Charity Laughlin

Seeking support in the face of life’s challenges is an act of great courage and I am glad you have found your way here. As a couples & family therapist and AASECT Certified Sex Therapist, I work with adult individuals, couples, and intimate partnerships experiencing relationship difficulties, sexual difficulties, or general mental health concerns (depression, anxiety, trauma, loss).

We are neurobiologically wired to seek connection with others, and it is common to feel loneliness, confusion, and heartbreak when experiencing relationship difficulties (poor communication, wanting different things, ongoing conflict without repair, lack of intimacy, relational trauma, or working through a breach of trust, such as infidelity). These relationship difficulties, while painful, can also be an invitation to stretch and grow in order to hold the paradoxes that arise in living in community with others. In therapy, I support you in deepening connection to yourself and others by helping you identify and skillfully communicate what you think, feel, and prefer and to listen to your partner(s) or significant other(s) share what they think, feel, and prefer from a place of curiosity and compassion. I particularly enjoy working with couples and individuals around issues of sexuality. I treat sexuality and relationships from a sexual health perspective, view consensual sexuality to be an essential, life-giving, and sacred aspect of our humanity, and support you in in integrating sexual health into the whole of your life and relationships.

Betrayals and breaches of trust, such as infidelity, are often experienced as relational traumas that bring with them painful and conflicting feelings. Betrayed partners often experience PTSD symptoms due to a particularly painful kind of trauma called betrayal trauma, and participating partners may experience the heavy shame of moral injury trauma. In couples therapy for betrayal, space is created where each of you can undertake your own healing journey and can together explore the meaning of what happened and choose whether to co-create together a new relationship built on deeper, more authentic connection.

I welcome diversity in my therapy practice and am committed to providing a supportive, affirming therapeutic environment for the multiple aspects of yourself you bring to therapy, including those identities in which you may have felt shamed, oppressed, or invisible. I have specific training and experience serving the LGBTQIA++ community and affirm all sexual orientations, gender identities, (consensual) relationship configurations, cultures, and faith traditions.