Meet Adrian Belmes

We recently connected with Adrian Belmes and have shared our conversation below.

Adrian, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?

“Purpose” is an interesting concept. There’s this sort of singularity that’s assigned to the idea of purpose in the Western consciousness, a concrete object that is for most tied up in the machinations of profit and productivity. I am by no means immune to this line of thinking, but I do also believe that purpose is a thing of multitudes, universally applied values with context-specific translations. No person can really be boiled down to a handful of imperatives without quite a lot being lost in reproduction. The totality of the human soul defies linguistics, as it absolutely should.

Finding purpose wasn’t a linear thing for me. There’s this pesky expectation that it ought to be, but I’ve yet to meet a single person who can honestly say they knew their purpose from day one of coming online and never wavered from it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying either to you or to themselves, but don’t fault them too hard for that. You have to get to a certain age of development before you even start to conceive of life in terms of longitude and legacy.

Purpose was for a lot of my life a synonym for career, and in that respect, I had quite the go of it. By the age of 25, I had worked as a theatrical electrician, stage manager, barista, promotional model, bartender, sex worker, library assistant, literary editor, copywriter, legal secretary, and records clerk, just to name a few things. If you want to add to that list all the things I gave countless hours of my life to and wasn’t paid for, it would triple in length and include a probably unsurprising array of substance addictions, fluctuating relationships, and frankly cartoonish exploits. I had lived a very interesting life but not an entirely fulfilling one.

By the end of summer in 2020, I had just been laid off from my cushy air-conditioned office, where I drove a records cart for corporate lawyers and danced in the stacks to ABBA remixes when nobody was looking. I was about as miserable as I was comfortable, which is to say that I was totally unmoored in life. I was two years out of a relationship I thought would end in marriage but am ultimately glad didn’t. I had broken up with my rebound boyfriend because we were both tops and I was trying to get sober. I spent a few months seriously re-examining my life, alternating between working at a friend’s crystal shop and traveling up and down the Pacific coast. It was an overdue self-analysis. I was reflecting on multiple careers in art and a flirtation with law all having gone down the drain by my own volition. I was wondering why I was choosing to be corporate and shallow when all it did was burn me. I was disenfranchised, disillusioned, and profoundly depressed. If you squint, these are all synonyms for purposeless.

There wasn’t a single moment where I decided what my purpose was. This too is a pervasive myth in the grand tapestry of American introjects that have surrounded me since I arrived in this country. It’s not uniquely American, but there’s a sort of cultural fetish here in the idea that purpose should arrive to you like God’s lightning. If I had to describe how purpose came into my life, it was more like slapping my hand around looking for a light switch. It was years of that over and over that only coincidentally culminated in those weird couple of months in the pandemic. I’ve since learned in my thousands of hours of clients that this kind of fucking around until you find out is a fairly common experience.

To give myself an ounce of credit here, I had in fact always felt a profound calling to helping professions, but it took a long time for that to really crystallize into a vocation and source of meaning-making. The privileged and satisfied do not often seek to involve themselves in the difficulties of other people, and my life has not been a privileged one. As someone who is transgender, queer, an immigrant, and a child of poverty and diaspora, I am and have always been a plethora of statistical marginalia. I know and have known what it is to feel unseen, to navigate systems that were not built for me, and to survive environments where simply existing is an act of defiance. I’ve made it so far, but a lot of people don’t. A lot of people I knew personally haven’t. I’d gone to 12 funerals by the time I hit my mid-20s. Nobody was over the age of 35 and most were my peers.

My experiences are not unique, but that’s exactly the point. All my life I had felt and seen something that people like me—in part or in whole—also felt and saw. I turned my heart into a home by my own two hands because I needed it for me and thought that others might too. The amount of times in my life I was the midnight phone call to somebody in crisis would be difficult to measure. There were those friends in my life who joked repeatedly that I was their therapist, but I recall bristling at the label. I wasn’t a professional by any means and had not earned the title whatsoever. I had always treated this sort of thing as a deeply personal act, a committed but private resistance to the ravages of life that me and the people around me were subject to. I got really good at collecting people’s tears. That’s not a skill most people possess. I felt that I had to get good at it, and I’d like to think I did, but making a career of my care wasn’t on my radar then.

It would be dishonest to say that I had never considered becoming a therapist, but that infant of an idea was slain pretty early in life. My Soviet parents considered psychology to be an American scam. They encouraged my intellectual pursuits in the form of reading Freud and true crime biographies at probably too young an age for all that but were adamantly against the notion that depression was anything more than temporary laziness. This was compounded by the simple fact that I had never myself had a good experience in therapy. I grew up in a conservative hellscape in suicidal crisis for most of my teen years because there were no helping professionals who knew what to do with me beyond platitudes and pills. I desperately needed somebody to see me and understand me. If nobody else was going to do it, I—a grown ass man despite it all—certainly could. So I set out to be the person the little me would have wanted to hold his hand in the most difficult time of his life, because there’s a lot of people out there who need that person too. Several degrees and a lot of hours of work later, I’m finding how to be that person. That’s purpose.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?

My name is Adrian Belmes, and I’m an Associate Marriage and Family Therapist specializing in supporting transgender, gender non-conforming, and queer teens and adults. My approach is collaborative, person-centered, and strengths-based. I hold space that is explicitly LGBTQIA+ affirming, relationship-diverse, trauma-informed, sex-positive, kink-knowledgeable, psychedelic-integrative, and harm-reduction framework. Grounded primarily in a Psychodynamic perspective, I explore the conscious and unconscious aspects of life—how the present is shaped by the past and the subtle language of both mind and body. Together, we focus on identifying persistent patterns, deeply understanding them, shedding illusions, and moving toward a more meaningful and authentic reality.

At the heart of my work is a profound belief in the fundamental human need to be seen, loved, and accepted exactly as you are. In this light, therapy becomes a space where we come home to ourselves—where we are known fully and held in the radical belief that we are already worthy, just for being who we are. I take pride in creating a deeply empathetic space where my clients can explore their identities and feel empowered to live a life that is more true, more full. The process of realizing yourself as a whole person requires courage to bear witness to one’s inner vastness, openness to being deeply moved by it, and the willingness to allow transformation to take root. Being part of that journey, witnessing that change, is what I find most meaningful about this work. It is a privilege and a sacred trust — one that humbles me deeply and inspires my ongoing commitment to healing and growth, both for those I work with and for myself.

A central tenet of my work is supporting people through gender transition and queer identity formation. I see it as my duty to support individuals in making informed and empowered choices when it comes to fulfilling their identity needs. I firmly believe that there is no one singular model of what transition should look like for any person of any identity, and all choices made in the process of transition are the right choices for the individual making them. I provide not only ongoing therapy to support the exploration and embodiment of those choices but also accessible one-time letter-writing services to help clients access gender-affirming medical care. Especially in the current social, cultural, and political climate, access to this care is life-changing and life-saving. Beyond my direct work, I lead trainings and workshops for clinicians, educators, and healthcare providers on topics like gender development, affirming care, and ethical practice with LGBTQ+ clients, expanding the support network beyond my own practice.

If you or someone you know is navigating questions around gender, sexuality, relationships, or identity and seeks an affirming, compassionate, and knowledgeable therapist, I would be honored to walk alongside you. I’m committed to continually learning, growing, and expanding the ways I can support the evolving needs of the communities I hold dear.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The indelible lessons learned in my time as a clinician and a human being can’t honestly be collected into any sort of list, much less narrowed down into just three things. But, sure, twist my arm. I would say the most necessary qualities of being are self-trust, humility, and radical empathy.

I grew up a nervous kid. I had a lot to be nervous about. I didn’t know anyone like me who had made it into adulthood, and I had no role models who even remotely resembled who I was or might become. My environment was one of high expectations with little support to reach them, and this does not a confident child make. There was no clear place for me to be or belong. The adults in my life largely regarded me as an oddity and had no idea what to do with me. Most of the adults in my life regarded me as an oddity, unsure of what to do with me. You could easily frame that experience through the lens of neglect — and in many ways it absolutely was — but it also gave me something rare: the freedom to determine my own path at an age when most of my peers were being told exactly who and how to be. Left to my own devices, I got inventive. I took risks, I stumbled, and I often failed. But that was the most essential part of the lesson. I got back up each time I fell, and with every recovery, I proved to myself that even if no one else had my back, I had my own. This wasn’t a sudden transformation or a singular experience but many small and repeated moments that solidified a deeper truth: when we learn to hear our inner voice and trust its wisdom, we become unshakeable. Your story is not a detour — it IS the path.

Now weigh that against ego. Not just ego in the colloquial sense of inflated self-importance, but ego as essence — the story you tell yourself about who you are, what you deserve, what’s possible for you. So much of my work — both internally and with clients — is about softening that narrative, making space for contradiction, for not-knowing, for possibility. Humility in this context could perhaps better be defined as leaving room for nuance. It’s the skill of being willing to be wrong, to not be the expert, to allow your worldview to shift in the presence of new information or a truth that belongs to someone else. That kind of humility isn’t about shrinking — it’s about expanding. It’s a strength, not a lack.

Some might disagree with me, but I’m not ashamed to say that I love my clients. Love is a form of seeing with not only our minds but our hearts. Understanding is love’s other name. This kind of love—radical empathy—is not about sentimentality. It’s about real presence and the willingness to hold space for the full truth of another human being. It means allowing ourselves to be moved by another’s experience, even when it challenges us. We have to get good at sitting with discomfort, contradiction, and uncertainty without turning away. Radical empathy doesn’t mean merging or losing boundaries; it means holding space with clarity, compassion, and care. It means meeting people where they are, without flinching, and walking alongside them not as an expert but as a fellow traveler.

I try not to be an advice giver. As a therapist, my role isn’t to dictate the lives of the people who trust me with their shadows but rather to offer a compassionate perspective machine. The promise of therapy is that every time we enter those corridors of perception and examine more closely what we see, we will learn something of ourselves and of the world. Remember this deeply: we all bear witness to the wounds of our communities and we should not look away. Being who and what we are, we have a responsibility to galvanize those lived experiences of identity and trauma into something which serves others. Every person alive has the power to make a difference in the world if they would only choose to do so. We can’t all be on the front lines, but we can all do something. Find that something and do it with dignity, diligence, and deep respect.

Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?

The second day of grad school, the professor who I hated most at the time but would later become my most cherished mentor told us — and I’m certainly going to misquote this a little but — “by the time you have graduated here, you will have completed 6th grade in terms of therapeutic knowledge, and if you don’t keep training and studying and pushing, you will be a shitty therapist”. I thought this was incredibly harsh at the time, but I think this is the most pointedly honest thing I had heard anyone say in the entirety of that program, possibly any program anywhere ever. There’s a nuance there that I was deaf to in my youthful hubris, and I only really got to understand the depth of her words by actually going through the rigors of the program, the practicum, and the countless clinical hours.

Learning isn’t something we complete — it’s a daily discipline we must commit to practicing. One of the places I see clinicians falter most is in assuming the work is done once they’ve cleared the gates of grad school or passed their licensing exams. But that mindset is not just short-sighted; it’s a profound disservice to our clients, our communities, and the field as a whole. We live in a dynamic world with ever-evolving language, contexts, and cultural realities. To stay rooted in outdated knowledge is to risk doing harm, however unintentional.

I’ve pursued ongoing training with a kind of relentlessness — not because it’s expected of me, but because it’s essential. I truly do owe so much to the formal educators and peers who have poured into me. Expanding my clinical skills, deepening my knowledge, challenging my blind spots, and staying in conversation with new ideas are non-negotiables in my work. Anything less would mean showing up half-formed in spaces that deserve my whole self. The more I’ve committed to learning, the more I’ve been able to practice true attunement to my clients, to my own internal compass, and to the shifting needs of the communities I serve. This is a lifelong practice, and it’s one I approach with reverence, because being in this work is a privilege I take seriously.

I’ve been incredibly lucky to learn from brilliant mentors, supervisors, and teachers along the way, and yet some of the most profound learning has also come directly from my clients. It’s in the therapy room that I’ve been most shaped and sharpened. My clients have challenged me to become more honest, more nuanced, more deeply attuned. They’ve taught me how to listen with my whole self, how to stay open even in uncertainty, and how to meet people exactly where they are with care and clarity. I’m truly grateful to that. I’m a better clinician and a better human because of them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://adrianbelmes.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrian-belmes/
• Other: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/adrian-belmes-queer-affirming-care-for-teens-adults-carlsbad-ca/1235590