Where Does Your Pride Come From
Part II
Flash forward to 2009. I have worked in the LGBT 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 a sexual deviants.
