LGBTQ+ Affirmative Therapy
Therapy for queer people and queer couples in Lisbon
English-speaking psychotherapy for adults and couples — in person in Lisbon, or online across Portugal and beyond. You won't have to explain who you are before the work can start.
Book an initial consultationWho we work with
People who'd rather not start from scratch
Most of the people who find this page have had at least one experience of a therapist who was well-meaning but needed educating. That takes time, and it costs something. Here it isn't necessary.
Same-sex and queer couples
Two people trying to work out what's happening between them — treated as a relationship, not as a category.
Open and non-monogamous relationships
Renegotiating agreements, managing jealousy, or working out whether an arrangement is actually consented to by both people.
Coming out, at any stage of life
Including people who came out decades ago and are only now looking at what it cost, and people navigating it in mid-life or later.
Trans and non-binary adults
We work with trans and non-binary clients on the same range of concerns we work with anyone. We don't provide assessments or letters for medical transition.
Expats who moved for room to breathe
People who relocated to Portugal partly because of what home had become — and are finding that the relief is real but the difficulty travelled with them.
Anyone whose sexuality isn't the presenting problem
Anxiety, grief, work, a relationship in trouble. You may simply want a therapist with whom none of it needs a preface.
The word itself
What affirmative actually means here
The word gets used loosely enough that it has started to mean very little. So, plainly:
What it doesn't mean
- That your sexuality or gender becomes the subject of the therapy. Usually it isn't what you came about.
- That we hold specialist expertise in every area of queer and trans life. We don't, and we'll say so when something falls outside what we can offer.
- That difficulty inside a queer relationship gets explained away as external pressure. Sometimes two people are simply hurting each other.
What it does mean
- You don't have to translate. No explaining your relationship structure, your pronouns, or your family situation before we can begin.
- Your relationship is assumed to be a relationship — with the same weight, the same possible futures, the same right to be worked on.
- Hostility you've encountered is treated as something that happened to you, not as evidence of something wrong in you.
- Neither of us will treat you as a teaching case, and nothing you bring will be met with curiosity that belongs to us rather than to you.
Why the outside gets inside
Minority stress, and what it does to a couple
A recurring pattern in couples work: two people are fighting about the dishes, or about sex, or about a phone — and underneath it sits something neither of them put there. Vigilance learned early. An expectation of rejection that never fully switched off. Shame absorbed long before there was any way to refuse it.
The minority stress framework describes this directly: chronic exposure to stigma and the anticipation of rejection creates a stress load that is additional to ordinary life stress, and it doesn't stop at the front door. Inside a relationship it often shows up as contempt, withdrawal, or a kind of pre-emptive defensiveness — reactions that make sense as protection and are corrosive as intimacy.
Meyer's integrative review remains the reference point for this: stigma, prejudice and discrimination generate a hostile social environment that produces measurable mental health consequences — an excess of distress that is explained by the environment rather than by the people living in it.
Meyer, I. H. (2003). Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations. Psychological Bulletin, 129(5), 674–697. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.129.5.674
Worth setting alongside it: when Gottman and Levenson observed same-sex and different-sex couples in conflict, overall relationship satisfaction was comparable across couple types — and same-sex partners used more humour and affection when raising a disagreement, with less belligerence and domineering. Queer relationships are not fragile by nature. What they carry is added from outside.
Gottman, J. M., Levenson, R. W., Swanson, C., Swanson, K., Tyson, R., & Yoshimoto, D. (2003). Observing gay, lesbian and heterosexual couples' relationships. Journal of Homosexuality, 45(1), 65–91. doi:10.1300/J082v45n01_04
Couples work
What we actually work on
Couples sessions are led by Sylwia, using Emotionally Focused Therapy — an attachment-based approach that works with the cycle two people get stuck in rather than with who is right. The themes below come up often. None of them are required.
- Uneven outness. One partner is out at work and to family; the other isn't, or can't be. Every social decision becomes a negotiation.
- Families of origin. Invitations that don't include your partner. A parent who is polite and has never once used the word.
- Agreements about openness. Rules made years ago that nobody has revisited, and one person has quietly outgrown.
- Carrying too much for each other. When the relationship is the only fully safe place, it ends up holding more than a relationship can.
- Building a family in Portugal. Long, uncertain processes that put sustained pressure on a couple, whatever the outcome.
- Shame turning outward. Contempt at home that started as something absorbed elsewhere.
If you're looking for the broader picture of how we work with couples, that's on the couples therapy page. Sessions are available in our Lisbon office, or as online therapy anywhere in Portugal — which many couples outside Lisbon use as their default.
Individual work
When the work is yours alone
Not everything belongs in a couples room. Individual therapy here is often ISTDP — Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy — which works closely with what happens in your body as feeling rises, and with the defences that have kept certain feelings out of reach.
That focus tends to matter for people who spent years managing how they appeared. Concealment is a skill, and it becomes automatic. ISTDP works directly with that automatism rather than around it. You can read more about the method on the English-speaking therapy page, or arrange an initial consultation and see how it feels in practice.
Who you'd be sitting with
Two therapists, one practice
Piotr Szmyt
ISTDP Psychotherapist
"I invite you to think about psychotherapy as a way of searching for new perspectives — new ways of being, relating, feeling, and experiencing life." Certified ISTDP psychotherapist, trained by Josette ten Have-de Labije; also draws on Transference-Focused Therapy and CBT. MSc, Gdańsk University, 2014. More on the English-speaking therapy page.
Sylwia Latacz
Psychologist & Psychotherapist · OPP 31224
"For me, psychotherapy is not only a method of coping with difficulties — above all it is a method of experiencing one's life more deeply." Licensed psychologist (Ordem dos Psicólogos Portugueses, no. 31224), trained as an integrative psychotherapist, leading couples work here with Emotion-Focused Therapy. MSc, Jagiellonian University, 2016.
The process
How to start
Write to us
A short message is enough. You don't need to explain everything in it.
Initial consultation
50–60 minutes to describe what's going on and to find out whether this feels workable.
Decide together
Individual or couples work, in person or online, and at what rhythm. No commitment is made in advance.
Ongoing sessions
Usually weekly, at a fixed time. Length of the work is reviewed as it goes, not fixed at the start.
Fees
Session fees
Initial consultation
50–60 minutes €90Individual therapy
50 minutes €80ISTDP session
90 minutes €130Couples therapy
70 minutes €120Questions
Before you write
Will I have to explain queer life to my therapist?
No. You may still want to explain your particular situation — every relationship has its own shape — but you won't be starting from the basics, and nothing about your life will be treated as unusual before we've heard it.
Do you work with non-monogamous and open relationships?
Yes. Non-monogamy is not treated as a symptom or as something to be resolved back into monogamy. Where it becomes a subject in therapy, it's usually because an agreement has stopped working for one person and hasn't yet been said out loud.
Do you work with trans and non-binary clients?
Yes, on the full range of concerns anyone brings to therapy. We don't carry out gender identity assessments and don't issue letters or reports for medical transition — if that's what you need, we'll say so at the consultation rather than after several months.
Can only one of us come?
Yes. Plenty of relationship work is done individually, particularly when one partner isn't ready or isn't willing. It changes what's possible, but it doesn't make the work pointless.
Is this available if we're not in Lisbon?
Yes — we work with clients across Portugal and internationally through online sessions. For couples living in different cities, online is often the only format that makes regular work possible at all.
Are sessions confidential?
Yes, within the standard professional and legal limits. If you are not out in some part of your life, that is a clinical matter as much as an administrative one, and it's worth raising at the first session so that contact arrangements can be set up accordingly.
Do you work with people under 18?
No. Our practice works with adults only.
Related
Elsewhere on the site
Start with one conversation
The initial consultation is exploratory. Nothing is decided in it except whether it makes sense to continue.
Book an initial consultation Email us