Uprooting fear and growing into your best LGBT life

May 17, 2018

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Words by Jan Castañeda of the ASEAN SOGIE CAUCUS and Vizla Kumaresan, a clinical psychologist in Kuala Lumpur

Art by Bryan Ngo

It is said that the roots of fear go deep. It reaches across many hearts across many generations, often strangling the soil and leaving little for sustenance. In Southeast Asia, this fear has its roots everywhere you care to look, though we do what we can to make goodness grow in these places. But perhaps what makes fear, both as specific experiences LGBT people grow up with and as a collective condition that follows them everywhere, such a destructive force: it makes nurturing a sense of dignity and self-love exceptionally and unnecessarily difficult.

In our clinical practice or advocacy work, we find that fear occupies different places in LGBT people’s lives. We’ve seen how LGBT people, whether as young people working through puberty or adults, deal with fear very well. The ideal scenario is “integration”: traumatic experiences, whether it’s an insult hurled by a stranger on the street or an exceptionally violent event such as large-scale war, are put in their proper place within the person’s psyche and serve as sources of renewed strength. Many LGBT people already do this. Their scars are visible, but they carry them well. The scars make for inspirational anecdotes or reference points to improve one’s capacity to respond to others with more compassion. The scars give way to emotional, psychological and spiritual growth.

Sleepless nights, flashbacks, heightened anxiety, anger and mistrust, gratuitous displays of pride, substance abuse, despair—these are some of the marks of a mind whose fears have not been put in their place. And these are marks you see everywhere in the LGBT community.

Still, some LGBT people deal with fear in a different way. Instead of integration, there is “dis-integration”: traumatic experiences become phantoms that move from place to place in a person’s mind, creating cracks in an already fragile system. Sleepless nights, flashbacks, heightened anxiety, anger and mistrust, gratuitous displays of pride, substance abuse, despair—these are some of the marks of a mind whose fears have not been put in their place. That fear also creates in people a unique kind of self-hate, as our friend from Indonesia tells us: they turn on themselves, deny their gender and sexuality, curse and blame themselves for being LGBT, and practically break themselves in the process of trying to be “normal”. We see all these things too often in Southeast Asian LGBT communities. The possibility of a garden there, but the roots of fear remain firmly in place, and they kill the seed before it even has the chance to grow.

But any gardener, activist, or psychologist will tell you that there are very few instances where there is no hope for growth. With enough work and guidance, gardens can and do grow. Throughout our work, we have been lucky to learn a few things that facilitate this process. And what’s important to know is that, with the exception of those cases where professional help is truly needed (as in the presence of serious clinical conditions), these are things which any LGBT person can do to foster what is already innate: our ability to nurture in ourselves, and in each-other, a sense of dignity and self-love.

1. Find a supportive social network. These can include friends and family, and more importantly, a larger community. This does not only help in providing sources of comfort, but is also an opportunity to understand their personal struggles as connected with larger social and political issues. Growth is not limited to only personal healing, but also to national—and perhaps international—healing so that the structures that lead to vulnerabilities of communities can be addressed.

2. Find small ways you can feel a sense of control in your life. This can be as simple as managing your daily schedule, or implementing an exercise routine that you can stick to. Having a sense of control over these things builds a healthy optimism that helps to deal with helplessness.

3. Identify your strengths. List them out and carry this list with you. Expand on it. You grow everyday as a person. Why not remind yourself of that, especially when you live in a world that is constantly reminding you that you are not good enough?

4. Stop and smell the flowers! It is so easy to become overwhelmed with everything around us. It’s easy to forget that we have plenty to be grateful for. Develop a practice of gratitude to help your mind better identify and appreciate the things that make your life happy and meaningful. A simple exercise is to have a daily list of three to five things you are grateful for. Remember to revisit this list regularly.

5. Get professional help if you can. If the services of a trained mental health professional are accessible, it would be advised to invest in therapy. It is not just a service for people with mental illnesses. It also helps achieving psychological and emotional growth. We’re all for emotional intelligence, aren’t we?

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