Manchester Psychotherapy

Counselling in Manchester

Working With Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Clients

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working with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender clientsLast Tuesday (12th October 2010) was “National Coming out Day” in the UK. To quote Wikipedia, this is “an internationally observed civil awareness day for coming out and discussion about gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual and transgender (LGBT) issues”. It seems appropriate then, for this week’s blog post to be about working with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender clients.

I’ll start off by stating that I am a gay affirmative therapist.  I don’t give two hoots whether you are gay, lesbian, straight, bisexual or transgender. We are all OK and there are no goods or bads, rights or wrongs, there’s just us.

I believe that human sexuality is a continuum, it’s a grey scale and we are all somewhere on it. This belief is backed up by research by Kinsey (1953) and Klein (1985). Klein went further and suggested that there is fluidity to our sexuality throughout time. There is no doubt in my mind that our sexuality plays an important part of defining who we are and this is an issue that we all must examine regardless of our sexual orientation.

 

Issues that need accounting for with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender clients.

Societal oppression – It wasn’t too many years ago that homosexuality was illegal in this country. In the USA, LGBT couples still have few rights in some states.

Homophobia – Within society this can take many forms from violence and victimization to subtle discrimination in the workplace. Some LGBT people lose contact with family and friends as a result of coming out. Others dare not come out for fear of losing those around them that they love or of persecution from others who would not accept their sexuality.

Heterosexism – the belief that opposite sex relationships are superior to same sex relationships. This sometimes has a major impact on same sex couples both from the perception of the validity of their relationship from society, but also the acknowledgment of their relationship from their family and friends.

Internalised Homophobia – The feelings that some LGBT individuals have that they are “defective” which can result in self-hatred, guilt and lack of belief that they could ever have a successful same sex relationship. We can work through these issues in therapy and it can sometimes be a slow and painful process that leads to self-acceptance and pride in who they are.

Issues only same-sex couples have to deal with:

Homophobia and heterosexism in the community – this can create fear about committing to a same sex long term relationship for some lesbian and gay people.

Lack of “role models” for how to have a same sex relationship – this can lead to confusion over boundaries, expectations and obligations within the relationship.

Generally lower levels of family support – When things get tough some LGBT couples find it difficult to get help, advice and support from their family.

The same-sex nature of the relationship increases the chances of certain problems if both partners conform to traditional gender roles – Lesbian couples can have problems with emotional fusion whilst gay men may find they are emotionally disengaged from each other or in competition.

Bisexual clients may have to deal with another set of issues all together, including the confusing state of being “too queer” for heterosexual society and “not queer enough” for the homosexual one.

I’m not for a minute suggesting that these issues would be the focus of the work I do with a lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender client. We all bring our own stuff to therapy regardless of our sexuality. What I’m saying is that these issues need to be kept in mind and tackled when they come up. I don’t need to be gay to do that, just as I don’t need to be black in order to empathise with the pain of being racially discriminated against.

Ultimately for me, I like working with people. I get a buzz out of helping people change, grow and realise their potential. Whether you are straight or gay, black, blue or green, I’m there for you if you need the support.

References

Kinsey, A.C., Pomeroy, W.B., & martin, C.E (1948). Sexual behaviour in the human male. Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders Company.

Klein, F., Sepekoff, B, & Wolf, T.J (1985). Sexual orientation: A multi-variable dynamic process. Journal of Homosexuality, 11 (1/2), 35-50.

If you need more help, advice or support on lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender issues I can recommend the Lesbian and Gay Foundation, which is based in Manchester.

rainbow lover

Why All Our Emotions Are Important

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our four emotionsAs a therapist I spend a great deal of my time talking to clients about their emotions. For some clients this is no problem, they live in an emotional world. For others I can ask what they are feeling and I see a look of confusion descend. Some of us are good with emotions; some of us are good at hiding them. We all have them.

I can remember the first time I came across the concept that there are only four emotions. It was explained to me that humans are happy, sad, angry or scared. Eric Berne, the father of Transactional Analysis even dismissed anger as a racket feeling, which would leave us with three. The explanation continued with the statement that all other emotions are a combination of the four. Jealousy, for example, is a combination of anger and scare. Boredom is just another way of saying we feel angry.

Whilst I agree that this is a blatant oversimplification of the vast emotional spectrum we experience, I like the simplicity of it. It’s a great way of getting to the bottom of our feelings and reduces the chance that we will use language to deny our real feelings. It’s like saying you are annoyed when really you mean you feel angry. Anger feels much more genuine and is more likely to lead to constructive change. It moves away from the passivity of “annoyed”.

All emotions are OK and all have a valuable part to play in keeping us on an even keel. Here’s a quick rundown of what they do for us:

Happiness

This one, I don’t have to explain! When we feel happy the world is great, everything is fine and we want for nothing. Unfortunately though, there is a common misconception that this is how we should feel all the time. Imagine if we did. Happiness would become normality. How would we then distinguish the great times from the rest of our lives? Being happy all the time is an unrealistic expectation that, ironically, decreases the chance that you will feel happy because you become angry at your lack of happiness! I’m going to stop there with that one because I’m tying myself in emotional knots!

Sadness

This is the bad boy of the gang. No one likes to be sad. Sadness has got a bad press (I feel sad for sad). Sadness gives us permission to slow down, do less, withdraw from the world and do what we need to do in order to successfully get on with our lives again once we ready. We may have heard bad news, been let down or even lost someone close to us. Sadness is there to give us time to sort this out in our head. It’s OK to be sad. It’s useful and just as important as happiness over the course of our lives. Give yourself permission to go with it and it will pass, and you will have grown.

Anger

Anger can give us the energy to change situations that are pissing us off! The rush of adrenaline, the focused mind, these could save us from harm or pull us out of bad situations. Anger is readily embraced by some, hence the need for “anger management“, but for all of us anger can result in change for the better if used appropriately.

Fear

Fear keeps us safe and protects us from dangerous situations. Fear can also hold you back from doing all things in life you’d like to. In therapeutic terms it’s important to distinguish between fear, which is rational and from the Adult ego state, and scare, which is from the Child ego state. It’s that scare, which kept us safe when we were kids, but can be a block now we are adults. During the process of therapy, many people learn to let go of those scary feelings about issues we have echoing from our childhood and move on with our lives.

I make no apologies for repeating this next statement; all emotions are OK. They are all equal. When they get out of balance we may need help to adjust. Too much of any of them might not be useful for us and could lead to depression, anxiety or anger issues. But pushing our emotions away just moves those feelings inside and they manifest in other ways, often through physical illnesses or stress. So don’t deny them, be with your emotions and they will serve you well.

Transactional Analysis Games

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Have you ever said to yourself “I can’t believe this has happened to me again!” or “why does this always happen to me?”. If so, there are high chances you have been involved in playing what’s known in the TA world as a game. We all play games. We play them often. Eric Berne famously said “do not ask whether you are playing a game, ask which game you are playing”. If we can spot our games and nip them in the bud we can move towards intimacy with the people around us and be more contented as a result. Read on to find out more about games.

Last week’s article looked at how us humans structure our time (click here to read). Berne observed that humans hate to be bored and will carry out one of six methods for avoiding it. Playing games is one of those methods. Games deserve a whole post to themselves because they are interesting, important and demand a fair bit of explanation.

What is a game?

Woollams and Brown* (1978) define games as:

“a series of duplex transactions which leads to a switch and a well-defined, predictable payoff which justifies a not-OK, or discounted, position”.

Let’s have a look at what that actually means. Firstly, what’s a duplex transaction? A duplex transaction is where we say one thing and mean another. Only about 8% of our communication is through words, the rest is through, tone, body language and facial expressions. Berne observed that whenever we say one thing (the social message) and mean another (the psychological massage), it’s always the psychological message that gets heard. A classic example might be the old “do you want to came in for a coffee?” at the end of a date. The social message is about coffee, the psychological message is about sex (unless you are Tom Hanks in Big!).

So we tend to open games with duplex transactions, not saying what we really mean, scared that the intimacy involved will get us rejected or hurt. Usually then, the game will proceed to deliver us some positive strokes until the “switch” clicks in.

The switch is the point at which things suddenly feel like they are going wrong. It’s the point at which we may feel confused, scared, angry, or whatever our racket feeling usually is. This usually leads quickly to us taking a “payoff”. This is a confirmation that whatever negative (untrue) thoughts we have held on to about life are true.

Let’s give an example of a game and take it apart using the language introduced above. Let’s take the common game “Yes, But”. This is where one person has a problem and another person is invited to solve it. Everything the other person suggests is rejected with a “Yes, I could do that, but..(insert reason for not doing that)”. We all know people who play this. We may even play it ourselves.

Whilst it may appear the player is asking for help on the social level, what they are really doing on the psychological level is proving that they can’t be helped and no one else can control them. The switch comes when the other person gives up trying. The payoff for the player is proof that no one can help them even though they remain passive. This may be accompanied by feelings of sadness or anger, the feelings that the player learnt were acceptable to caregivers as a child.

The other player in this game may feel helpless and frustrated that they have been unable to help the starter of the game – these feelings are likely to be very familiar too and reinforce a belief that they are not a very good friend, problem solver, therapist, etc. It takes two to play a game.

Why do we play games?

Games are a way in which we can get strokes without risking intimacy and confirm our beliefs (mostly wrongly held ones) about life.

How do we stop Playing games?

The first thing we need to do is identify what games we are playing. Ask yourself what patterns keep emerging in your life? What predictable events occur? What feelings do you often end up having? A good TA therapist will speed up this process dramatically because we play games out of awareness. They will be able to spot the games and bring them into the light where you can chew them over and decide whether you want to keep on playing or you choose to do things differently, avoiding the negative payoff along the way.

In this article I have barely scraped the surface of this interesting and deep theory. If it’s a topic you want to find more out about, I suggest you read Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, the book Eric Berne wrote just about this fascinating subject.

* Woollams,S and Brown, M (1978). Transactional Analysis. Huron Valley Institute Press.

For Transactional Analysis Therapy in Manchester with me, contact me using my contact form or ring me on 07966 390857