Healing from Internalized Homophobia as a Gay Man

The Wounded Child and The Protector Part

As a therapist who has worked primarily with gay men for over a decade, I’ve heard many different iterations of internalized homophobia, and many different iterations of the “best little boy in the world.” They are all the same at their core: the internalized homophobia says ‘there’s something deeply wrong with me,’ and the best little boy says, ‘there’s absolutely nothing wrong with me.’ What I have learned over time, both as a therapist and a client, is that you can’t address the internalized homophobia without first working with the perfectionist, protector part. 

Often when we come into therapy or any kind of healing environment, we want to go right for the gold. I was guilty of this for many years in therapy. I knew that I had a lot of shame deep down, and I wanted to heal already! But for some reason I kept taking steps backwards, feeling worse after therapy, and engaging in unhealthy coping strategies. Ultimately, I wanted to give up on therapy altogether. 

What I realized after time is that I was in a battle against my protector parts. I viewed the controlling energy inside of me as the enemy that was preventing me from healing. I wanted to get past all the perfectionist energy to get to the wounded child, but every time I tried, the controlling energy grabbed hold tighter. I became less relational, more anxious, and more alone. I even developed a great deal of physical body pain that endured for many years. 

Finally I discovered Internal Family Systems therapy, which is all about respecting and befriending protector parts in order to get to younger exiled parts. I was able to start welcoming the perfectionist part into consciousness and befriending it. I began to recognize how hard it had been working to keep me safe, and that its intentions had always been good. I began to thank that part of me for everything it had done on my behalf. 

Healing from Internalized Homophobia

Only by building a trusting and affirming relationship with that perfectionist part did it begin to finally relax and give me more access to the rest of my self, including my wounded child. It’s not like the perfectionist goes away, I still feel it with me all the time and it has a lot of value in my life. But it is more of an ally that can be brought online for certain situations. And when it’s not needed, that part of me can rest or use its energy for creative purposes instead of protection. 

The thing we come to realize about protector parts as we befriend them is that they never really slow down and look around until we gently invite them too. They work very hard with one singular mission, and they develop tunnel vision. When we get to know them, we also give them a chance to get to know us and come into the present. The truth is there is a lot less homophobia in our country today than there was 20 years ago, and most of us have found much more affirming environments in adulthood, but protector parts might be doing the same job with the same intensity that they’ve been doing since we were 10 years old, keeping us stuck in an unhealthy pattern. 

One last note on protector parts- they aren’t always perfectionists, that is just a common one for gay men. There are a lot of different roles that protectors take, from the saboteur to the caretaker to the obsessive compulsive. At the core, however, they all have the same intent, which is to protect us from re-experiencing overwhelming pain. And the strategy in working with them is also the same with all of them - befriending, thanking, gaining their trust, and gently inviting them to slow down.