Some things are hard to talk about, even when you’re good at talking
Maybe you’re navigating the complexity of relationships: the anxiety, the mismatched expectations, the emotional patterns that keep showing up no matter how much you want them to stop.
Maybe you’ve spent years performing competence: at work, for your family, for everyone around you, and you’re quietly running out of steam.
Or maybe you’ve experienced trauma—sexual assault, violence, or something else that was never your fault—and you’re ready to stop carrying it alone.
Whatever brought you here, you deserve care that takes you seriously, with rigorous, evidence-based treatment from a therapist who understands that the work isn’t just talking. It’s about making actual and sustainable change.
My Approach to Helping
I’m Peter Luehring-Jones, a clinical psychologist licensed in Virginia and the District of Columbia.
I trained at Boston University and completed my postdoctoral fellowship at the Washington DC VA Medical Center, where I worked with people carrying some of the most complex trauma presentations there are. I’ve also conducted research on sexual health and wellness among gay and bisexual men, which means that when I work with LGBTQ+ clients, I bring not just personal understanding as a gay man, but a genuine scholarly engagement with the issues that affect our community.
My approach is cognitive-behavioral at its core: structured, goal-directed, and grounded in treatments that have been tested and shown to work. That means we won’t just talk. We’ll identify what’s keeping you stuck, agree on a clear plan to address it, and track whether it’s actually helping. Most of the treatments I use are time-limited, typically 12 to 16 weeks, and involve active work both in and between sessions.
If you’re looking for a therapist who will take your problems seriously, work hard alongside you, and hold yourself accountable to real results, I’d love to hear from you.
Services
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Care for the LGBTQ+ Community
LGBTQ+ relationships come with their own particular texture: the excitement and anxiety of navigating dating and intimacy in a community that can feel both expansive and small, the attachment patterns that show up again and again no matter how much you want them to stop, and the emotional weight of building a life and identity that may look nothing like what you were raised to expect.
As a gay man and a researcher who has studied sexual health and wellness among gay and bisexual men, I bring both personal and professional understanding to this work. Whether you’re figuring out who you are, working through the complexity of coming out, or trying to build relationships that actually feel good, this is a space where you won’t have to explain yourself from the beginning.
I work with LGBTQ+ clients on relationship anxiety, attachment, sex and intimacy, and the ongoing process of becoming your most authentic self. Whatever you’re navigating, you’ll find care here that is affirming, rigorous, and entirely focused on you.
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When Success Isn't Enough
The DMV is full of people who are very good at solving problems for their clients, their constituents, their colleagues, and their causes. If you’re one of them, you probably know how to push through, perform under pressure, and project confidence even when you’re running on empty. What you may be less practiced at is asking for help for yourself.
Burnout, anxiety, and perfectionism don’t announce themselves all at once. They build quietly, in the exhaustion that doesn’t go away after a vacation, the standards that keep rising no matter how much you accomplish, the growing sense that you’re holding everything together for everyone else all while something in you goes unattended.
If any of that sounds familiar, therapy can help. Not as a place to vent, but as a structured, focused process for understanding what’s driving these patterns and building the tools to change them. You’re good at doing hard things. This will be one more.
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Trauma and PTSD
People recover from trauma. That’s not a platitude: it’s what the research shows, and it’s what I’ve seen firsthand working with people carrying some of the heaviest experiences imaginable: sexual assault, combat, and the particular harm that comes from a world that has treated your race, gender, or sexuality as a problem to be managed.
Trauma leaves a mark on how you see yourself, how you move through the world, and how you connect with others. But it doesn’t have to be permanent. Evidence-based treatments for PTSD are among the most effective interventions in all of psychology, and the treatments I offer — Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), Prolonged Exposure (PE), and Written Exposure Therapy (WET) — have helped thousands of people reclaim their lives.
This work isn’t easy, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But if you’re ready to stop organizing your life around what happened to you, I’m ready to help you get there.
How to Get Started
Taking the first step is often the hardest part. Reaching out to a therapist, especially for the first time, or after a difficult experience with therapy in the past, takes real courage, and I don’t take that lightly.
When you’re ready, the process is straightforward. Reach out by phone or email to let me know you’re interested. We’ll schedule a free 15-minute consultation call with no commitment and no pressure so that we can get a sense of each other and you can decide whether working together feels right. If it does, we’ll schedule an initial 50-minute telehealth intake session to get started.
There’s no perfect moment to begin. If you’ve been thinking about it, that’s enough.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Individual sessions are $225. I am an out-of-network provider and do not bill insurance directly. Many clients are able to use out-of-network benefits to offset the cost of sessions. I’m happy to provide invoices to submit to your insurance company for reimbursement. I encourage you to check with your insurer about your out-of-network coverage before we meet.
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Sessions take place over a secure video platform. All you need is a phone, tablet, or computer with a camera and a private space to talk. Telehealth is convenient and flexible, but it does have one important limitation: you must be physically located in Virginia or the District of Columbia during our sessions.
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Most of the evidence-based treatments I offer are time-limited, typically running 12 to 16 weeks. This isn’t open-ended therapy that continues indefinitely, it’s a focused, structured process with a clear arc and defined goals. Some clients choose to continue beyond that, but most find that 12 to 16 weeks produces significant and lasting change.
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Evidence-based therapies are treatments that have been rigorously tested in clinical research and shown to produce real results. Rather than talking generally about your problems, we’ll work from a structured protocol, learning specific skills, completing exercises between sessions, and tracking progress along the way. It’s active, collaborative work, and for people who are ready to engage, the results tend to be faster and more durable than less structured approaches.
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Finding the right therapist matters and research consistently shows that the relationship between therapist and client is one of the most important factors in whether therapy works. If after our consultation or early sessions you feel that we’re not the right match, that’s completely okay. You are always in the driver’s seat. I will never take a decision to discontinue therapy personally, and if you’d like help finding another provider who might be a better fit, I’m happy to assist with that too. The goal is for you to get the care that works for you, whatever form that takes.
