Repairing the Trauma of Growing Up Gay

This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s gay or to those folks close to them: gay men (and queer people more broadly, but this article focuses on gay men) experience higher rates of depression, suicide risk factors, addiction, and a whole host of other negative mental and physical health outcomes than their straight counterparts. Until recently, it was common for psychotherapists to blame gayness as the cause of these negative outcomes. But decades of research have shown this notion to be false.

So, what is the actual cause?

Ilan Meyer’s notion of “minority stress theory” is instructive here. Meyer suggests that a lifetime of stigma and oppression causes marginalized people of all types to develop the negative outcomes we see gay men developing. Gay men still face discrimination, stigma, and violence—in school, housing, healthcare, the workplace, and various other avenues in their communities. Did you know, for example, that only 3% of queer folks grow up in affirming religious communities? Did you know that anti-gay hate crimes have been increasing in recent years?

So, what to do about it?

Alan Down’s insightful book The Velvet Rage gives us some ideas. Downs—a gay clinical psychologist who came of age during the AIDS crisis—suggests that gay men too often run from their trauma and shame, seeking refuge in unhealthy relationships with substances and other men. This may help some people feel better temporarily, but at some point, shame rears its ugly head, manifesting in even more destructive behavioral patterns. Instead of running from their shame, Downs argues, gay men need to confront it head-on. 

There’s no easy, quick fix here. For most gay men, it took years to learn their shame, and it can take years to unlearn it. Talking about it in therapy helps many. Affirming spiritual traditions help many more. A go-to practice of mine is mindfulness meditation. In mindfulness meditation, practitioners learn to develop self-compassion. In contemplative psychotherapy—one of the central theoretical outlooks that I base my work on—self-compassion is seen as the antidote to the self-aggression that we develop because of our shame. Eventually, this shame can transform into a feeling of pride, and deep healing can begin.