What is the difference between queer/LGBTQIA+ psychologists, counsellors and LGBTQIA+ friendly therapists?

These terms refer to different registration pathways and levels of training, but the most important distinction for LGBTQIA+ clients is often not the title — it's the depth of lived and clinical experience with your community. A psychologist holds a university degree in psychology and is registered with the Psychology Board of Australia. A registered mental health social worker like me holds a social work degree plus specialist psychotherapy training, and is registered with AASW — and can offer Medicare rebates via a GP Mental Health Care Plan. An LGBTQIA+ affirming therapist is a broader term that simply signals a commitment to inclusive practice, but doesn't specify registration or training level. When choosing a therapist, ask about their specific experience with LGBTQIA+ clients, not just their title.

Why seek LGBTQIA+ psychologists or counsellors with lived experience?

Therapy works best when you don't have to spend your session educating your therapist about who you are. A therapist with lived experience in your community brings an understanding of minority stress, identity-based shame, the impact of discrimination, and the specific ways LGBTQIA+ people have often adapted to navigate environments that weren't safe — without needing it explained. This means sessions can go deeper, faster, and with less of the emotional labour of making yourself legible to someone who doesn't share your context.

How LGBTQIA+ psychologists and counsellors create a safe place for you.

Safety in therapy comes from consistency, honesty, and genuine understanding — not just a rainbow flag on a website. In practice, it means you don't have to explain your pronouns, justify your relationships, or translate your experience into language a non-queer therapist can follow. It means I understand what internalised homophobia actually feels like from the inside. And it means the therapeutic relationship itself is grounded in over a decade of working specifically with LGBTQIA+ adults in Melbourne, including in community health and advocacy settings.

How do you find a LGBTQIA+ counsellor in Melbourne you can trust?

Here are some tips to help you find the LGBT counsellor in Melbourne for you. Reach out to your community and ask for recommendations. Someone close to you may know a LGBT counsellor in Melbourne who could be a good fit for you. Make sure to ask for details about their experience working with the therapist. You can also browse therapist directories, such as Psychology Today, Good Therapy, and Australian Psychological Society. These directories have filters that can help you narrow down your search based on your preferences. You can also check out Vic Inclusive Practitioners, a list of therapists and practitioners working with diverse populations, including LGBTQIA+ counseling in Melbourne. Be cautious of therapy profiles that include long specialty lists and look for specific LGBTQIA+ experience and training. Don't be afraid to ask questions and have a conversation with potential therapists before scheduling an appointment. Its ok to ask your potential new therapist if there are also LGBTQIA+.

What are your specialties as a LGBTQIA+ Counsellor in Melbourne?

My core specialties are trauma, complex trauma, shame, and the negative core beliefs that form when we've been hurt, dismissed, or made to feel like we're too much or not enough. I work with gay, queer, bisexual, trans, non-binary, and gender-diverse adults. My therapeutic approach is grounded in Gestalt psychotherapy, with specialist training in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) and IFS (Internal Family Systems). I am a registered mental health social worker and offer Medicare rebates.

Do you offer Medicare rebates?

Yes. As a registered mental health social worker, I offer Medicare rebates to clients with a valid Mental Health Care Plan from their GP. This gives you access to rebates for up to 10 sessions per calendar year. You don't need a specific diagnosis — a general mental health referral is sufficient. If you're unsure how to get a referral or what to say to your GP, I'm happy to talk you through it.

Do you offer online therapy?

Yes. I offer online sessions to LGBTQIA+ adults across Victoria. Online delivery works well for the approaches I use, and Medicare rebates apply to online sessions just as they do to in-person sessions.

Caregiver Fatigue in Gay Relationships: Insights from a Gay Therapist in Melbourne

Sep 15

Written By Matthew Austin

When Being a Loving Partner Starts to Feel Like Too Much

Watching a partner who is suffering from an experience that is out of your control can leave you feeling helpless and overwhelmed. If that experience was homophobic abuse at work, this identity-based trauma can hit particularly hard. Caring for a partner who can no longer work comes with unique challenges.

I imagine you're carrying a heavy weight of responsibility and finding it hard to share your feelings about the situation for fear of being judged. You keep up a brave face at home, at work and with friends/family, while inside you are secretly collapsing under the pressure of your caregiving role.

You may be carrying immense guilt or shame for resenting your partner. You know the situation isn’t their fault, and you feel horrified and outraged by the circumstances that led to your partner no longer being able to work. You're the one left holding everything together now; the whole situation likely feels unfair, and it's hard to accept this new reality. You feel alone in all of this, which makes matters worse.

In the counselling room, caregiving clients want to feel safe, heard, and emotionally held when they're overwhelmed. They want support so they don't have to hold it all together, even for an hour at a time. They need to know their needs count too.

In this post, we are uncovering the specific struggles that lead to caregiver fatigue/burnout. We will explore the particularity of isolation for caregivers, what caregiver fatigue is, what helps and practical ways forward.

Why This Kind of Caregiving Is Harder Than It Looks

The feeling of injustice you may feel when your partner is treated poorly in the workplace and no longer able to work can at times feel unbearable. This, in combination with witnessing your partner in significant distress and negativity, is an awful lot to contend with on your own.

You may be on guard for deterioration in their recovery and try your best to mitigate it where you can, sometimes overemphasising your level of control over the situation to feel less powerless.

There are often significant feelings of loss for caregivers of partners. You may be feeling you have lost the main person you rely on when life gets hard. They suddenly feel emotionally unavailable to you; their empathy for your struggles may be limited. This can leave you feeling lost and emotionally adrift, while also pushing you into overfunctioning and disconnecting you from your own needs.

When Your Support Network Isn’t There

I often hear in my office that caregivers feel like they're the only person who knows how much their partner is struggling. This can isolate caregiver partners if they feel that talking to close friends and family about what is happening at home betrays their partner's confidence.

These caregivers quickly become everything for their partners, and this emotional burden can develop into empathy fatigue, resentment, and exhaustion. If you have approval-seeking/people-pleasing tendencies, you may struggle to connect with your own needs for connection and support outside the relationship. It may feel selfish or bring up feelings of guilt if you want to spend time alone, or see your friends separately. Bit by bit, you stop filling your own cup and run on empty.

The Guilt That Keeps You Quiet

Caregivers I support often suppress their guilt and resentment until it blows up in an argument with their partner, usually over something small. In this situation, both parties quickly become dysregulated and feel misunderstood and judged. Caregivers may bounce back to appeasing their partner and backtrack their feelings of anger, then feel immensely guilty about their outburst and its impact on partners who are already struggling.

However, guilt and resentment in this context are normal. Needing support outside your relationship doesn’t mean you are failing. The negative belief that my needs/feelings don’t matter might be coming up; your inner critic might be getting loud. See if you can ask the inner critic for space; in a compassionate inner voice, say to yourself, ‘I’m doing the best I can with the skills I have. ’

Understanding Caregiver Fatigue, and Why It’s Not Your Fault

Caregiver fatigue is defined as a state of extreme physical, emotional, and mental fatigue that occurs when someone cares for another person for a long period without rest, help, or time to recover. Symptoms may include

Constant physical tiredness and low energy
Trouble sleeping or staying asleep
Feeling sad, helpless, or hopeless
Getting angry or annoyed very easily
Pulling away from friends and family

Caregiver fatigue doesn’t indicate that there is something wrong with you or that you don’t love your partner. It is a predictable human response to an unsustainable situation.

Saying the Hard Thing to Your Partner, Even When Nothing Can Change

When I see a client who is a caregiver for their partner, I notice a lot often goes unsaid between the couple. Usually, a caregiver client doesn’t want to burden their partner with negative feelings when their partner is already struggling. They tend to internalise negative feelings, which turns into an emotional pressure cooker over time.

Learning to share your negative feelings with your partner, and having them received in an open, nonreactive way, soothes the nervous system. It sends the message to the emotional part of our brain that it's okay to have the feelings we are having, and my partner can hold these and wants to hear them. I notice that for my caregiver clients, it can be a huge relief just to be honest. It can breathe fresh air into the relationship.

Now, this kind of sharing isn’t a no-holds-barred offload. That is likely to get your partner overwhelmed and reactive. Instead, share your feelings about the difficulties in the situation. Avoid criticising your partner’s character. If there are specific behaviours your partner has engaged in that have upset you, name how the behaviour makes you feel and make a request for how you would like things to go differently in the future.

By being honest with our partners, even about the hard stuff, we learn not to disappear inside ourselves. Our partner gets to update their user manual on us regarding how we are coping with the situation. When these types of conversations go well, partners can feel more connected and more compassionate toward one another.

You May Be Carrying Trauma You Haven’t Named Yet

Witnessing a loved one go through a traumatic experience can have a profound impact on us. Vicarious trauma is the emotional and psychological stress you feel from hearing about or witnessing other people’s trauma. Now, if that trauma you have witnessed connects with your own history- if it's related to experiences of homophobia or transphobia, for instance this can open up old, unprocessed wounds.

Therapy can be a place to process these experiences without burdening your partner, who is processing the trauma they experienced directly. EMDR and IFS can help caregiver clients process their vicarious trauma so they can show up emotionally more fully for their partners and themselves.

Finding Ways to Be Nourished, inside and outside the Relationship

For partner caregivers, it's important to find ways to be nourished inside and outside the relationship to maintain your well-being long term. Often I hear that when a romantic relationship shifts into caregiving mode, it is common for sex to drop off completely. This is to be expected; however, that doesn’t mean it's not worth talking about. Your grief about these changes is real and needs to be voiced and heard. You and your partner might experiment with forms of sexual intimacy that feel manageable for you both, with clear expectations that either partner can say when they have had enough. Perhaps you negotiate for your partner to spoon you; maybe you both decide to make out with an understanding it won’t go further than that.

Outside the Relationship, my clients have shared the following ways they have found nourishing, which have helped them feel less overwhelmed, gentler with themselves, and more connected with others.

Recognise the negative beliefs & parts that are activated.

Your previous ways of coping with difficult situations will show up when you take on a caregiving role. Perhaps you’ve always struggled with Unrelenting standards and a need to be perfect. Learning to recognise when this part of you is activated, and being able to challenge it and step back, can help you feel less pressure and find relief.

Reconnecting with a close group of loved ones

Caregiver partners often become socially isolated. They worry their friends don’t want to hear about their situation anymore. Reconnecting with a few close trusted friends in ways that feel relationally nourishing can make a big difference. Naming your worries about burdening your friends can help you make space and ease these concerns.

Finding gentle ways to soothe your nervous system

Caregiver partners I see are often highly stressed and overwhelmed. Having gentle, manageable ways to soothe your nervous system can help. This might include going on walks in nature, yoga or swimming. The emphasis here is on activities you find soothing. This isn’t about hitting any fitness goals.

You’re Allowed to Need Support Too

You know you need support, but actually getting it is another matter altogether, particularly when you are running on empty. So when you're feeling overwhelmed,, try to do one small supportive thing each day; maybe you text one friend, tell your partner you're having a bad day, or go for a walk.

I hope this post helps you appreciate that your need for support is fundamental to the longevity of your role as a partner caregiver. The guilt, resentment, anger, and overwhelm are all completely normal and need space to be heard. Counselling is a supportive space for you to be heard as you navigate caregiver fatigue. If you would like to learn more, you can book in a free 30-minute check-in below.

Book a consult here

About the Author

Matthew Austin | Counsellor & Psychotherapist, Melbourne

Matthew Austin is a Melbourne-based counsellor and psychotherapist who has worked with LGBTQIA+ individuals for over a decade. He has held roles at both Thorne Harbour Health and Queerspace, where he developed a deep understanding of the external forces that shape how LGBTQIA+ people see themselves. His background working with children and adolescents who have experienced trauma and neglect informs his understanding of how early experiences shape the lens through which we view ourselves, others, and the world.

Matthew holds a Bachelor of Social Work, a Certificate in Developmental Psychiatry, and an Advanced Diploma in Gestalt Psychotherapy, and has completed EMDR Levels 1 and 2. He is a mental health social worker and offers Medicare rebates.

His approach draws on IFS, EMDR, and Gestalt therapy to help LGBTQIA+ clients access the compassion, calm, and clarity that has always been there — beneath the self-criticism and distress.

Matthew works with LGBTQIA+ adults in Melbourne. To book a 30-minute check-in, visit my contact page