We each have our understanding or interpretation of the meaning of the phrase – Internalized Homophobia. To some of us it means a straight person who has a deep hatred of anything and everything that has to do with homosexuality. For some it means the deep inner feelings of self loathing that a homosexual has towards themselves. In most cases people immediately think of some kind of fear and or loathing regarding the gay community.
While this may be true, Internalized Homophobia does not always manifest itself in obvious ways. During a discussion on the subject of Internalized Homophobia in one of the Recovery Groups that I facilitated, one of the members of the group declared that they did not have internalized homophobia, that they were proud to be gay, and they held no deep seated hatred of their sexuality. When I asked the group member to tell me more about that, to tell me what there feelings toward being gay are, and how do they act upon those feelings, I got an ear full.
When I was in high school, I was very out about my sexuality. I did not care who knew I was gay, I wanted to make sure that everyone knew, and if I made anyone uncomfortable, then that was there issue not mine.
I paused, smiled, and explained that all of our feelings are internal. Every image every thought, every feeling that we have all come from inside of our selves, thus the word Internal.
Sure, the group member said, but what about being homophobic, I am not afraid, or hateful towards myself for being gay. “Then why did you feel the need to announce your sexuality to everyone around you, whether they were comfortable with it or not?”
“We have spent all of our lives having to hide ourselves! Why shouldn’t we be able to make people uncomfortable the way they made us uncomfortable?”
“I thought you told me, you were proud to be gay, how can something that you are proud of make you uncomfortable?”
The group member hesitated, unsure of how to answer.
The actually manifestations of Internalized Homophobia show up in many forms and many ways, many social masks and identities. It may indeed show up in the simplistic form of “I hate all fags!” It may show up in the form of a member of the GBLTQ community trying desperately to hide their sexuality through the façade of a straight marriage, it may show up in the form of a gay youth committing suicide because they can’t face having to deal with being different, or loosing the love and respect of their peers, and family. It may even show up in the form of a member of the GBLTQ community becoming very aggressive and in your face about who they are. All of these identities spring from feelings we have about who we are, and the feelings about who we are all had their origins in our upbringing, or as Don Migual Ruiz; author of the Four Agreements; puts it, our domestication. I simply put it under the heading of internalized homophobia.
I want you to think, for just a moment, about your social mask, about your gay identity. Are you out to friends, to family, at work? Do you proudly proclaim your sexuality, do participate in Gay Pride Rallies, or do you keep quiet, and keep yourself in the closet, unwilling or afraid to let your friends and family know who you really are? Are either of these approaches wrong, or are they simply ways of dealing with a very tough reality in our society?
Recently, through such movies as The Secret, people have been told that we create the circumstances of our lives, based upon the images and thoughts that we have in our heads. Given that this is true, I want you to think about it means to be a member of the GLBTQ community? What are the images you have of yourself and of other members of your community?
Do you think of fabulous parties, gay night clubs, gay pride parades, rainbow flags, pink triangles, proposition 8, don’t ask don’t tell, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy? What images come to mind when you think of the GBLTQ community and your place in it. What was your first and earliest memory of what it meant to be gay?
I can tell you for myself that my first memory of what it meant to be gay, came from a James Bond film that I saw when I was about eight years old. I was conscious of all of the implications, but I do recall that there were two guys skipping hand and hand through a desert terrain, laughing and happy after they had just blown up a jet causes it to crash in, killing many innocent passengers. Without knowing why, that memory haunted me for many years. I was given an image, I was socialized, or domesticated to think and feel about homosexuals, about myself, as someone who would be happy about killing and destruction. Not the most appropriate thing to begin to believe about myself. As I grew up I was given more messages about who I was as a gay man. I was to shunned, I was to be the butt of locker room jokes, my life was to be defined by the fact that I was and am attracted to other males. My own internalized homophobia was festering and seething with self loathing. How I would deal with that self loathing was going to be as unique and individual as everyone else in my community. Sometimes the manifestation, the identity would take on very familiar patterns, many similarities with my GBLTQ family members, and thus was born the GBLTQ community.
What is your social mask, your social identity? Where do you fit into your community?
Where Does Your Pride Come From
Part II
Flash forward to 2009. I have worked in the GBLTQ community for over twenty years, working as a Hypnotherapist, and addiction studies specialist. For the first eleven years I worked in private practice as a Hypnotherapist while working with chemical dependency agencies, a medically based smoking cessation program, and in outreach positions for HIV, and AIDS clientele. I followed that with nine years as the Clinical Coordinator for Project NEON, first at Stonewall Recovery Services, and later at Seattle Counseling Services.
Project NEON works with Gay & Bi-Sexual Men who inject Crystal Methamphetamine. When I first came to the program, I worked with both components of the program, the Peer Education component, (having current users of Meth distribute information resources, needles, condoms, etc., and the clinical portion of the program which deals with clients who wish to either cut down or stop their use of the drug).
Within a few years I was spending the majority of my time developing and growing the clinical portion of the program, utilizing the combination of my skills as a Hypnotherapist, Neuro Linguistic Programmer, Time Line Therapist, and Chemical Dependency Counselor.
It was during this time that I really began exploring why our community has been so heavily affected by drugs and alcohol. The answers I came up with, while not new, helped me refine a method that utilizes the incredible energy of the brain, through Hypnotherapy, NLP, and Mindfulness to resolve those issues.
What I have come to realize is that drug abuse, & addiction in the GBLTQ community comes primarily as a response regarding our original beliefs / agreements about ourselves, our deeply internalized messages about our sexual identity, and our own personal internalized homophobia.
As I mentioned before, Internalized Homophobia, does not always manifest in the obvious “I hate myself” type beliefs or behaviors, but it does manifest due to deep core beliefs we were taught and that we absorbed. All of these deep core beliefs are based in fear and ignorance.
What kind of messages have you subconsciously accepted and agreed to about what it meant to be GBLTQ while you were growing up? How many times were you told over and over again that you are sick, perverted, less than, need to change, not worthy of being in a recognized loving relationship, and in many cases you found yourself abused, used, and treated less than by your straight friends & associates? Even when those straight friends and associates are making jokes and unkind remarks about the gay community, these jokes and remarks are touching deep core wounds and beliefs we have held about ourselves for many years. As we begin to recognize these messages, we realize that we are not alone, and that we have all been effected by similar messages in some way or another.
Think about the messages from movies, books, television, parents, churches, schools, and our straight friends as we are growing up. How many of us can recall sitting down and having a talk with Mom or Dad, and being told that some day we would meet a nice girl, or boy, (someone of the same sex), and we would fall in love and get married. I would hazard to say that not many of us had this kind of interaction. Instead I can give you examples of how many of us were on the school playground, or in the gym locker room, and the words, faggot, dyke or queer, were mercilessly thrown at us by those that we considered our peers. At a young age it hurts, as we get older it still hurts, only know we have learned to play the game and pretend that it is OK. And no matter what age, it leaves an incredibly deep scar. For the rest of our life we carry with us the deep belief that we are less than our friends simply because of our sexual orientation.
As we get older some of us bottle up those feelings, they become our constant companion, and our worst enemy. They feed off of daily news items of hate crimes, or religious slander, political bigotry agendas, Sometimes the hardest issue to deal with is the rejection of our own family because of sexual orientation. Some of us manifest these feelings in a life in which we remain in the closet, never feeling like we can be your true self, always having to hide our feelings, afraid that we will be rejected by those who “love” us. Some us manifest these internalized feelings in bold and in your face identities that cause us to become activist, or champions of the community, drag queens, leather kings, etc., (O.K. so being an activist, being a drag queen, being a leather king, etc. can be argued as appropriate paths that we have created / manifested for ourselves), BUT too even have to manifest a particular role that we now identify with, narrows us, and hides much of what is true about us.
Everyone of us needs, & deserves to be accepted and valued, for who we truly are, whether that is Gay or Straight. This kind of acceptance and value creates feelings of self confidence, self esteem, and self worth. As A Gay or Lesbian youth we learn early to suppress our thoughts and our feelings. We learn through subtle and not so subtle messages that it is not right – or acceptable – to be who we really are, to have sexual feelings toward members of our own gender. We learn that to admit to such feelings will cause us pain, humiliation, torture, and even death.
In one such case a young boy was attempting to come to grips with his homosexuality, and felt that it was time to confront his father with the revelation. The father’s response was less than kind. The youth made the mistake of telling his father on the second story of the family home. The father became so enraged that he threw his son from the window. Luckily the youth experienced only a broken leg. As it was the mental damage went much deeper than a broken bone.
In my own case, I began to come to grips with my homosexual feelings at a young age. I had a friend whom I thought I could trust with my life. We had been buddies since the fourth grade. Since he had moved away to an adjoining town. I sat down & wrote him a letter telling him I needed to talk, the talk was less than successful. I had only superficial contact with my best buddy since that time and he felt it necessary to tell everyone he could to stay away from the queer. Ironically I found out years later that this buddy had committed suicide amidst rumors of his own homosexuality.
These early experiences create core beliefs, core agreements, about who we are now, and how we fit into society. These become the foundations of our ego. Without always conscious awareness, we struggle against these agreements, while we continue to struggle against the institutional societal discrimination that hits us every day. Some examples are the hate crimes that are perpetrated against people in our community, or the ongoing struggle to gain the basic rights enjoyed by straight couples, toward legally recognized same sex marriage / partnerships. Despite the fact that many same sex partnerships last as long as or longer then many straight marriages. Our basic rights such as housing, employment & privacy are constantly being legally threatened thanks to such homophobic groups such as fundamentalist and, Ex-Gay ministries, etc.
Violent attacks against the GBLTQ community are often excused as the fault of the victim being sexual deviants.
Where Does Your Pride Come From?
Part III
For the last few bloggs I have been talking about the origin of Internalized Homophobia and how it manifests in each of our lives. What does all this mean in terms of Hypnotherapy , NLP, & Mindfulness?
Your brain is an incredibly sophisticated piece of equipment. In fact it is said to be so sophisticated that no computer will ever match it’s ability to think and reason.
Like a computer it receives information through the central nervous system, translates it into electro – chemical bits of vibrating bytes, down loads it into our hard drive, and has been doing so from the moment we are first born. According to some theories this process has been going on for several months before our birth.
Think of your mind as having three different components, the conscious, the brain, and the subconscious.
Our Conscious is comprised of all our central nervous system, our five senses and possibly more. In this way we download every piece of information that we are ever exposed to. From birth to puberty (about 11 – 13) we take in this information accept it all without any analysis. Much like a keyboard on a computer, the Conscious records every bit of information and imprints it onto the physical mass of cells and tissues that we call the Brain.
The Brain, like a hard drive on a computer, stores the information for future playback in the form of neuro firing patterns, electro – chemical bits of information that travel along the pathways producing behaviors that make up our personality. Since we simply absorb this worldly input and stimulus, it all contributes to what becomes our agreements, our blueprint, our personal individual road map of reality. Many of these beliefs are woefully defined by merely a same gender attraction which must therefore, be the sole primary motivation of our lives. From the age of about 13 on we start developing the capacity to analyze the information that we receive. Many of those pieces of information, our original agreements, become what many people call our inner child. In the LGBTQ community the majority of us start out with false beliefs and agreements about who and what we are. We often accept agreements that we are sinners moral deviates, and less than our straight companions. These thoughts and ideas becoming our core beliefs, and ultimately contribute to internalized homophobia.
One of many human challenges is that we identify with our bodies, and our thoughts and feelings as the ultimate truth of who we really are. This is simply not so. We are that which has a body; we that which possesses and creates thoughts and feelings but we are not these things. We came to believe that our value is defined by the external.
We strive to create success. We can pull ourselves up, get a good career, make a good living, and take fabulous vacations, but none of that is going to matter until we release our false beliefs and agreements.
Finally the subconscious, vast in scope, truly and simply tailors our experiences to its programming. Like what we see on the screen of our computers, the things we manifest in our lives our actions and more importantly perhaps, our reactions and responses to the people, situations, and circumstances of our daily lives is dictated by our deepest core beliefs.
It is interesting to note that the subconscious processes off of images in our mind. If I were to ask you, describe your mother, would you see a paragraph in your mind that says, “my mother is 72 years old, 5′ 8″, 165 lbs, reddish blonde hair, etc.”. or would you see an image of your mother, a picture in your mind of what she looks like and a feeling she evokes.
We can rationalize, we can minimize, we can deny our agreements each & every moment of every day. But until we face our innermost core beliefs, we will always end up continuing down that old familiar path.
Utilizing the power of our brains with hypnosis, you can release yourself from the debilitating trap of old beliefs, your images, and old feelings. Foundations Hypnosis Seattle – Bellevue uses a technique called Emotional Release Therapy that can actually cut the emotional ties, at a very deep level, to those old images and agreements. Once those ties are cut you are able to rebuild a crumbling negative foundation with a strong positive one, a foundation that allows you to accept yourself as A PERFECT WHOLE & COMPLETE HUMAN BEING who just happens to be a member of the GBLTQ community!!!!
As a community as far as we’ve come, we’re still exposed to a multiplicity of challenges on various fronts.
We are each armed with a wondrous and amazing and mighty tool, our brain. This tool can be either a merciless master or a wonderful servant and we each absolutely possess the power to master this tool and live the life of our dreams.
Wow, heck of an article David… hope you help a lot of people…
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