A Journey In Therapy From Homophobia To Acceptance

Several years ago, an adolescent boy was killed in a hate crime targeting an LGBTQ+ community center. The family set out for a normal day. Instead, their world crashed. “Montford” had never come out to his family members, who were shocked to discover that their 15-year-old son/brother/cousin/nephew had been murdered at a social event for gay teens. 

Montford’s aunt “Kate” and uncle “Stan” lived in a city near me, in a different state from Montford. A mutual friend referred them to my psychology practice.

Struggling with the initial wave of shock, Kate and Stan sat in my office for our first meeting. Before I could say a word, they began to speak. 

“Our friend said you were comfortable with those people,” Kate anxiously.

“Which people?” I asked.

“Gay people,” Stan shifted nervously.

I nodded.

Stan then stated he wanted an objective opinion. 

“An objective opinion about what?” At this point, the tension spiked so high that I asked quietly, “What’s not being said here?”

The floodgates burst open.  

It was “unacceptable” that Montford was gay, Kate stated. “Ridiculous, actually.” 

“He didn’t even like fashion!” Stan added. “He was on the football team!” 

“There was nothing gay about him!” Kate.

“He can’t be gay!” Stan. 

“He must have been at the LGBTQ Center by accident.” Kate.

“Maybe he was lost and asking for directions.” Stan.

“The entire situation makes no sense.” Kate.

As one spoke, the other nodded then jumped in, overlapping. They left no room for discussion as they frantically threw out an avalanche of reasons why Montford couldn’t possibly have been gay. Finally, they paused and looked at me expectantly. I waited a few seconds to see if they’d tolerate a short moment of quiet, but quiet wasn’t on their agenda. Kate leapt in. 

“You believe us, don’t you? He can’t be gay!” 

I listened closely, trying to figure out a path into a productive therapy.

“I can’t think about anything else,” Stan said.

“We can’t even ask Montford about it. We’re stuck with it.” Kate’s eyes filled.

With that comment, she gave me an opening. “I think I understand what you’d like from me — to help you get unstuck, so you can mourn the way you need to.”

They both nodded.

“I want to ask something that you might not expect. Why is it so important that Montford wasn’t gay?”

They talked about their relationship with their nephew, and with Stan’s brother and sister-in-law, Montford’s parents, who also had no idea that he was gay and couldn’t believe it was true. Kate and Stan’s son “Gil,” loved his cousin and was heartbroken to lose him. The boys were the same age and spent two weeks every summer visiting each other, alternating homes.

Stan explained that Gil’s reaction puzzled them. “He doesn’t seem to care whether or not Montford was gay. He’s not focussed on that at all. It’s very strange.” 

I tried again. “Can I say something that may seem even more strange?”

They nodded.

“Let’s substitute the word dead for the word gay.” 

They exchanged a confused glance, so I did it for them.

“Montford can’t be dead. It’s ridiculous that Montford is dead. It must have been an accident that he’s dead. It makes no sense that he’s dead. There’s nothing dead about him.”

There was a long pause and they both began to cry. 

Finally Kate spoke: “It’s much easier to focus on the gay piece than the dead piece.”

Session after session, layer by layer, Kate and Stan grieved. I couldn’t take away their pain, or rush their grieving process. Worst of all, I couldn’t bring Montford back to life. But I could offer them a different path, so that their grieving was, in Kate’s words, “no less painful, but a lot less impossible.”

As they worked through the harsh initial stage of mourning, I wondered if they’d ever be willing to address their homophobia. As it turned out, their son Gil helped the process move forward. Gil’s best friend came out to him. When he told his parents, saying he was so glad his friend felt safe telling him, Kate shook her head.

“Wow,” she said, “I never would have guessed. He always seemed so normal.”

Stan grinned. “Did he try to hit on you? I’ll bet he did. You’re a good looking guy!”

They were completely taken aback when Gil shouted at them and stormed out. 

Kate opened the next session. “Gil thinks we’re homophobic assholes.”

“An exact quote,” Stan said.

“Do you think you’re homophobic assholes?”

They both blinked then laughed, surprised by my language. 

Kate took a deep breath. “I think maybe Gil’s right.”

Stan nodded. “I hate to admit it, but he has a point.”

“Why do you hate to admit it?” I needed to see whether he’d follow through or veer away from this part of himself.

“I don’t want to be an asshole,” Stan looked down. 

“I don’t want to be a bigot,” Kate added.

I held my voice calm. “So you’ve both realized you don’t like a part of yourselves.”

They nodded.

“What do you each want to do about it?” I asked softly, carefully non-confrontational.

This was a turning-point moment in therapy. My job was to show them they had a choice; their job was to choose. Many patients would have chosen to leave the treatment at that point rather than face the painful work ahead. The choice had to belong to them, so I waited. Their eyes locked.

“I feel like a jerk,” Kate said quietly. “I mean, Gil’s best friend is a normal guy. That hasn’t changed one bit. What I said was idiotic.”

“Not as idiotic as making a joke like I did,” Stan winced. 

“When we first met,” I said, “you were both  focussing on Montford’s being gay because it was less painful than focussing on his death. You were using homophobia to protect yourselves from something that felt more painful. Do you think that’s a piece of what’s going on now?”

We then embarked on one of the most difficult phases of their therapy as they confronted the intersection of their grief for Montford and their homophobia.

Kate wondered “why Montford never told anyone he was gay.”

They tossed ideas back and forth until Stan suddenly caught his breath.

“What’s wrong?” Kate turned to her husband.

He cleared his throat. “Montford didn’t tell anyone because the whole family is filled with homophobic assholes. My brother, my sister-in-law, the two of us. He was probably afraid to tell Gil, because of us. It’s our fault.”

“He must have felt so alone,” Kate whispered.

Over the next several sessions, they talked about what that must have been like for Montford to know he was gay and to be surrounded by people he couldn’t safely tell. 

This led to their both talking about their own secrets, the parts of themselves they felt they had to hide. 

As a child, Kate was a talented cellist, but also aced her math and science classes. She held a Ph.D. in biology and taught at a nearby college. She never told anyone how much she missed music, which her family considered “frivolous.” 

Stan grew up in a family of academics, and he taught chemistry at a university. But he had given up his secret dream, to become a chef. “A kitchen is like a lab. A lot of it is chemistry, except unlike in the lab, you create something wonderful to eat and you can share it with people you love. But where I came from…” Stan trailed off as a thought took hold. “Where I came from cooking was for girls, not guys. When I was little, I’d help my mother in the kitchen. But when I was around ten, my parents started making jokes that I was gay.” Stan closed his eyes. “So I stopped cooking, grew up, and did a version of the same thing to Montford and to Gil’s best friend.”

Over time, they both grieved for Montford, for themselves, for the pain they felt as they hid core parts of themselves, for the much greater pain Montford must have felt, for the closeness they might have had with Montford if they had been more accepting.

“It was us and them,” Kate explained. “We were the us, and anyone who was gay was the them.”

I asked why they thought they had focused so much of their us/them mentality on gay folks.

Stan shrugged sadly. “They’re an easy target. I was on the basketball team in high school. My teammates were always hassling the gay kids. I never stepped in, never stopped them, told gay jokes. I was a coward.”

“I was just as bad,” Kate admitted. “I didn’t care. I didn’t bother to notice when someone was being targeted. I let it happen, sometimes right in front of me, and I just walked away like it was nothing. I was a coward, too.”

I could feel their shame permeate the room, threatening to stop them in their tracks, shut down the issue. So I asked if they could acknowledge the courage involved in admitting cowardice.

A long pause followed.

“Maybe we can change,” Stan quietly. “Starting now.”

“For Montford,” Kate didn’t wipe her tears. “And for us. We’ve missed a lot.”

“We can never make it up to Montford,” Stan said sadly.

Kate nodded. “I failed him. But I can learn.”

“It took us too long to get there, but we’re here now.” Stan reached for her hand.

At the end of the treatment, Kate had started “my own little orchestra” — five friends, five instruments, playing together every month in an informal concert for their families. At each gathering, Stan planned the menu and cooked for the event. Anyone who wanted to cook with him was welcome. “Every time we’re in the kitchen and they call me chef, I feel great,” he smiled. In the colleges where they now taught, both Kate and Stan became active in the LGBTQ/Straight alliances. They began hosting an annual social event in their large yard, with Stan flipping burgers and veggies on their outdoor grill, bringing the two college alliances together. 

Two years after our first meeting, we said goodbye. As Kate and Stan walked out of my office for the last time, she turned at the door.

“There’s a path for everyone to become an ally. All you have to do is take the first step. Stan and I will be there, waiting for you.”

“And Montford,” Stan said quietly. “Montford will always be there, too.”

*All identifying information in this essay has been changed.

*This post was first published on Medium, on the platform Prism & Pen.

How Therapy Works — Cinderella Redux

At a friend’s birthday party in third grade, I saw the animated movie Cinderella. I sobbed through the entire film, terrified that the evil cat would devour the mice. When the credits rolled and the beloved rodents triumphed, I was vastly relieved — but also confused. Cinderella’s happily-ever-after finale made no sense. She lost both parents. She suffered emotional abuse and neglect. She survived extreme isolation and had no human friends. Cinderella couldn’t possibly erase her traumatic past with a hasty marriage to a man, flashing epaulettes, who knew her shoe size before her name. Cinderella didn’t need a prince; she needed a therapist.

Fast-forward twenty years.

I completed a doctoral program in mental health and began a career that lasted more than two decades. Along the way, I’ve been asked several times to explain how therapy works, how words can become catalysts for emotional change. I’ve fielded this question at dinner parties, teaching classes, in sessions with clients, supervising trainees. It’s a worthy question, superficially simple, deceptively complex.

I was always annoyed when therapists spoke Jargon rather than English. When I was in grad school, training to work with patients, my role-model mentors conveyed ideas with an artistic simplicity. They helped their patients explore the depths of their emotional worlds, speaking with clarity and heart, in no way sacrificing scientific knowledge or human intricacies. They chose clear words, to show their patients how unresolved issues from the past became superimposed on the present, derailing the ability to make healthy choices. Simple language is our telegraph line into the tangled, layered, lush emotional life we all hold deep within.

Some adults survive backgrounds that match Cinderella’s early trauma, and resist the emotional pathology that seems inevitable. Some of these children (like Cinderella) look unbreakable, immune, invulnerable — which of course isn’t true. In our offices, our patients show us that their survival has rested in part on their ability to manage potentially incapacitating feelings of vulnerability, a vulnerability which often surfaces in the safety of therapy, as a part of healing. These children carry bruises, even scars into adulthood, but they survived because they were, in many ways, healthy. Like Cinderella with her animal friends, these folks figured out ways to interact with the situation at hand, allowing their own psychological development to continue a forward motion.

But what happens to forward motion when that child stumbles over a roadblock? What happens when that young emotional core needs bolstering from a more mature emotional core? And what if that more mature helper is not available? Then, in the service of forward motion, the child skips over that building block in development. It’s those potential but not yet solidified building blocks that our patients present to us, sometimes in the moment, sometimes decades later.

Into adulthood, people can create lifestyles that accommodate those not-yet solidified building  blocks. But if life throws them a curve ball, or if their own emotional needs call for these building books to be cemented into place, then these people bring to us their pain, bewilderment, vulnerability, both past and present. They begin to examine their own youthful coping strategy, a strategy that was beyond their own years at the time, and to initiate the process of psychologically catching up to themselves.

Each person is an emotional tapestry — interwoven threads of strength, weakness, illness, health. The unique blend in each individual forms an emotional fingerprint of textures, colors, patterns. As clinicians, we strive to understand each thread, and how it intertwines with all the others. Therapy helps patients explore their own internal tapestry, and move from images centered around illness and trauma to norms allowing for a more healthy range. In other words, in the course of treatment, patients shed the constraints that, by necessity, they themselves created in order to grow up.

So how does therapy work? Together, the therapist and patient create a safe place to feel vulnerable, which allows the patient to take charge of that vulnerability. The hunger in each patient becomes a measure not only of need, but also of capacity. If both health and illness are vital to this picture, then the patient’s own strength can be enlisted to engage the patient’s potential to heal, which empowers the patient (instead of the therapist) to become the primary agent of change.

Throughout treatment, the therapeutic relationship is essential. Every word, every nuance, every gesture is an opportunity for the therapist to communicate an optimism of repair — an optimism which no amount of drugs, predictable program regimens or technology can replace. (To be clear, meds, programs and technology can be extremely helpful, but not as a replacement for talking-therapy.) Whenever a sign of health emerges, the therapist can reach for it, weaving it into the tapestry of the therapeutic relationship, and into the patient’s core tapestry as well.

If Cinderella, grown up, had entered my office for treatment, I would have listened carefully to the words she chose to tell her story. Together, we would have developed a language to understand her emotional landscape. I would have helped her own the importance of her relationships with the animals — their warmth, their love, their limitations. Layer by layer, we’d walk through her losses, anger, fear — interwoven with her perseverance, tenacity, resiliency. Inevitably, at some point, she’d become upset with me — possibly she’d experience me as mean (like her step-mom); possibly she’d become terrified that I was about to die (like her Dad); I’d point out that her past was shaping her present world view, causing her to relate to me as a stand-in for someone who had hurt her. When the moment was right, I’d comment on her stunningly graceful movements and her unusual gift relating to animals. I’d wonder — did she hold any interest in dance? In veterinary medicine? I’d ask if she liked her glass slippers, or if she preferred Birkenstocks. I’d guide her to redefine her existence as more than an exercise in endurance, her goals as more than escaping from pain. We’d find words to expand her emotional repertoire, as she discovered new frontiers of empowerment. I’d help her become the person who, by her own definition, she was meant to be.

That’s how therapy works. Just that simple. Just that complex.