For
almost three decades, I have immersed myself in the life stories of many people
of the LGBTQ community who had painful homophobic and transphobic upbringings. Many
of the gay men’s personal narratives that I have heard are not very different from
my own. Regardless of national origin, we are part of a tribe with similar stories
of growing up in a homophobic and heterosexist world where our gayness was
repeatedly assaulted. We are everywhere, and unfortunately so is homophobia.
Many
gay men have shared with me that as long they could recall they always felt
different. They were unable to articulate why they felt that way, and, at the
same time, they did not feel safe to talk about it. Some knew this feeling of
being different was related to something forbidden. “It felt like keeping an
ugly secret that I could not even understand,” described one person. Other gay
men have disclosed to me that this feeling revealed itself in the form of
gender nonconformity, which could not be kept secret. Therefore, it made them
more vulnerable to homophobic mistreatment at school and often at home. Gay men
of color reported even worse experiences due to the additional stress of racism
and racial bullying.
Many
school-age children organize their school experiences around the notion of not
coming across as different, in particular, queer. Any school-age child’s worst
nightmare is being labeled faggot, which was commonly experienced by many gay
individuals who did not flow with the mainstream. Educational institutions felt
like a scary place for many of them who were scapegoated as queer growing up.
Therefore, they had to cope with a daily assault of shame and humiliation
without any support. This is a form of child abuse on a collective level, and it
needs to stop.
So
much has been written about the devastating impact of homophobia on gay
people’s psychological functioning but not enough on the biological impact of
it. It is important to understand how repeated hateful acts toward gay
youngsters can impact the way their bodies and minds function, including the
functioning of their nervous system. Unfortunately, this also applies to
any child who is a target of hate and abuse. As Peter Levine, the founder of
Somatic Experiencing, stated, “Trauma is not in the event, but in
the nervous system.” Based on my personal and clinical work, I also concur
that trauma becomes embodied during a person's life and can affect the working
of the autonomic nervous system (“ANS”). Much of the healing
from this trauma needs to happen through the body. In particular, the nervous
system needs to be regulated.
The ANS is the part of the nervous
system that governs the fight, flight, or freeze instinct and is responsible for the unconscious
bodily functions like breathing, digesting food, and regulating the heart rate.
It also plays an important role of supplying information from our organs to our
brain. The ANS can become dysregulated due to the thwarted
responses of fight, flight, or freeze in the aftermath of trauma.
The ANS is central to our experience
of safety, connection with others, and our ability to bounce back from life’s
overwhelming experiences. This ability to recover defines resilience and
requires the help of our ANS to keep us in our “window of tolerance”, which has
been defined in the book Nurturing
Resilience by trauma specialists Kathy Kain and Stephen Terrell “as the zone
where we effectively process environmental signals without becoming too
reactive or too withdrawn, given the circumstances.” The window of tolerance as
a frame work is very helpful to understand where we feel safe, unsafe, and how
to expand our optimal arousal zone.
Stephen
Porges’, Bessel van der Kolk’s, and Peter Levine’s research and writings have
significantly reworked my understanding of how the nervous system responds to
threat and trauma. Drawing from their work and my decades of experience, it
is my understanding the ongoing stress from homophobia can activate a
youngster’s nervous system and “unresolved activation will be stored in the
body as bound energy and manifest as trauma symptoms.” In other words, under a daily
homophobic assault, a child’s sympathetic system (“stress response” or “fight
or flight” response) gets overly activated. Often during such stressful
situations, neither fighting nor fleeing can resolve the overwhelming situation,
and the thwarted or incomplete fight and flight responses can become “trapped” within the body and
dysregulate the nervous system. Such a dysregulated nervous system is more
likely to get stuck on “high” or hyper-arousal. Anxiety, panic attacks, rage,
hyperactivity, mania, hypervigilance, sleeplessness, exaggerated startle
response, digestive problems, and many other symptoms are the result of a dysregulated
nervous system that is stuck on “high” or hyper-arousal.
According to many studies, gay
individuals who experienced homophobic related stress showed increased
production of the stress hormone cortisol compared to peers in safer
environments. This
experience of being stuck on “high” continuously activates a person’s stress
response system, which leads to the release of stress hormones. Research in
this area has shown overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones leads to
numerous health problem including headaches, oversensitivity to touch or sound,
weight gain, heart disease, concentration impairment, and sleep disturbance.
On the other hand, there are gay men whose nervous systems
are stuck on “low” or hypo-arousal, which can result from being terrorized
growing up with no hope of protection. Faced with isolation, confusion,
physical violence, not being valued, and carrying a secret that the youngster
connects with something terrible and unthinkable is too stressful for any child
to endure, especially when there is no empathic other to help him sort it out.
Such experience is often beyond the youngster’s “window of tolerance.” This is when the dorsal vagus can shut down
the entire system, and the mistreated youngster can go into freeze. In other
words, the youngster suffers in silence with numbness or dissociation as his
only available survival mechanism.
Stephen Porges, the founder of Polyvagal Theory, has expanded
our view of the vagus nerve, one of the largest nerves in the body and a major
part of the Parasympathetic system. The word “vagus” means wandering in Latin. The
dorsal vagus is a branch of the vagus nerve which is a much older part of the
nervous system. Dorsal vagus regulates organs below the diaphragm. Dorsal vagus
is instrumental in activating the “shutdown” of the body as discussed in cases
of overwhelming fear which can result from homophobic mistreatment. This automatic
survival mechanism can become a long-standing pattern of how individuals might
cope with fear and stress in life. For example, people whose nervous system is stuck
on “low” or hypo-arousal when faced with life stresses can default to shutting
down, disassociation, chronic isolation, detachment, numbness, and suicidal
thoughts.
In my counseling work, I have noticed
when the nervous system gets stuck on freeze, when numbness and detachment
become a gay man’s dominant state, he is more likely to engage in risky
behaviors as a temporary relief from inner deadness. Thrill seeking behaviors such as sexual acting out, excessive gambling,
and crystal meth (crystal methamphetamine) use are ways some gay men escape the
emotional flatness that results from experiencing the hypo-arousal state. The
same behaviors can also be used to cope with ongoing activation of the fight or
flight response. One person might turn to substance abuse to escape his inner
deadness and another person might use it to dampen his anxiety that often
results from being stuck in a state of hyper-arousal.
As Peter Levine stated, “Trauma is a fact of life. It does
not, however, have to be a life sentence.”
For those of us who have had painful struggles with homophobia, life
after the closet needs to include dealing with memories of homophobic
mistreatment that can lie dormant in our body. Recovery from it needs to start
with resourcing and then progressing to completing the thwarted responses of
fight, flight, or freeze. Such healing can reset the nervous system and restore
inner balance. In Body Keeps the Score,
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk writes about a body-centered approach to healing which
allows “the body to have experiences that deeply and viscerally contradict the
helplessness, rage, or collapse that result from trauma.”
How far the LGBTQ community has come in our struggle for
equal rights reflects how brave we are as a community. Our bravery can continue
by facing traumas we experienced growing up in oppressive environments that did
not nurture our true essence. Not every LGBTQ person felt traumatized growing
up, but those who did can benefit from the vitality and the sense of liberation
that comes with incorporating
somatic work as part of the healing process.
The Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute offers trainings and seminars on
the biology of traumatic stress reactions including tools on how to bring the body-mind-spirit
back into balance. Participating in their trainings has enhanced my ability to
help others who are interested to tap into the wisdom of their bodies for
healing and growth. There are many other
institutes that offer body-centered approaches toward healing which reflect the
increased popularity of such work.
© Payam Ghassemlou, MFT, Ph.D., SEP, is a psychotherapist (www.DrPayam.com), Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (www.SomaticAliveness.com), writer (https://www.drpayam.com/articles_and_book) ,and artist
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist online anywhere in CA & Florida.
For more
articles by Dr. Payam, please click on the following link: https://drpayam.com/articles_and_book
