Sometimes, some things are just better done with a peer. Someone that’s walked the same path, that knows the terrain, sharing the same challenges as you in the face of an often hostile world. This brief article considers why you might, as a person falling within the diverse LGBTQIA+ community, seek a psychologist like me that similarly lives outside heteronormative life.
You will work with someone that understands the primary internal conflict
Every single LGBTQIA+ person has had to walk some kind of journey where they’ve had to set themselves apart from heteronormative life. Over time, a point is reached where difference in sexual attraction (and desire), gender expression, or relationship needs can no longer be ignored. This ‘pivot point,’ depending on circumstances, might be passed without a care. It might be a place you dwell for a while, figuring the meaning of things out. For many however, it can be a place of ferocious, unrelenting pain and torment, a great scary dilemma. Some choose not to ‘out’ themselves and live with their difference discreetly (e.g., for cultural or family reasons).
When you work with an LGBTQIA+ therapist, you are guaranteed someone that understands this definitive event in your life’s journey.
You will work with someone that understands the culture
Well, I’m lying a little bit here. Anyone proclaiming to understand the entirety of LGBTQIA+ culture would need god-like powers. It’s a vast, amorphous beast that changes every day! I’m a cis gay man, and I struggle to keep up with gay culture let alone what’s happening in lesbian, bi and trans circles. Each have their own slang, their own unique signifiers and symbols, their own pressures and expectations.
What’s important here however is the general appreciation of subculture. There is understanding of how the LGBTQIA+ umbrella is home to a galaxy of different lives, realities, and communities. A baseline of respect, as well as an overlapping of more general community cultural understanding, comes from this. A shared appreciation of minority identity, and minority stresses, in a world that can feel threatening. We live in uncertain times, in which it feels to many like our rights and freedoms are backsliding.
You will work with someone that understands that, as human beings, we’re just the same as everyone else
Homosexuality was removed from the DSM (the American guide to psychological disorders) in 1973. The professionals responsible for updating it accepted that sexuality difference in itself has no bearing on your mental health and well-being. Their data indicated otherwise and could no longer be ignored. We can be just as healthy (or, as “messed up!”) as everybody else, and that is separate from sexuality (and indeed other aspects of LGBTQIA+ identity). When you work with an LGBTQIA+ peer, you can be assured that they are not going to make false connections between your psychological life problems and who you are at your core. The stigmas on who we are gets left outside the door – you will not be pathologised.
You will work with someone that understands what affirmative means
I provide a sex-positive, kink-positive, and queer-positive atmosphere in my practice. This means, as I noted in the previous paragraph, leaving stigma outside. So many LGBTQIA+ people are cursed with the residues of shame from societal judgement. We don’t need that relived in the therapy room.
If you’d like to work with an LGBTQIA+ therapist, I welcome you to be in touch.
