INTERNALIZED HOMOPHOBIA IN EACH ONE OF US - Page 2

Saturday, 12 June 2004 12:54

Primary family and the conflict of loyalty

(Consult the authoress article dated January, 2004 where she discuses the specificity of parent separation process during adolescence)

Internalized homophobia is often most clearly shown within the relation to the primary family. The decision of “whether to tell or not” that one is a lesbian appears as crucial for the personal growth of women and girls lesbians. The dynamic that describes both gender roles and all of the striving for patriarchal values, power and the state is very interesting. Let us, for example, consider the situation when a girl conveys that her mother is suspicious or is, somehow, already aware of girl’s falling in love with other girls. With this the realistic possibility of the father’s knowing the same information and a certain kind of an automatic response to this would be the daughter’s plea to the mother “not to tell daddy” or mother’s suggestion “I won’t tell daddy, if…” I record the cases when such conditioning on the practical level means: 1) recurrence of secrecy (until the moment of coming out a daughter had already lived her identity in secrecy and fear, and the exchange between the mother and daughter is being kept as a dirty secret, i.e. the message to the daughter is “you are dirty”) or 2) a form of blackmail “I wont tell daddy if you stop this, if you find a boyfriend, if you seek help, etc”. Here we see mothers as the relentless keepers of “the head of the family”, the father, who at this time they “don’t want to bother”, but they use power from their role of “the family pillar” and they try to take care of everybody. Some cases are more concrete in the way mother’s demand of finding professional help within the form “heterosexual therapist employed within the state institution sought”. At this moment it is important to notice the girl’s internalized homophobia through the repetitive fear that the therapist who does not work in the state institution would not be credible in the line of work she is expert in, and even this goes further to suppose that it is “obvious” she is not heterosexual. The fear is also intensified by the mother’s possible demand that they visit a therapist together and this practically means the mother will take the daughter and have the opportunity to meet the expert providing counseling.

Consistently, I have been noting that girls and women of lesbian orientation had themselves consulted different health institutions having numerous questions regarding their own sexual orientation and had often given up therapy after certain time. Many of them have sought therapy and conveyed other contents as acute problems, waiting for a sufficient level of trust in the help giver so that they would be able to express what they have actually come for. The experiences are different. The negative experiences certainly further “copy” poor feelings towards oneself.

Women and girls often fear that “something will happen to them” should their parents learn their daughter is a lesbian. Actual formulations are that the parents will be hurt, that it will affect their health (or especially the health of one parent who may be chronically suffering from some illness). It is important to consider what this phantasm is actually made of and what is “the worst case scenario”. Developing this phantasm in the degree of “101%” is important through the answering of the questions: what is really going to happen when you come out, what do you base your fears on, what kind of communication have you had in your family on some controversial topics (that concerned you personally), what does their negative reaction personally mean to you, for how long (according to your most negative prediction) their reaction can take place (“time does not stand still”), how are you going to deal with this, what are you going to do in your everyday-life during this time (“would I be able to live with this”), what exactly would change in your everyday-life (e.g. is there economical dependency from parents or any other relevant attachment), how long you believe your feelings would last and what intensity you predict (most often girls predict the feelings of rejection, being unloved and similar), have you ever heard about the examples of bad/good practice when coming out to parents, do you personally remember an example of bad/good practice when you came out to somebody as lesbians, what do you consider affected that person’s (non)acceptance... 

What is most common in all these fears is of course the well-known anxiety of parents’ terminating all contacts (or the punishment would go in some other way), that they would reject the daughter – actually, not love her anymore. It is important to deconstruct paralysis when coming out is delayed due to the real danger for the parent’s health in informing oneself more of the predicted aftereffects through examining exact data on the previous alike cases as well as on the parent’s illness itself. Nobody can argue with the persons with internalized homophobia since this is the process that the person herself needs to go through. The power of internalized homophobia is fully seen in aborting the process in its initial steps strengthening the person in her fear and not allowing her to perceive the entirety of her life where the relationship with the parents is just one of the issues during adulthood.  Some of the above posed questions can assist in establishing the real, instead of “the worst case” scenario. The importance of traversing the entire phantasm lies in the more precise location of the reality.