Lana Hurst, MA, LMHC, MDiv (she/her)
Lana Hurst, MA, LMHC, MDiv (she/her)
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I didn’t set out to become a therapist—I found my way here through deep questioning, personal transformation, and a commitment to understanding the complexity of human experience. I know what it’s like to feel both the pull of expectation and the longing to step into something more alive. My story involves wrestling with questions about belief, spirituality, desire, belonging, identity, and loss.
Before becoming a therapist, I worked in faith communities, sitting with people in their deepest moments of questioning and life transitions. That experience continues to shape my approach—not in offering answers, but in making space for the questions themselves. Over time, my work expanded to focus on trauma, gender identity, sexuality, and the ways we come to know ourselves in the wake of rupture—when what we once relied on no longer holds, and something new is trying to emerge.
My Approach
My Approach
I don’t believe healing is about returning to some imagined unbroken past. Rather, it’s about cultivating a new relationship with yourself and with the world around you—one that is more connected, spacious, and attuned to the parts of you that have been hidden or cast aside. As we learn to listen to these parts, our capacity to relate to others often deepens as well.
My work is grounded in psychoanalytic therapy. I know that for some, psychoanalysis may call to mind outdated ideas or strange doctrines. But for me, analysis has been a source of transformation—as a patient, as a student, and now as an analyst-in-training.
One of the gifts of analysis is the invitation to slow down in a world that often demands speed and certainty. This isn’t about being told what to do or given quick fixes. It’s about entering into a relationship where speaking freely—without censoring or polishing—begins to open unexpected pathways. In that process, something shifts: you start to hear yourself differently, uncovering desires, contradictions, and longings that may have remained unspoken.
In analysis, the depth of your inner life—its complexity, its strangeness, its queerness—becomes not something to resolve but something to live more fully. Healing doesn’t erase the past; it gives us room to inhabit our lives in ways that are more alive, more honest, and more our own.
My Background & Training
My Background & Training
I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC) in New York and a registered telehealth provider in Florida with a background spanning clinical practice, spiritual care, and academic study. I hold a Master’s in Mental Health Counseling with Spiritual Integration from Fordham University and a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary.
My perspective is shaped by psychoanalytic, trauma-informed, decolonial, feminist, queer, and anti-racist frameworks, which guide how I think about people and the worlds we inhabit.
I have completed training in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and sometimes draw on this approach to help patients build internal resources for navigating traumatic memories. EMDR can also illuminate the links between memory and the beliefs we hold about ourselves, creating space for new possibilities of meaning and resilience.
Currently, I am a psychoanalyst in formation at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics, where I study and practice within a community of clinicians committed to wrestling with psychoanalytic traditions. This work deepens my attention to the ways mind and body speak in our sessions, and to how listening carefully can open new paths of transformation.
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, but with a curiosity that makes room for the unexpected. Therapy offers a space where what has been unspeakable can begin to find voice, and where new meanings take shape in the act of being heard.
At its best, therapy is not about fixing or smoothing over what feels broken. It is about allowing unconscious life—its desires, its contradictions, its strangeness—to come into relation. In that process, we often discover that transformation emerges not from erasing difficulty, but from engaging it in ways that open us to who we are still becoming.
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