Gay-Centered Depth Therapy

For Self-Realization, Empowerment and Change

All Different Kinds of People Welcome!

Christopher Kilbourne, L.M.F.T.

No matter your background, the dynamic depth therapy I practice aims for you becoming more alive, creatively inspired and better turned on to life’s finest possibilities through the extraordinarily enriching nature of coming to be more truly and profoundly yourself.

I have over thirty years of experience working with:

  • depression, anxiety, grief, anger and trauma
  • substance misuse and other compulsions
  • sexual hang-ups, romantic and relationship difficulties
  • work and career disappointments
  • cultural, racial, sexuality and identity concerns
  • lack of meaning and other issues  

“The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you really are.”
– Carl Jung​

How Does Depth Therapy With Me Look?

With a warm sensitivity and focused mindful intention, I’ll meet you in the session where you are, whether you need to cautiously open up emotionally or just let it all out. I feel honored and grateful to have worked successfully over the years with many diverse clients, each one with a unique and beautiful soul, which has helped me learn a lot about how to create a safe enough space where you, the client, can feel most in control.

You’ll be in the driver’s seat whether you need me to be a non-judgmental ear who can listen and gently mirror you or you need me to be more engaged and directional in the therapeutic process. I’ll carefully try to gage how to most effectively guide you towards clarifying and accomplishing your goals, whether more effectively handling relationships, learning to better love, figuring out career, or overall creating a more satisfying life.

My work with you draws on a finely developed multidisciplinary methodology that includes CBT and mindfulness, archetypal and psycho-dynamic, emotion-focused, relational, intersubjective, existential, and neuroscience approaches, synthesized and honed through many years of clinical, instructional, and supervisorial activity, not to mention extensive community activist leadership experience, as well as my own personal inner work, ongoing since early adulthood.

As an introduction to my approach, you’re welcome to attend a monthly public event I facilitate called “The Gay-Centered Inner Work Club,” under the auspices of long-time educational nonprofit, Treeroots.

In working together, you and I can aim to solve your pressing concerns while developing more complex, depthful and potent mental and emotional capabilities.

We’ll mindfully explore all your options and then organically come to solutions and resolutions that make sense on many different levels and from different angles. I’ll help you devise exercises which might be very simple or more challenging to help address important needs like to better relate with others, focus on tasks, work with difficult feelings, handle stressful situations, and meet goals.

We’ll also go mindfully inward at your pace to make connections to old forgotten parts of yourself which, in becoming more conscious can result in a more coherent, grounded and empowered sense of self.

An important part of healing the ailing psyche is to work to more deeply feel feelings and emotions and so learn to better regulate feelings. This can be done most effectively with the power of the imagination. Imagining, for example, a kid within who suffers because he’s neglected and then a soul image, a being a light, who holds that kid and beneficently empathizes with his hurt to transform that pain into a magical elixir of love. 

With the unique understanding and insight into the ways of the psyche I can bring, together we can open the door to an extraordinary transpersonal world full of meaning and lasting sense of fulfillment – as well as the nutritive rush of a newly generated gay spirit power!

We Can Approach Your Problems As a Kind of Doorway Through Which You Can Enter Into The Wondrous, Challenging Inner World Of Your Psyche.

There, The Possibility Of A Life-Changing “Hero’s Journey” Of Self-Realization Awaits…

And Your Uniquely Colorful and Creative Capabilities And Potentials Yearn To Be Mindfully, Developmentally Engaged.

If You’re Gay or Lesbian, Becoming Gayer Can Be A Spiritually Enlightening Path... An Ever-Deepening Intimacy With The Magnetic Beauty Of Generative Same-Sex Love, Eros And Ecstatic Possibility!

Or If Trans, Bisexual, Heterosexual, Non-Binary, Black, Latinx, Questioning, As Well As Any Other Possible Identification, Your Path Of Self-Becoming Can Unfold As Your Own Unique, Multifarious Developmental Journey Of Empowerment In Soulfully Enriching Subjectivity Generated Through Striving For The Ultimate In Love, Meaning and Deep Satisfaction.

Maybe you can hear a deeper, truer self who might be calling for you to invest in your inner life through the soulful way I’m offering. Then in working with me we can together build the resolve and confidence to conscientiously, heroically and transformatively wrestle with those challenging compulsions, habits, defenses, and strong feelings such as fear, shame, anger and hurt!

In thus working this way to gaily partner with shunted, shadowy parts of experience, helping make them more conscious and gradually integrated, a previously hurtfully split psyche can undergo some serious healing; then comes the next challenge. And by meeting in this way each new difficulty life offers, the drive to develop oneself within and without, the confidence 

and inspiration to better handle major challenges, grow ever stronger because with every newly-gained insight and emotional learning we will be furthering the project of psychological differentiation and self-empowerment, which endogenously produces a dynamic, resilient generative operation from which previously stifled creative juices can more fully flow.

Especially in regard to lesbian and gay folk have been deprived of much, if any, affirming and soulful gay experience growing up and have suffered such harsh repercussions as depression, anxiety, compulsion, relationship problems and meaninglessness, I offer the prospect of a tried and tested path to developing a successful and gay personhood – as well as successful personhoods of many varied and wonderful people.

“Nothing is possible without love… For love puts one in the mood to risk everything.”

-Carl Jung

To learn more about how therapy with me might work for you, feel free to contact me: 

email, text, or phone 323/252-8824.

So sorry, the links below are under construction:

 

Liberating Your Unique Cultural, Sexual or Gender Spirit

Some Basic Jungian Depth Understanding

An Active Imaginational Method For Healing The Split Psyche

Gaily "Partnering" Bad Feelings

Addressing Societal And Internal Homophobia Growth-fully

A Personal Experience Of Childhood Heterosexism

Realizing Our "God Of Gay Love" Within

Meet Christopher Kilbourne

I had already begun to find myself, come out of the closet and try to change the world when I met my long-time cherished partner, Mitch Walker, the innovator of gay-centered psychology in 1979. I was definitely ripe for the gay spiritual and psychological turn things took then. His devotion to gay love as a spiritual path was contagious to me and I soon found myself on a remarkable journey that continues to this day of initiation into the mysteries of gay Eros and psyche. He turned me on to the psychology of C.G. Jung as a theory powerfully useful for understanding the gay soul, among many other wonderful ideas, as well introducing me to Harry Hay and the Radical Faeries, and also a fiery passion for gay liberation. By 1991 I became licensed as a therapist as a most effective way to share with other seekers the kind of meaningful, psychologically genuine, and visionary gay-centered life reflected in my practice to this day.