“So many of us have had to destroy ourselves, contour ourselves into someone else’s fiction of who we should be.” Alok Vaid-Menon
One of the things that has surprised me most in my work with LGBTQIA+ clients is that the loudest voice in the room is not always the one that belongs to other people. Many LGBTQIA+ people have experienced homophobia, transphobia, rejection, discrimination or exclusion in very real ways. These experiences can occur within families, schools, workplaces, faith communities and wider society. We continue to live in a world where certain identities and ways of being are often treated as more acceptable, more visible, or more “normal” than others. The impact of this should not be underestimated. At the same time, one of the questions that often emerges in counselling is not only how a person has been treated by others, but what they have come to believe about themselves as a result.
I often find myself asking clients questions such as: Where did you get that idea from? Who taught you that? When did you first start believing that about yourself? Sometimes the answer is obvious. A client may recall experiences of bullying, rejection, shame or exclusion. At other times, the answer is far less clear. The belief has simply been there for so long that it feels like a fact rather than something learned. A person may describe feeling “too much”, “not enough”, difficult to love, fundamentally different from other people, or somehow undeserving of acceptance. They may be highly critical of themselves without fully understanding where that criticism came from.
Over time, messages received from the outside world can become internalised, shaping how we see ourselves long after the original experience has passed. This does not mean that the problem exists only within the individual, nor does it mean that external experiences are unimportant. Rather, psychodynamic counselling is interested in the relationship between the two. How have the experiences we have lived through become woven into our understanding of who we are? Which beliefs genuinely belong to us, and which were inherited from the environments we grew up in? For many LGBTQIA+ people, these questions can be particularly significant. Growing up, there may be countless messages about gender, sexuality, relationships and identity. Some are explicit, whilst others are communicated more subtly through assumptions about what a future should look like, what kinds of relationships are valued, or what is considered acceptable, desirable or “normal”.
For some people, these expectations fit comfortably. For others, there may come a point where the gap between who they are and who they feel expected to be becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. This is often where the narrative of “coming out” begins. Yet in my experience, coming out is rarely the end of the story. In many ways, it can be the beginning of a different question: if I am no longer trying to be who other people expected me to be, who am I?
Whilst coming out can be an important milestone, it does not automatically untangle years of assumptions, expectations or beliefs about ourselves. Sometimes the work of understanding who we are truly begins afterwards.
At Highgate Counselling Centre, we understand that gender and sexuality are important aspects of many people’s lives, but they are rarely the whole story. Each person arrives in counselling with a unique set of experiences, relationships and identities that have shaped their understanding of themselves and the world around them. Gender and sexuality intersect with culture, ethnicity, faith, family relationships, disability, social background, age and countless other aspects of identity. These experiences do not exist separately from one another; they interact in complex ways, influencing both how we see ourselves and how we are seen by others.
Within a psychodynamic approach, we are interested in understanding the whole person. Rather than reducing someone to a single identity, label or experience, counselling offers space to explore the many different influences that have contributed to their sense of self. For some LGBTQIA+ clients, this may involve processing experiences of discrimination, rejection or exclusion. For others, it may involve exploring relationships, belonging, intimacy, family dynamics, self-esteem or questions about identity that have never previously been given much room to exist. Often, it involves all these things at once.
One of the most powerful moments in therapy can be recognising that a belief we have carried for years was never truly ours to begin with. That we learned it somewhere. That it belonged to a family, a culture, a school, a faith community, a relationship, or a society that struggled to make room for who we were. Once we begin to ask where these beliefs came from, we can also begin to ask whether we still want to carry them.
In that sense, counselling is not about becoming somebody different. It is about creating space for the person who was there all along.
