Rooted | Whole | Growing

Identity-affirming online therapy

for LGBTQIA+, Neurodivergent

BIPOC in California

As someone with multiple marginalized identities, you know how it feels to not belong…

In your family or community. As part of a church, workplace, or institution. In this culture and society. Even in your own body or whole life.

You’re so tired of feeling anxious, afraid, angry, ashamed, and alone.

Constantly trying to keep up and fit in, to do better and be enough is wearing you down.

And you’re realizing that you just can’t keep going like this.

Erin Carahan LPCC biracial woman therapist smiling gently wearing green camp collar button up maroon pants sitting on flagstone steps

I support and empower queer, neurodivergent, and mixed race BIPOC to:

  • deconstruct inherited, imposed, and internalized ideologies

  • explore and embrace their intersectional identities

  • design more sustainable and liberatory lives

Having a multifaceted identity often means it’s hard to find people who get it — who are accepting and safe enough that you can voice your doubts and fears, sit with your feelings and dreams. Even if you have generally supportive folks in your life, there are inevitably raw times or tender topics that leave you without someone capable of providing care in the ways that you need right now, being supportive of all of you.

As a licensed therapist with multicultural identities and experiences of my own (e.g. being biracial, exvangelical, a Third Culture Kid/adult), I bring a deeply compassionate presence and anti-oppressive framework to the collaborative healing process of counseling. I affirm the particular experiences and unique stories of multiply marginalized people; I support and empower them to process past traumas and navigate their intersectional identities with compassion and curiosity, and to embody authentic, expansive, and meaningful lives.

“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”

— Audre Lorde

Because so many LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and neurodivergent folks — myself included — have had harmful experiences and their identities invalidated in relationships and encounters in and outside of the mental healthcare industrial complex, I’m passionate about co-creating a safer space for therapy that’s deeply respectful of your own self-knowledge.

Specialties

    • Explore and affirm romantic and sexual orientations, gender identity and presentations

    • Challenge and deconstruct compulsive cis-hetero-sexuality and allonormativity, internalized homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, and misogynoir

    • Navigate and grieve past, present, and future familial relationships with cultural sensitivity

    • Develop effective communication skills and healthier attachment patterns in queer, platonic, kink, and/or polyamorous relationships

    • Explore unique neurodivergent traits and strengths, and integrate effective accommodations into everyday life

    • Develop an individualized and practical path out of burnout and into sustainable living

    • Address immediate challenges with personalized, neuro-affirming, and harm-reduction coping strategies

    • Recontextualize pre-diagnosis (including self-diagnosis!) life experiences with a neurodivergent-informed and -affirming lens

    • Process anger, shame, guilt, and grief of misdiagnoses, unmasking, and late-recognition of neurodivergence

    • Develop personalized skills and strategies that actually help with the stress of life changes (e.g. graduating, coming out, getting laid off)

    • Build an orienting and grounding connection to self-identified values and beliefs (e.g. while deconstructing faith, starting/ending/opening a relationship, becoming a parent)

    • Create space for mixed feelings, opposing desires, and ambiguous losses amid destabilizing uncertainty

    • Get un-stuck and begin taking definite steps towards an authentic, fulfilling future

    • Process spiritual abuse and religious trauma from Evangelicalism, Purity Culture, and other high-control communities

    • Deconstruct imposed and internalized religious influences and worldviews

    • Unlearn shame and renegotiate relationships with sex, gender, and sexuality post-Purity Culture

    • Explore and identify personal values and beliefs

    • Reclaim a chosen, healthier spirituality and a deeper sense of meaning and connection

    • Process the challenges and ambivalence of living with a double+ consciousness and continual code-switching

    • Unpack the legacies of intergenerational, immigration, racial, and ancestral traumas

    • Honor the strengths of multiplicity and unique, liminal identities

    • Explore how racial, cultural, and ethnic influences have shaped family dynamics, relationships, communication styles, and sense of self

    • Identify and challenge externally imposed, internalized, and socioculturally normative narratives obstructing more liberatory options for living as a neurodivergent, chronically ill, and/or disabled person

    • Explore and iterate on possible everyday structures and strategies that build on strengths and accommodate individual needs and shifting capacities

    • Dream big in a safe container and guided space to (re)consider major life changes (e.g. career pivots, relationship changes)

    • (Re)Design a values-guided path to a sustainable life worth living that prioritizes holistic health

…Now what?

Send me a message to set up a consultation call (phone or video), or schedule a time directly on my Zencare calendar.

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We’ll chat for 10-15 minutes about what you’re looking for from therapy and so I can answer any questions you have.

If we think we’d be a good fit to work together, we’ll schedule your first appointment!

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green grass and tall trees lining a dirt path that fades into fog

Land Acknowledgement

With deep gratitude and respect, I acknowledge that Oakland, California, where I live and work, is on the unceded ancestral homelands of the Muwekma Ohlone people. Their care for this place stretches beyond memory and continues today. I honor their enduring relationship with this land, remember the injustice of their persistent displacement, and support their ongoing fight for federal re-recognition of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe (https://muwekma.org/). Learn whose land you’re occupying at https://native-land.ca/