A Most Queer Language: The Case Against an All-Inclusive Buffet in Therapy

The vantage point of a queer-identifying therapist is uniquely translucent; I see some things in sharp resolution, while there are other things that remain opaque. How does a queer therapist affirm a queerness that endangers them as well? How does a queer therapist affirm a queerness that bemuses them? Sitting across from a patient tussling with questions of sexuality that cannot be assuaged with ‘woke’ platitudes- evokes a sharp confusion that assaults the intersubjective self-hovering over our virtual room. This is not to say that it is an alien other; an- other situated firmly in heteronormativity that can better unravel the enigmas of sexuality. However, I do want to admit to my own sense of lost-ness as a queer therapist when it comes to matters of fluid desires and dynamic identities. I want to better understand how to navigate these desires and identities with authenticity, especially within the special framework of my patients and the unconscious language I use.

Time and again, I go back to my own personal therapy and my encounters with queerness within it. Did I ever seek a therapist who advertised a queer-affirmative practice? Did that choice fundamentally change the trajectory of my therapeutic journey? When looking back, I can see anti-queer rhetoric of every therapy clinic I’ve visited in high definition, but I found genuine affirmativeness of a clinic to be more diffuse, like in 420p resolution. For example, I remember in chilling detail the time my previous therapist convinced me that the bodily pleasure I experienced during a sexual harassment incident must be a result of “missing the male touch.” I cannot, however, recall with any clarity what other therapists conveyed to me after this that was of any benefit. I only remember feeling safe and feeling held in times of vulnerability surrounding my queerness.

To me, safety is something you feel. The same goes for affirmation; so, can they be said into existence? Is it possible that repeatedly saying that a room is a safe space doesn’t necessarily make it one? It makes me wonder if inclusive language and so-called “appropriate terminology” can be a permanent fixture in the therapy room. In the absence of conflict, errors, confusion, and disagreements, can the therapist and the patient ever meet on the human plane? Yes, there is obliteration in hostility and prejudice which demands redressal. There is such a thing as too much pathologizing. There is even such a thing as bad mothering. But what about mothering that’s too good to be true? Is there such a thing as too much validation?

What I’ve discovered to be true is that the principles of such clinical practice that positions itself solely around identity oftentimes seems sterile. I find a strange mystification attached to the “7-day bootcamps” that claim to train practitioners to become adept at taking on LGBTQ+ patients. It is becoming an increasingly common practice to declare that one has been trained in the art of queer-affirmative work but the modus operandi of these camps and programs makes me question the verity of the work being done. The hefty amount being charged for such training with its near-mystical curriculum also doubles down on the inaccessibility issue of psychotherapy praxis. This inaccessibility also seeps into the language, again feeding into the cycle of therapy by and for the privileged few, sectioning off the LGBTQ+ patienthood further. The goal here morphs into parroting taughttautology that convinces both the patient and I that we are not bigoted.

Psychic disturbances and pathologies intercept dialogue in a way that makes conversations convoluted; can we then call such use of inaccessible language a psychic disturbance too? Is language then a cover for a neurotic unconscious? Conversations in the clinic seem to have been deformed further by the impossible standard of perfect politics. In such an environment, do we overlook the resistances of the LGBTQ+ patients we take on in queer affirmative-practice; LGBTQ+ patients who are subsumed under a monolith? The bitter aftertaste of keywords like “affirmative,” “safe space” and “trauma response,” which have undergone relentless semantic bleaching, remains residual in both our mouths, the patient and me.

I carry my patient with me here, a patient who has been on a journey with her sexuality in the couple of years we have been working together. When we started, she identified as a bisexual, cisgender woman who had most of her romantic relationships with men. We talked about the beginning of romance and its culmination; we talked about intercourse and anxieties around sex. Then, about a year into our work, she shared that she felt that her experiences with men arose from culturally sanctioned compulsory heterosexuality. Before she was to shift states, we started exploring what being a lesbian is, what it means to her, what it could mean to others in her view and how that would impact her.  In the middle of these discussions and upon arriving in a new state, her perennially empty walls became adorned with the lesbian pride flag. It was no longer an uncharted facet of her being – it was now a fact.

Here is where my dilemma made its first appearance. Would questioning this tectonic shift count as hostility?

How would she feel if I were to ask her how she is making sense of discovering a different sexuality in a transitory period of her life? What does the flag represent to her? Even writing these questions down seems patronising, as though I’m doing something wrong by the queer movement. This self-policing judgement didn’t help as I began sitting uncomfortably with my silence. I began the Sisyphean task of validating thereafter. I indulged in those woke platitudes that never really felt right to her, or to me. That felt sense of affirmativeness seemed to be missing for both of us. We lost ourselves and our real voice in the cacophony of Internet scriptures prescribing a manner of speaking that was foreign to us. Our fable of perfect therapy and perfect humans cast a shadow over our relational work. In forced oblivion, we packed this mess aside and walked into other entanglements to sift through, ones that seemed easier on our egos.

But us humans have a fatal flaw – we compulsively repeat that which traumatises us. And so, we rammed into this unquestioned, under-explored part of our ocean. My patient found herself feeling attracted to a heterosexual man in her vicinity. She resolved to ask the man out to discover what it is that she really wants from his company. This time around we had to look through the psychoanalytic lens; the kaleidoscope of propriety had failed us. It is at this juncture where the games we were playing through semantics revealed themselves to us and we steered our discussion towards the core of the relational issue at hand. In the face of an invalidating situation, we had to grapple against the instinct of validating and rely on good ol’ analysis to navigate how older wounds from her childhood were reappearing in guises with the new man. Pulling the“daddy issues” thread did more for us than any truisms that we had been using before.

This patient and I are still working out a means of talking that is respectful but not fully addled with anxieties about sounding right. Creating this path that is unique to our relationship reminded me that in appearing to be a queer-affirmative therapist, I’d forgotten to be a queer person myself. This failure to see my own person had been keeping my patient from bringing their person into the room too. As I attempt to wind up this treatise on queering the clinic with my trademark uncertainty, I want to once again iterate my fear of being misunderstood. I am unsure of what is right, I am unsure of what works and what does not. In laying out my unsuccessful attempt at using perfect politics in the clinic, I am trying to think out loud. I’ve found that dialogues cannot be effective in silos, in echo chambers. If this is my internalised queerphobia, it’s still better worked through outside than inside me all alone. Sometimes I think I let my inner confused conservative (we all have one) out for a walk, and all of what I said here is what it whispers to me.