Lana Hurst, MA, MDiv, LMHC (she/her)
Lana Hurst, MA, MDiv, LMHC (she/her)
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I didn’t set out to become a therapist. I found my way here through sustained questioning, personal transformation, and a deep curiosity about how people live with belief, desire, identity, and loss.
Before becoming a clinician, I worked in faith communities, accompanying people through seasons of rupture, transition, and doubt. That experience continues to shape my work today — not by offering answers, but by making space for complex questions to be spoken and held.
Over time, my practice has come to focus on trauma, gender identity, sexuality, and religious trauma — particularly for adults navigating what happens when what once sustained them no longer does.
My Approach
My Approach
I don’t believe therapy is about returning to an imagined unbroken past or achieving permanent wholeness. It is about developing a new relationship to what has wounded you — one that is more spacious, honest, and alive.
My work is grounded in psychoanalytic thinking. Rather than offering quick solutions, we slow down. We listen for patterns, contradictions, and what has been carried in silence. In speaking freely — without censoring or polishing — something begins to shift. You may start to hear yourself differently.
In this space, the complexity of your inner life — its strangeness, its queerness, its depth — is not something to resolve, but something to inhabit more fully.
This way of working tends to resonate with people drawn to depth, reflection, and sustained inquiry rather than quick fixes. Many are navigating questions of identity, gender, desire, faith, or meaning — especially in the aftermath of rupture or transition.
You may sense that what brings you here is not only a problem to solve, but something that wants to be understood and lived with differently over time.
My Background & Training
My Background & Training
I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) in New York and a registered telehealth provider in Florida. I offer in-person therapy in Downtown Manhattan and online therapy for clients located in New York and Florida.
I hold a MA in Mental Health Counseling from Fordham University and a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.
My clinical perspective is informed by psychoanalytic theory, trauma-informed practice, and decolonial, feminist, queer, and anti-racist frameworks.
I've had formal training in EMDR and, when appropriate, integrate some of the techniques to support clients engaging traumatic material.
I am currently a psychoanalytic candidate at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, where I study within multiple analytic traditions, particularly Freud and Lacan.
Why I Do This Work
Why I Do This Work
I do this work because I know what can happen when someone is met without judgment and with sustained curiosity.
Therapy can become a space where what has been unspeakable begins to find language — and where change comes not from erasing difficulty, but from engaging it in ways that make life more livable and open us to who we are still becoming.
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