The Path to Healing: 5 Tips 

1. Practice Anxiety Tolerance 

Typically anxiety is a good place to start. Anxiety can be seen as a warning signal for some other, deeper emotion. Think of anxiety as your nervous system ringing the alarm. 

Start to think about the way you think about fear and anxiety. Is it something that you shut down and run away from? Probably. Can you begin to learn how to sit with it, little by little, and share it with someone who can handle it. If you can begin to tolerate the anxiety, it will begin to give way to the other emotions and other parts of you that have been repressed. 

Think of anxiety as a bridge. Yes, a very uncomfortable one! like a rickety bridge with lava underneath, connecting your rational mind with the rest of you. 

2. Unpack your internalized homophobia and your internalized affect phobia in therapy.

The truth is we all have both of these things, it’s impossible to grow up in our culture and not internalize them to some extent. But that still means we need to do the work of making them conscious and releasing them, which is ongoing work. It’s important to do this in a trusted therapeutic relationship with a therapist who understands these forces and how they operate within all of us. 

You want to allow yourself, within a safe container, to really step into those younger parts of yourself that are afraid. Afraid of the emotions in your body because they feel out of control. Afraid of being your authentic self because you fear rejection or abandonment.  You might need to move your body in new ways, or scream, or cry. 

3. Deepen your affirming relationships. 

Healing happens in relationships, so before deep healing happens we have to invest in people and build our chosen family. We need to find people who understand the queer experience, and who can handle emotions or are at least working on themselves in order to be able to do so in the future. Think about the people in your life who seem somewhat relaxed in their bodies, versus maybe the chaotic party friend. Invest your energy in the people you believe in long term. Build trust, work through tension when it arises, and build a foundation for vulnerability. 

4. Start a queer feelings journal. 

One of the most important ways to get back in touch with queerness and our raw emotions is to get thoughts and feelings out of our head, and having a journal is a great way to accomplish this. Remember the goal is to connect our rational mind with our feeling body. Writing down our feelings is literally bridging the two, or translating raw emotion into rational words. The journal is not something you have to go back and reflect on if you don’t want to, it just serves the purpose of building that bridge and keeping the energy flowing toward consciousness. 

5. Adopt a practice like meditation, yoga, or nature walks.

Practices like these get us away from our phone, away from all the noise, and invite us to connect with our internal experience and our body. It might be very difficult at first to slow down and notice our internal state, remember that is normal within our affect phobic and homophobic world.

Figure out what activity works for you, you don’t want to force yourself into doing something that is too uncomfortable. You want to find the good edge of comfort and discomfort. Find something you are naturally drawn to and enjoy, but also challenges you. And don’t put pressure on the practice to have results in a linear fashion, just try to enjoy the practice itself. 

In the end, we are trying to find safe ways to connect with ourselves, and others. Over time, as we practice connection and vulnerability, the fear that separates us from our authentic experience becomes less necessary. Often without us even realizing it, it begins to fade away, and we are able to step more into our full, queer, emotional life.