talk about what went well that week and what could help you feel more connected going forward.

Rituals can also be playful or creative. Cooking a meal together, choosing a queer pizza and movie night, making art or a night of DJing for each other. Reading gratitude lists to each other can strengthen mutual appreciation.

The best rituals are the ones that feel like you and represent your relationship. Let your personalities, sensory needs, cultures, and humor guide what you build together.

If You Are Feeling Stuck, Consider Therapy

Queer and trans love deserves tools that truly support it.

If you and your partner want help strengthening your communication, working through conflict or deepening your connection, the therapists at Gaylesta.org offer affirming relationship therapy for LGBTQIA+ relationships.

About the author:

Lisette Lahana, LCSW has been licensed for over 25 years and is a queer white, Latine therapist in California. She runs an online and Oakland-based private practice group, Authentic Alliance, serving LGBTQIA+ clients including offering relationship therapy and individual therapy for all ages. Lisette specializes in trauma therapy, work with transgender and non binary clients, their families, as well as mood disorders, such as bipolar disorder. She is a WPATH Certified Member and Mentor as well as an EMDR therapist.

Written by Dr. Denise Renye

In working with queer couples, the range of presenting concerns is broad and often complex. Desire discrepancy is one recurring entry point, and one that is often approached in ways that can miss what is actually organizing it. What often appears as a mismatch in desire is more frequently shaped by regulation needs, relational patterning, and the conditions under which desire can emerge.

Responsive desire is still often misinterpreted as diminished libido. In queer couples, this can be compounded by the absence of clear cultural scripts for how desire is “supposed” to function. Many people we work with expect desire to precede arousal. When it does not, they assume something is wrong. But for many people, desire emerges in response to conditions: feeling emotionally connected, physically at ease, and not under pressure. When clinicians orient too quickly toward increasing frequency, it can unintentionally reinforce the idea that desire should be spontaneous and consistently available. This often deepens shame and further disrupts the conditions that allow desire to emerge in the first place.

A common intervention in couples work is to focus on communication. While important, this often occurs without sufficient attention to whether either partner is regulated enough to engage. In many couples, particularly those organized around pursuit and withdrawal, conversations about sex are happening in states of dysregulation. One partner may be activated and moving toward contact as a way to restore connection or reduce anxiety. The other may be moving toward shutdown, protecting against overwhelm, pressure, or a loss of internal contact. In practice, this often looks like one partner leaning forward, trying to initiate a conversation about sex, while the other becomes quieter, less present, or subtly withdrawn. From this state, even well-structured communication tools tend to have limited impact. Desire does not respond to pressure. It responds to conditions. And those conditions are mediated by the nervous system.

In queer couples, pursuit and withdrawal can take on particular forms, especially in the absence of heteronormative roles that might otherwise organize the dynamic. One partner may move toward sex as a way of regulating distress or seeking reassurance. The other may experience that movement as demand, leading to further withdrawal. Over time, sex becomes organized around this pattern. It is no longer primarily an expression of mutual desire, but a site of regulation, negotiation, and, often, misattunement. Clinicians may inadvertently reinforce this dynamic by encouraging compromise without attending to the underlying regulatory mismatch.

One of the central clinical tasks is to hold both partners without quickly assigning dysfunction. The partner seeking more sex is often not “too much.” They may be attempting to regulate anxiety through closeness, or they may simply experience desire as a more central pathway to connection. The partner seeking less sex is not necessarily avoidant or low libido. They may be protecting against overwhelm, pressure, or disconnection from their own body, particularly if intimacy begins to move them outside their window of tolerance, where the body shifts toward activation or shutdown. In other cases, they may feel less oriented toward sexual connection, require different conditions for desire to emerge, or already feel more internally resourced without needing sex to regulate or connect in the same way. At times, one partner may feel more at home in their body or more available to pleasure, while the other is navigating tension, inhibition, or the lingering effects of trauma that shape how safety and contact are experienced. These differences do not inherently signal dysfunction, but they do shape how desire is experienced and expressed within the relationship. When either position is pathologized, the system tends to become more rigid. A non-pathologizing stance allows for a different kind of inquiry: What function is sex serving for each partner? What conditions support or inhibit desire? What happens in each partner’s body as intimacy becomes possible?

Queer couples are often navigating additional layers that shape how desire and regulation unfold. These can include histories of marginalization, internalized shame, and the absence of consistent relational templates, as well as the complexity of forming identity and attachment outside dominant cultural narratives. For some, these experiences are not only social but also somatic, shaping how safety, exposure, and connection are felt in the body, particularly in the presence of intimacy. In smaller or overlapping communities, relational patterns may repeat within shared social networks, making differentiation more difficult and increasing the pull toward what is familiar, even when it is not sustaining. These factors do not determine outcomes, but they do shape the relational field in which desire emerges.

Over time, I have come to understand these dynamics less as problems to solve and more as patterns to track. When desire discrepancy is approached primarily as a problem of frequency, interventions tend to remain at the surface. When it is understood as an expression of regulation, attachment, and relational patterning, the work begins to shift. The focus moves away from increasing desire directly and toward understanding and supporting the conditions in which desire can emerge. This often requires slowing down, tracking the nervous system, and working at the level where misattunement occurs. In this way, desire becomes less something to fix and more something to understand, support, and, over time, reorganize.

About the author:

Dr. Denise Renye is a licensed clinical psychologist, AASECT Certified Sex Therapist, and IAYT Certified Yoga Therapist based in Marin County, California. She specializes in LGBTQ+ affirmative therapy, queer relationships, sexuality, embodiment, trauma-informed care, and complex relational dynamics, working with both individuals and couples. In addition to her clinical practice, she provides consultation and supervision for therapists seeking deeper training in sexuality, trauma-informed relational work, and somatic approaches to psychotherapy. She also consults with companies and organizations on workplace relational dynamics, communication, and interpersonal complexity. Dr. Renye writes and teaches on topics related to intimacy, desire, attachment, and embodied relational healing.