Lana Hurst, MA, LMHC, MDiv (she/her)
Lana Hurst, MA, LMHC, MDiv (she/her)
Embedded Files
I didn’t set out to become a therapist. I found my way here through sustained questioning, personal transformation, and a commitment to understanding the complexity of human experience. I know what it is like to feel the pull of expectation alongside a longing for something more alive. My story includes wrestling with questions of belief, spirituality, desire, belonging, identity, and loss.
Before becoming a therapist, I worked in faith communities, accompanying people through moments of deep questioning, transition, and uncertainty. That experience continues to shape my approach—not in offering answers, but in creating space for questions to be spoken and held. Over time, my work has come to focus on trauma, gender identity, sexuality, and the ways we come to know ourselves in the aftermath of rupture—when what once sustained us no longer holds, and something new is trying to take form.
My Approach
My Approach
I don’t believe the work of therapy is about returning to some imagined unbroken past or achieving a state of permanent wholeness. Rather, it is about learning how to live more fully with what has wounded us—developing a new relationship with ourselves and with the world around us that is more spacious, honest, and alive. As we learn to listen to what has been carried in silence, our capacity to relate to others often deepens as well.
My work is grounded in psychoanalytic thinking and analytic ways of working. For some, psychoanalysis may call to mind outdated ideas or rigid doctrines. For me, engagement with analytic thought and practice has been a source of transformation—as a patient, as a student, and as a clinician in advanced analytic training.
One of the gifts of analytic work is the invitation to slow down in a world that often demands speed, certainty, and solutions. This is not about being told what to do or given quick fixes. It is about entering into a therapeutic relationship where speaking freely—without censoring or polishing—can begin to open unexpected pathways. In that process, something shifts: you may start to hear yourself differently, encountering desires, contradictions, and longings that have remained unspoken or unexamined.
In this work, the depth of your inner life—its complexity, its strangeness, its queerness—is not something to resolve or smooth over, but something to live with more fully. The past is not erased. What becomes possible is a different way of inhabiting your life—one that allows for greater honesty, freedom, and relational depth.
This way of working is not for everyone. It tends to resonate with people who feel drawn to depth, reflection, and sustained inquiry rather than quick solutions. Many are living with questions about identity, desire, faith, gender, or meaning—especially in the aftermath of rupture, transition, or loss. You may be someone who senses that what brings you distress is not only a problem to solve, but something that wants to be understood, spoken, 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. My background spans clinical practice, spiritual care, and academic study. I hold a MA in Mental Health Counseling with Spiritual Integration from Fordham University and a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.
My clinical perspective is informed by psychoanalytic thinking as well as trauma-informed, decolonial, feminist, queer, and anti-racist frameworks. These orientations shape how I understand psychic life, relational dynamics, and the broader social contexts in which suffering takes form.
I have completed formal training in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and at times draw on this approach to support clients in building internal resources for engaging traumatic material. When used thoughtfully, EMDR can help illuminate connections between memory, affect, and the beliefs people hold about themselves, creating space for new ways of relating to experience.
I am currently a psychoanalytic candidate at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, where I study and practice within a community of clinicians engaged with multiple psychoanalytic traditions, particularly the work of Freud and Lacan. This ongoing training deepens my attention to the ways mind and body speak in sessions, and to how careful listening can support shifts in meaning, symbolization, and relational life over time.
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 a curiosity that leaves room for the unexpected. Therapy can become a space where what has been unspeakable begins to find language, and where meaning emerges through the experience of being listened to carefully.
At its best, therapy is not about fixing or smoothing over what feels broken. It is about allowing unconscious life—its desires, contradictions, and strangeness—to come into relation. In that process, change does not come from erasing difficulty, but from engaging it in ways that make life more livable and open us to who we are still becoming..
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse