Pride and shame: why LGBTQ+ affirmative therapy is crucial.
Firstly, happy Pride month!
It’s part of my job to always think about the opposites, the flip-side of what is being talked about, and how nothing is ever black and white. So, naturally, pride has got me thinking about shame.
Shame is not just the feeling that you’ve done something bad, but that you yourself are bad. This feeling is particularly forced upon people who do not conform to society’s implicit (and often explicit) views on what “normal” sexuality, gender, and relationships look like. Often queer people “know” that being queer is ok (and not just ok, perhaps great!), and will tell themselves so, but that knowledge is often accompanied by an underlying feeling that something isn’t ok, feelings of disgust, unacceptability, wrongness, abnormality… shame.
Of course this is the case. No matter how “liberal” or “accepting” a family you grew up in, we all live in a world that perpetuates the idea that any deviation from gender, sexuality and relationship norms is, at best, weird, and, at worst, punishable by death. Sure, there are pockets of the world where this is changing, but that doesn’t alter the messaging that we all receive from most of the world most of the time. When we hear a message repeated to us over and over again from childhood, especially one that comes in explicit forms and also in insidious, harder to detect, subtle forms, we internalise that message. The feelings of shame become a part of us.
Feelings of shame are very hard to access and acknowledge. Shame is one of the most intolerable feelings we can experience and so we will go a long way to avoid feeling it, our minds coming up with complex unconscious defence mechanisms to avoid it. We force the feelings of shame away and avoid things that will push us towards feeling it. For queer people (like all people) it can be very hard to acknowledge internalised shame. Feeling shame is so painful, and there can be something shameful about being ashamed. Many queer people can feel like they are not a “good enough” queer person if they feel a drop of internalised shame about their queerness.
Exploring and learning about the origin of these rules can help us explore what’s going on within us, and help us get more comfortable with the messiness and complexity of our experiences. Finding spaces where we feel accepted and free to be who we are can be wonderful, but it can also highlight how challenging it is to spend a lot of your existence in a world that others you. Being proud of who you are is really hard when a lot of the messaging you have received is that you are not normal. And sometimes being told things like “normal is boring” doesn’t help. “Normal” often comes along with physical safety, access to basic rights, and the psychological freedom to just go about your life without the weight of shame.
Pride is a beacon of sparkly, rainbow coloured hope. But we can’t just paper over the dark, scary blackness of shame with a month of companies making their logos rainbow. We need to shift the narratives in the world, but we also need to be aware of the narratives we unintentionally tell ourselves, and to explore these with compassionate curiosity. It is by doing this that we can begin to forge the lives we really want, free to be the people we are.
LGBTQ+ people deserve to have therapeutic spaces where they can feel safe in the knowledge that their therapist is not pathologising them because of who they are. I practise LGBTQ+ affirmative therapy, meaning that I do not treat being gay, bi, queer, trans, or any other form of GSRD (gender, sexuality, and relationship diversity), as a mental disorder that needs to be “fixed”. They are simply a few of the many varied ways in which humanity appears in the world.
If you would like such a space, please contact me.
