I thought I was over my Catholic guilt about being gay. Maybe I was wrong?
Guilt and shame can be addictive. In certain religious and traditional contexts, it can even be venerated, honoured – the requisite emotion that subdues human ego and maintains humility at the feet of a far higher power. But it can also leave an indelible stain on our character, our personality, and our mental health that endures for years, particularly for those brought up in such conservative environments where guilt and shame were measurements of our own self-worth.
“It’s good to cry when you pray. Tears wash away your sins,” an aunt – a devout Maronite Catholic – once remarked to me as a child. I took those words and held them close to my chest, and for many years in my adolescence, Good Friday was the moment of repentance, of a dive deep into my own being in search of guilt. I’d sit, in darkness, burrowing into the corners of my mind, scouring the memories of the previous year in search of acts or incidents that would render me guilty, that would strike the emotional cords, and activate the stress hormone that made tears well up in my eyes.
What could I find? What would be worthy for this ritualistic, annual selfexorcism? I delved until the shame of my emerging same-sex attraction, culminating in a cascade of tears. “I’m sorry,” I would repeat, and success, my tears were washing away my sins. God could see I was full of repentance.
My adolescent experience is, sadly, too common among LGBTQ+ youth raised in conservative settings. The worldview, the values that we’re instilled with at a young age, inevitably leads to a Titanic moment – the crash into the iceberg when the realisation that our very natural being is in total conflict with all that we’ve come to know. Some of us find a way to swim, some of us sink, and others tread through life brandishing the scars inflicted upon us in our developmental years.
“[Sexual orientation] is not like a behaviour that you can just stop,” Jeremy Shields, a clinical psychologist in Melbourne with extensive experience working with LGBTQ+ patients, says.
“If during my development I experience messages that there’s something inherently wrong, sinful within me, then I’ll start to believe that there’s part of me that is shameful. In psychological terms, we call it ‘toxic shame’.”
That toxic shame, Shields adds, “can leave an injury, a complex trauma, which may extend into later years”.
I like to think I’ve shed my conservative baggage, that I was one of the fortunate who managed to swim – through education, life experiences, relationships, and a reimagining of my worldview that allowed a comfortable space between spirituality and the reality of my sexual diversity. Or perhaps not?
The scars of Christian guilt – or LGBTQ+ shame – in our developmental
years may not be completely vanquished, even if we’ve refuted religion or found a way to be at peace with our gender and sexual identities.
Our brains are constantly adapting to their environments, Shields says, which means that a brain that has trained itself to be highly vigilant of threats may be more prone to certain behaviours. So LGBTQ+ individuals who have expended significant energy compartmentalising their lives to hide or repress their sexual identities, particularly in their adolescence, may continue to exhibit those behavioural patterns well into adulthood.
“Being more vigilant from an early age will have an effect on our central nervous system. We know that can change the brain, some structures in the limbic system, the amygdala can become more active. They’re muscles that can become more muscular.
They’re more tuned into keeping you safe,” Shields explains.
The lingering residue of LGBTQ+ shame can manifest “in a variety of ways, some quite easy to identify, some subtle”, he adds.
I applied Shields’ words to my personal evolution over the years, and reassessed my own confidence in having freed myself of LGBTQ+ shame, of Christian guilt, years ago. And suddenly, this understanding of that experience as traumatic, and the psychological consequences it can have on behavioural patterns, illuminated subtle elements of my own behaviour.
I noticed just this week, while at the gym conversing with overtly “blokey” (and seemingly heterosexual) men in tattoos that I, by default, put on a more blokey demeanour. My accent shifted to reflect their harsh Australian tones, and my body language scripted to mimic behaviours recognisable as “straight” – as … “normal”.
It was only after this encounter that I applied the self-assessment. What was it in my brain that automatically defaulted to this mode of behaviour?
This ability to de-emphasise identities in certain settings was a common coping mechanism identified in a study of gay Polish men and Catholic guilt. It found that the men de-emphasised their sexual identities in environments perceived as hostile, such as church and family, while de-emphasising their religious identities in LGBTQ+ environments.
At the core of this “skill”, however, is the underlying belief that there is a level of shame associated with our sexual identities. I instinctively behaved in that manner at the gym because there was a fear that, should they see me as a sexual minority, I would be treated differently and seen as inferior or hostile. This is just one example of trivial, social interactions that, to some degree, may be informed by the past trauma of homophobia, of guilt and shame. How does it affect our relationships? Our sex lives? Our friendships? Our work relationships? Our own confidence and self-esteem?
Perhaps LGBTQ+ shame never truly leaves us. And while this experience is not unanimous in the LGBTQ+ community, it is ubiquitous … some learn to swim with their traumatic scars, others sink. It helps explain why LGBTQ+ youth are five times more likely to attempt suicide in their lifetime, and six times more likely to suffer depression.
My Good Friday ritual of self-exorcism was put to rest many years ago, but perhaps it’s time to create a new ritual … one that celebrates our differences, our complexities, our flaws. As the late renowned, and gay, neurologist Oliver Sacks remarked: “It is … the genetic and neural fate of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”
In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.
My Good Friday ritual of self-exorcism was put to rest many years ago, but perhaps it’s time to create a new ritual