Justin Friel, LMFT

For a lot of queer men, the hard part was never finding the words. It was finding a room where saying them out loud did not cost something. I work with LGBTQ+ people at the intersection of sexuality, spirituality, and relationships. A large part of my practice is men working through religious trauma: the shame that got installed early, the fear that questioning anything meant losing everything, and the specific grief of leaving a community that was also your whole social world. For queer people raised in that world, those two things are usually the same wound. If you are deconstructing, you may have noticed that nobody prepares you for the middle part. The certainty is gone, the community is complicated, and what replaces it has not arrived yet. That stage is not a failure of faith or a phase to push through. It is real loss, and it deserves to be treated like loss. I am a queer man and I have been through this. I trained for ministry before I trained as a therapist, and I rebuilt my relationship with faith on different terms. You will not have to explain the basics to me, and I will not push you toward any particular destination, whether that is out, back in, or somewhere you have not named yet. I also work with men on intimacy, sex, and relationship patterns that keep repeating, and I am trained in EMDR for the trauma underneath. My approach is relational, drawing on psychodynamic, family systems, and attachment theory. Sex-positive, antiracist, affirming without qualification. My primary focus is men, and I also work with women and people across gender expressions. I see clients in Denver and throughout Colorado.