Molly Bernhard, AMFT #143383 (she/her)
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Relationships are central to our sense of safety, identity, and belonging. They’re shaped by the people, places, cultures, and systems that surround us, and when those relationships are strained, it can feel isolating and painful. Through therapy, we can find healing within our relationship to ourselves and others.
I work with individuals, couples, and families who feel stuck in patterns of disconnection, loneliness, or conflict. Whether you're navigating family dynamics, feeling contempt or despair in your relationship, or carrying wounds from the past, I provide a secure and compassionate space for you to explore what’s holding you back from connection and intimacy.
Using an attachment-based, trauma-informed approach, I help clients understand how early experiences shape their current relational patterns. Together, we uncover the subconscious strategies you may use to protect yourself—strategies that might now be getting in the way of closeness or trust. I can support you in accessing your most vulnerable, authentic self and developing the confidence to share that self with others.
I have charted the path to my healing and have experienced the transformative power of therapy. Here, you will find a place where there is lightness and vitality alongside the hard stuff. As a systemic therapist, I lean heavily on collaboration with you and your treatment team, taking a mind, body, and spirit approach to the work. I also recognize that symptoms can be our body’s way of communicating to us to come back home to ourselves. Together we can weave ritual, oral tradition, and cultural narratives into your story as you are witnessed and held through the charting of your path.
My work is grounded in anti-oppressive, feminist, and culturally-responsive frameworks. I believe effective therapy must honor the complex realities of race, culture, gender, systemic oppression, and intergenerational trauma. I aim to hold these truths with care, approaching your story with curiosity, respect, and cultural humility. The therapeutic relationship is a core element of healing and change. I am dedicated to cultivating a gentle and safe relationship for you while also challenging you to come alive to your whole self, even the raw parts that are locked away. I am here with you as you speak truths you may have never spoken before, rediscover your inner resilience, and move toward relationships that feel secure, empowered, and deeply connected.
Services: Individual, Couple, Parent, and Family Therapy
Areas of Focus: Families with adult children or adolescents, couples, intercultural dynamics, queer folx, poly relationships, complex trauma, ambiguous loss, teens and young adults, life transitions, body liberation, depression, anxiety, and collective grief and trauma.
Theoretical Approach: I utilize an integrative approach curated toward client presentation, needs, and goals. I pull from humanistic, experiential, attachment-based, psychodynamic, ACT, and family systems theory.
Qualifications and Certifications:
M.S. Couple and Family Therapy, University of Maryland
Attachment-Based Family Therapy, Level 1 Training, Drexel University
Certificate of Couple and Family Therapy for LGBTQ+ Clients, University of Maryland Couple and Family Therapy Program and Sexual and Gender Minority Mental Health Program at Fairfield University
Certificate of Psychological First Aid (PFA)