Jennie Steinberg, LMFT, LPCC, PMH-C

Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor, Certified Perinatal Mental Health Professional, Certified Daring Way Facilitator

In high school, I was voted “most outlandish”.  True story.

Growing up with ADHD, I often felt like I was simultaneously too much and never enough.  My personality often felt too big to fit into the spaces I inhabited.  I felt uncomfortable in my own body – figuratively, and sometimes literally.  As an adult, I still feel this way sometimes, but I’ve learned to seek out places and people who welcome my effusiveness.

It was this expansiveness of my personality that led me to seek out a career in psychotherapy.  I knew other people must feel this way – struggling to fit in, feeling they had to hustle for their worthiness, and knowing that they’re smart and capable, while never quite feeling they were living up to their potential.

In 15 years of practicing psychotherapy, I’ve found this to be very true.  Often, my clients are the adults who were labeled gifted as children, the overachievers who don’t feel fulfilled, the awkward ducks who always feel like they’re missing the memo.  My own experience of feeling like an outcast helps me show up for these folks with compassion and authenticity.

Over the years, I’ve found my way through the “awkward duck-ness” of it all, and into embracing my quirkiness, in part through dozens of incredible friendships with queer people.  In these friendships, I found resonance.  These were people whose feelings of other-ness made them stronger and more stubbornly authentic.  Although I, myself, am cishet, I found that in many ways, my queer friends and I understood each other.

There were differences, though, too.  As I walk through the world, even if I’m a bit unconventional, the assumptions people make about me are mostly true – my partner is a cisgender straight man, I am a mom, and she/her pronouns are both compatible with my presentation and feel comfortable for me.  However, through engaging in these friendships, and listening more than talking, I have deepened my understanding of queer lived experiences.  Many of the clients I’ve worked with in my career have, themselves, been queer, trans, nonbinary, ace, poly, and kinky.  These clients almost always tell me that they feel very seen by me.

The older I get, the more I feel comfortable being myself.  But my journey to motherhood threw me for a loop.  As I navigated infertility and IVF, a high-risk pregnancy, and a paradigm-shifting transition to new parenthood, I felt hard-earned pieces of myself slip away.  I wondered what on earth was wrong with me.  After all, I’d worked so hard to start feeling confident and competent.  How could I be sliding backwards like this?

But as I spoke with other people navigating similar challenges – starting with questions about whether to have children in the first place, all the way through the tectonic identity shift that occurs when someone becomes a mother (or other birthing or primary parent) – I found that I was very much not alone.  Other people echoed my sentiments, sometimes word for word.  I realized that I wasn’t struggling because I was a failure; I was struggling because this shit is hard.

In recent years, informed by my own life experiences, I have begun to work with clients who are navigating these reproductive choices and challenges.  As a veteran of both IVF and a high-risk pregnancy, I bring compassion, empathy, and firsthand experience to supporting clients who are struggling with infertility, pregnancy overwhelm (including complicated/ high-risk pregnancies), grief over and trauma from the birth experience, the adjustment to new parenthood, and identity questions that arise at all stages of this journey.

In addition to my lived experiences, I am certified as a Perinatal Mental Health Professional through Postpartum Support International.  I am also pursuing a certificate in infertility mental health through the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

What to expect from therapy with me

The biography on this page is all about me, but therapy is all about you.  Here are some things you can expect from our therapy sessions together:

  • Respectful – I fully believe that you are the expert in your own life, and the foundation of my perspective on therapy is that I will never try to talk you out of your lived experiences. I may not agree with every decision you make, but that’s okay.  It’s not about seeking my approval; it’s about you having agency in the process of building a life that feels right for you.
  • Strength–based – I’ve written about this elsewhere in more depth, but I’d be remiss not to include it here. My strength-based approach is like mining for nuggets of gold.  It’s not about finding problems and deficits; it’s about building a map from the competencies, resilience, strengths you already possess.
  • Active – I’m not a “nod and grunt” therapist. I ask a lot of questions, inquire about apparent contradictions, and reflect feelings.  At its best, a therapy session with me feels like a compassionate personification of your most honest, curious voice.  My hope is that you’ll begin to internalize parts of that curiosity, and find those same resources within yourself.
  • Client-led – Each session – after the initial “getting to know you” process – begins with what you’re bringing in for the day. I don’t come in with an agenda or itinerary.  If what you’re bringing in is, “I don’t know what to talk about today”, we start by talking about that.  I try to give you things to chew on throughout the session, but rarely assign explicit homework.
  • Goal-centered – My intention is not to keep you in therapy forever. That’s why, within the first few sessions, we define what you want out of therapy and collaboratively develop goals.
  • Unapologetically political – Therapy that tells you to fix yourself in a broken social context is victim-blaming. I frequently toggle out and acknowledge that your struggles exist in a culture that, often, perpetuates rather than repairs them.  Much of our work together is about acknowledging these oppressive realities, and learning how to thrive amid them.
  • Human – Mess is welcome in our therapy sessions. Being human is inherently sloppy, and therapy is a good place to explore the weirder, less “buttoned-up” parts of yourself.
  • Filled with levity, bad puns, and occasional musical theater references – Because laughter is healing, reality can be absurd, and these things make the hardest times feel manageable.

Qualifications

I am licensed in California as a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT #85677) and Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (LPCC #1631).

I have been a psychotherapist since 2007 and have been in private practice since 2012.  During the 5-year period between 2017-2021, I also owned and operated Through the Woods Therapy Center as a social justice-focused, strength-based, feminist-oriented, queer-affirming, anti-racist group practice.  In this practice, I employed 8 other therapists, 7 of whom were pre-licensed clinicians who I supervised on their path to licensure.

In addition to my private practice, I have provided psychotherapy in a variety of settings, including a group home where I worked with teenage girls in foster care, an agency where I worked with people who had just been released from prison, a school where I supported children on the Autism spectrum, and a community mental health clinic, where I provided outpatient psychotherapy to members of a low-income community.

I am a Certified Perinatal Mental Health Professional (PMH-C).  I’m also certified in Brené Brown’s “Daring Way,” which focuses on learning to be more vulnerable and authentic, and building resilience against feelings of shame.  Additionally, I’ve attended workshops on many other topics, including perinatal mental health, LGBT-affirming mental health, self-esteem and self-compassion, suicide and self-harm, trauma, body image and disordered eating, microaggressions and the impact of marginalization, and sexuality.

My Master’s Degree in counseling is from California State University, Northridge.  During my years in graduate school, I was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi, an honor society, and was asked to serve as the student board member of the Association for Humanistic Psychology.  I also have a Bachelor’s Degree in psychology with a minor in theater from Columbus State University.

Before I was a therapist, I dabbled in fundraising and journalism.  I also supported myself in graduate school by working as a birthday party clown.  That’s not relevant to my qualifications as a therapist, but I’ve found that most people enjoy knowing it.

Reach out

To schedule a phone consultation to discuss how we can work together, reach out via email, the form on this page, or by phone at 818-284-6663.

(Psst, did you come here looking for someone else?  You can find contact information for all of the therapists who used to work at Through the Woods Therapy, back when it was a group practice, on this page.)