Relationships, identities, and intimacies are entangled, messy, and imperfect. They live and grow in what is inside us, between us, and all around us.
At Pearl Psychotherapy, our therapeutic frameworks nurture the vast ecologies of relationships, community, and everyday life.
Despair, anger, and confusion are not individualized mental health struggles. They are understandable feelings in a system that does not prioritize relational health and wellbeing. We will help you develop holistic skills to understand stigma, shame, and isolation through a lens of compassion and community.
We offer visionary and practical trauma-informed care for individuals, couples, and families with specializations in trauma repair and recovery, anxiety, grief and loss, sexuality and gender, perfectionism, identity development, and chronic illness. Anti-oppression and social justice are critical components of our therapeutic lens. We provide affirming and inclusive care for clients who hold intersecting, marginalized identities and have deep commitments to supporting nonbinary and trans folks, diverse family structures, sexualities, queer family building, ADHD and neurodiversity, and menopause across bodies.
You’ll find us on the edge of the East River in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, on the unceded homeland of the Lenape & Canarsie people. The river once teemed with oysters. A lush landscape of bivalves that maintained the health of New York’s coastal ecosystems. As reefs, they protect the shorelines: absorbing wave energy, storm surges, and offering support against erosion. As filters, they create the conditions for clarity: preserving water quality by removing algae, organic matter, and other excesses. Within the protective shell of an oyster, what were once irritations, unwanted intrusions, even toxicities can become a pearl. The restorative becomes transformative.
“What happens when I love the parts of me that scare me? What becomes possible when I am willing to be wrong? What would happen if we treated care and empathy as abundant rather than scarce resources that we need to compete for?”
Our Services
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LGBTQIA+ Gender Affirming Therapy
We offer a unique blend of clinical expertise and cultural competence. An affirming approach that validates, celebrates, and supports diversity of sexual orientations, gender identity and expression, and relationship structures. Queerness, gender, and marginalization shape mental health. We center the lived experiences of gay, queer, trans, and gender-expansive people. Whether you're unpacking internalized harms, exploring identity, working through trauma, or simply seeking grounded support without having to mask or translate who you are, we hold space for all of it and all of you.
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Individual Therapy
Individual therapy offers a compassionate space where you get to unpack everything with someone who’s trained to help — no judgments, just support. Whether it’s your first dive into understanding your mental and emotional landscape or you’re looking for new strategies to tackle old problems, psychotherapy offers a way to not just get by but to genuinely thrive. It’s about building resilience, understanding patterns on a deeper level, and learning how to move through struggle with a bit more grace and a lot less stress.
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Couples Therapy
Relationships can become stuck, stagnant, and disconnected. Or you may feel like the foundation of your relationship is strong, but you would like to be mindful about next steps together to insure you are on the same page. Relational problems are not removed from larger sociocultural factors. The current political climate, economic stress, job loss, parenting children, caring for aging parents, our own aging bodies, experiencing chronic illness, experiences of marginalization, all take a toll on our relationships. Imagine what it would be like to take risks, express vulnerability, and resist avoidance to insure the ruptures in your relationship are less frequent and repair is more sustaining.
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Holistic EMDR
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is an approach to trauma healing that offers tools for reckoning with painful life experiences such as single incident traumatic events and developmental attachment trauma. EMDR can help hold the pain of the past with less fear that the future will be a replication of the past. The result? Presence.
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Internal Family Systems
IFS is a therapeutic approach rooted in nurturing inner healing capacities. IFS helps cultivate care for parts of you that were wounded, unseen, or harmed so you have more flexibility and compassion to heal from the inside out. What we resist can persist and IFS focuses on deeply healing wounded parts—rather than suppressing them—to foster inner harmony. IFS is an evidence-based psychotherapy model used to treat trauma, anxiety, relationship difficulties and a wide range of other concerns.
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Sex Therapy
Sex Therapy can help you reconnect with pleasure, joy, and embodiment in your daily life. It can help soften stigma, shame, and fear and offer a way back to delight in touch, sensation, and imagination. Finding pleasure in your body, your life and relationships is not frivolous. Sex Therapy can be applied to Individuals or Couples/Relationships. You choose the path that works for you. Different paths, same destination: More pleasure. More authenticity.
“I don’t have to get everything in order before I can be with others. Come over anyway. Sit with me in the mess. Let that be enough.”
Meet the Founder & Lead Therapist
Rebecca Ross (she/her) is the founder and lead therapist at Pearl Psychotherapy. In addition to 15+ years experience working as a psychotherapist, Rebecca is an established educator, published author, and queer practitioner with personal and professional commitments to sex positivity, body autonomy, trans and gender affirming care, queer relationships and families, ADHD and neurodiversity, menopause and perimenopause.
Rebecca received her social work training at Smith College School for Social Work and went on to complete a 5 year post-graduate certification in Couples & Family Therapy from the Ackerman Institute for the Family. She has further certifications and training in Dialogic Practice, Internal Family Systems, Sex Therapy, and EMDR for Complex PTSD (C-PTSD) & Relational Trauma Recovery. She has held faculty positions at the Ackerman Institute for the Family and is currently faculty at Smith College School for Social Work.
Queer Owned,
LGBTQIA+ affirming
