INTERNALIZED HOMOPHOBIA IN EACH ONE OF US - Page 3

Saturday, 12 June 2004 12:54

Coming out to one’s parents is certainly connected to some concrete unpredictable outcomes. The paralysis, often present for many years, has to do to great extent with the conflict of loyalty. Looking at this in a simplified and more “potable” way, the person sees her sexual identity and her family as opposed. As a child she learns about all her parent’s expectations; out of many are the obedience, being pertinent etc. These expectations also condition that one must not be much different from the context one originates from, that is one is allowed to have some “desirable differences” e.g. to acquire higher education which is allowed to be higher than your parents’ (which will also create certain dynamics on the parent – child relation), but this is also something through which the parents affirm their parenthood as successful and the achieved child’s identity is in concordance with it.

Different sexual orientation from the majority one poses great challenge for the system of family values and the basic question that the child needs to deal with is “can I be that different”. Another question is “can you be your own (autonomous) self”, and children go through this in their relationship with the parents when choosing friends, profession, appearance, partners etc. Should some of the autonomous segments come to oppose the family values, problematic situations may arise. To be autonomous means to realize one’s own identities. The generation of our parents often did not succeed in achieving this goal and one can often hear how they wished to be or to do “this or that”, but some circumstances did not allow it, they claim to have sacrificed themselves for the children, often their dirge directs as “If only had I…!” All this adds up to the heritage children need to deal with. The decision to “be one’s own (autonomous)” often means to “be better than one’s parents” which is very difficult to give oneself the right to, given the described conflict of loyalty. Not acknowledging this process with girls and women lesbians, long-term paralysis occurs, with bad feelings towards oneself intensifying. The decision to allow oneself to be what she is becomes difficult to make and this process is surely not occurring in its entirety on the conscious level.

Some of the questions that may help estimate the stage one is currently going through follow:

Can I live with the fact that I would be free with what I am, which my parents (mother/father) never were?

Is my goal to keep a secret or to allow myself to enter the process that would bring about my coming out to people around me?

When I imagine myself as a 40-year old lesbian, how do I see the relationship with my parents at that moment? (In this mini phantasm “when will I be ready to be openly lesbian?” the age can slide upwards e.g. 5 or 10 years from the current age of the reader).