Meet The Team…
Adam Renteria, AMFT
I am especially interested in working with LGBTQIA+ individuals and relationships, including people practicing consensual non-monogamy or polyamory, as well as people in more traditional relationship structures. I offer sex-positive, affirming therapy where sexuality, gender, identity, and relationship structure can be talked about openly and without assumption or judgment.
As a gay therapist, questions of identity, acceptance, family, and belonging have particular meaning to me. I know that none of us holds just one identity, and I try to remain attentive to how culture, race, gender, sexuality, family history, socioeconomic experience, spirituality, and community shape the ways we understand ourselves and what feels possible for our lives.
My style is warm, curious, collaborative, and engaged. I don't see myself as the expert on your life, you bring knowledge about yourself, your relationships, your culture, and your history that I could never possess. I bring my training, curiosity, and perspective, and together we can make sense of what is happening and explore what you would like to be different.
I want therapy to be a place where you can be challenged without feeling judged and vulnerable without feeling exposed. I will listen carefully, ask questions, share what I'm noticing, and sometimes invite us to stay with something a little longer rather than rushing past it. Humor and humanity have a place in the room, too. Therapy can involve difficult work without every moment feeling heavy.
A Little About Me
Outside the therapy room, relationships and curiosity remain important parts of my life. I love being active, especially cycling and hiking, and spending time in nature helps me reconnect and recharge. I'm equally happy disappearing into a good science-fiction novel or comic book.
I love traveling, learning about different cultures, and exploring a place through its food. I'm an animal lover, and some of the parts of life I value most are also the simplest: intentional time with my husband, family, and chosen family.
Those things probably say something about how I approach therapy as well. I value curiosity, connection, difference, playfulness, and continuing to discover new ways of seeing familiar things.
I don't believe any of us ever becomes a finished product. I hope to offer clients a space where they don't have to be one either.
I believe most of us make sense when we understand the experiences, relationships, and stories that have shaped us.
The ways we protect ourselves, pull away, hold on tightly, avoid difficult conversations, or get caught in familiar patterns often developed for good reasons. They may have helped us belong, stay safe, maintain an important relationship, or get through something difficult. But sometimes the very strategies that once protected us begin to keep us from the connection, intimacy, or sense of possibility we want now.
That is often where therapy begins.
I work with individuals, couples, and partners who want to better understand themselves and the relationships that matter to them. You may be struggling with anxiety or depression, moving through a significant life transition, rebuilding after a loss, or feeling stuck in patterns you understand intellectually but haven't been able to change. You may love your partner deeply and still find yourselves having versions of the same argument, growing further apart, recovering from a rupture in trust, or struggling to find your way back to one another.
Therapy Frameworks
-
Understanding what happens beneath the pattern. Our emotions and needs for connection are meaningful. When we feel hurt, afraid, unseen, or uncertain of our place in an important relationship, we naturally find ways to protect ourselves. We may pursue, criticize, withdraw, shut down, or try harder to hold on. Over time, those protective responses can become a cycle that leaves everyone feeling less understood and more alone.
Emotionally Focused Therapy helps us slow these moments down and become curious about what is happening underneath them. We work to understand the emotions and needs driving the pattern and create new experiences of being heard, understood, and connected.
I use this approach with couples and relationships, and its principles also inform my individual work, particularly when we are exploring attachment, vulnerability, belonging, and the relationships that have shaped how you understand yourself.
-
Problems have a way of taking up a lot of space. When something has been difficult for a long time, it can become easy to see ourselves primarily through what isn't working.
I bring an equally important curiosity about what is working. Together, we may notice exceptions to a familiar pattern, times you have already responded differently, strengths you have stopped recognizing, and small signs that point toward the life or relationships you want.
We will spend time identifying what meaningful change would actually look like for you and drawing on abilities, relationships, values, and resources you already possess to help you move toward it.
-
Understanding you in context. None of us develops in isolation. Our relationships, families, cultures, communities, identities, and experiences all influence how we learned to understand ourselves, connect with others, and navigate the world.
I approach trauma and painful patterns with curiosity about not only what is happening, but what happened, what a response may have protected, and the context in which it developed. I also recognize that experiences of race, culture, gender, sexuality, marginalization, family expectations, and belonging can be inseparable from the concerns someone brings into therapy.
Cultural responsiveness, to me, does not mean assuming I understand your experience because I know something about one of your identities. It means being willing to listen, remain curious, examine assumptions, and let your lived experience inform our work.
Across these approaches, I believe lasting change grows from both understanding and experience. Therapy gives us an opportunity not only to understand old patterns, but to practice experiencing ourselves, our emotions, and our relationships in new ways.
I can support you with:
-
LGBTQIA+ Identity, Acceptance & Belonging
I especially enjoy working with LGBTQIA+ clients exploring identity, coming out, self-acceptance, relationships, family acceptance or rejection, chosen family, and belonging. We can also make room for the effects of minority stress, marginalization, and the experience of moving through spaces where important parts of you have not always felt welcomed or understood.
As a gay therapist, this work has personal resonance for me, while I also recognize that your experience is uniquely your own. My hope is to offer a space where your identity doesn't need to be explained, defended, or treated as a problem before we can talk about the rest of your life.
-
Relationships, Intimacy & Connection
Sometimes the person we most want to feel close to becomes the person with whom we feel most stuck.
I work with couples and partners who find themselves repeating the same conflicts, feeling disconnected, struggling with intimacy, navigating transitions, or trying to repair after hurt or a rupture in trust. Rather than looking for someone to blame, we can slow the pattern down and understand what each person is reaching for, protecting, or having difficulty saying.
My goal isn't to teach you the “right” way to have a relationship. It is to help you understand the relationship you have, clarify the relationship you want, and develop new ways of reaching, responding, repairing, and connecting with one another.
-
Consensual Non-Monogamy, Polyamory & Sexuality
I welcome people practicing or exploring consensual non-monogamy and polyamory, whether you are navigating communication, jealousy, attachment, boundaries, agreements, changing relationship structures, intimacy, or a concern that has little to do with non-monogamy at all.
My approach is sex-positive and affirming. I want sexuality, desire, intimacy, and relationship structure to be things we can discuss openly and thoughtfully rather than subjects you have to carefully introduce or worry will be misunderstood. Our work can focus on helping you build relationships that are intentional, connected, and aligned with the values of the people in them.
-
Feeling Stuck, Life Transitions, Anxiety, Depression & Loss
Sometimes there isn't one obvious crisis. You may simply recognize that the way you've been living isn't working anymore.
You might feel anxious, depressed, disconnected, uncertain about what comes next, or caught between who you have been and who you are becoming. A transition, loss, relationship change, career shift, or other experience may have disrupted the story you thought your life would follow.
We can make room for what hurts without allowing the problem to become the whole story. Together, we'll work to understand what is keeping you stuck, reconnect with strengths and possibilities that may be harder to see right now, and identify meaningful steps toward the life you want to build.
-
Children, Adolescents & Families
Children and adolescents don't always have the words to explain what they are experiencing and sometimes words aren't the best place to begin.
My experience with younger clients includes play-based approaches that allow children to communicate, explore emotions, and work through experiences in developmentally appropriate ways. With adolescents, I focus on building a genuine therapeutic relationship where they can develop their own voice while exploring identity, relationships, family, emotions, belonging, and the pressures of growing into themselves.
I also consider the relationships and family systems surrounding a young person, recognizing that meaningful change often happens not only within the child or adolescent, but within the connections that support them.
I strive to provide accessible and affordable therapy. I accept the following insurances:
I accept the following insurances:
Aetna
Cigna
Optum
United Healthcare
Superbill Option for PPO Reimbursement
Cash Rates:
Individual: $120
Couples/Partners/Family: $175
Sliding Scale Available on Case by Case Basis