Trauma-Informed Therapy from an LGBTQ2IA+ Perspective
“You’re overreacting!”
“It’s just a phase!”
“Why do you have to be so weird? Why can’t you just fit in?”
If those phrases hit a little too close to home for your liking, this article is for you.
Many LGBTQ2IA+ people navigate the world while carrying deep traumas.
Maybe that’s rooted in past experiences we never should have had to face.
Maybe it’s from the difficulty of trying to navigate the world as someone we know we’re not.
Maybe it’s the heaviness of navigating a world that seems aligned against people like us.
But regardless, you might be made to feel like your feelings are “too much”.
They’re not.
They’re your body’s reaction to the circumstances and the troubles you’ve faced.
But while queer trauma is real, it doesn’t have to be the guiding force for your life.
At The Witch’s Therapist, we’re a holistic psychotherapist collective in London Ontario.
Among our areas of focus, we offer both LGBTQ2IA+ therapy and trauma-informed therapy.
But today on our blog, we’ll explore the intersection of these approaches.
What Is Queer Trauma?
Before we talk about queer trauma therapy, let’s explore what we mean by queer trauma in the first place.
It’s not just trauma experienced by a queer person, but the type of trauma we face because of our queer identities.
It’s the type of trauma we experience when our gender and/or sexuality becomes a source of danger.
This can come from a single, devastating event of rejection, erasure, or violence.
But it can also come from quieter, subtler experiences that are more difficult to pinpoint.
The awkward silences.
The constant calculating of whether it’s safe to disclose your identity.
The jokes that clearly weren’t just jokes.
The looks.
And when we layer that experience on top of that of simply surviving the emotional impacts of late-stage capitalism?
All of this can live in your body in much the same way trauma does, even if these experiences don’t always look like trauma from the outside.
Minority Stress: What Does Queer Trauma Do to the Body?
There's a term for what LGBTQ2IA+ people experience over a lifetime of navigating a world that wasn't built for us.
It's called minority stress.
Minority stress is the chronic psychological burden many marginalized people face.
It forces us to be hypervigilant to our surroundings.
To conceal our identities until we’re sure we’re safe.
To constantly anticipate rejection and all the pain that comes with it.
We often carry these feelings from childhood onward, even if we can’t name or understand them at the time.
It means always having a part of your attention on whether this space is safe.
Whether this person can be trusted with who you are.
Whether being yourself in this moment will cost you something.
Needless to say, this is exhausting.
But more than that, it fundamentally shapes how you interact with the people around you.
It affects how safe you feel in your own body.
That’s what happens when a person spends years under that kind of invisible pressure.
And if you’re a queer person who also happens to be a person of colour, a disabled person, or has another intersection of oppression, this pressure can feel even heavier.
Good queer-affirmative psychotherapy understands this.
It treats minority stress as central to who you are and what you're healing from.
RELATED: Why Is My Body Tense All the Time?
The Many Forms Queer Trauma Can Take
Queer people are not a monolith.
No one person can “speak for” the LGBTQ2IA+ community, because we’re a diverse group with a wide variety of beliefs, experiences, hopes, and dreams.
That’s one of the reasons why the acronym keeps expanding.
However, what we all share in common is our marginalized gender and/or sexual identities.
As a result, our traumatic experiences can often overlap.
1. Family Rejection and Conditional Love
Our families should be a source of unconditional love and support.
But as so many of us know, “should” doesn’t always reflect our experience.
The experience of conditional love because of who we are is one of the most common and deeply wounding sources of queer trauma.
When the people who were supposed to love you without conditions become the source of harm, it reshapes everything.
It changes how safe it can feel to love.
It changes what you believe you deserve.
It changes how you relate to closeness and vulnerability for years afterward.
This wound can run deep, and healing it takes time and care.
2. Religious and Community Trauma
If you grew up in a religious environment, you may have been taught that your identity was sinful.
As you grow older and begin to understand your queerness, that sense of shame can still remain.
Even if you feel “out and proud”, the shame you were made to feel as a small child can be woven into your deepest beliefs about your own worth and lovability.
Many people carry this wound long after they've left the religion or community behind.
Beliefs that are absorbed in childhood don't disappear just because you've intellectually moved past them.
They’re based in emotion, not intellectual understanding.
3. School-Based Bullying and Social Exclusion
Being bullied during your school years because of your gender expression or perceived sexuality creates trauma that follows you into adulthood.
The body doesn't forget what it felt like to walk into a classroom and not know whether today would be one of the hard days.
It doesn't forget the loneliness of not fitting in, or the exhaustion of performing a version of yourself that felt safer than the real one.
Some of us experienced such things as young children, even before we had a sense of what queerness looked like or that we ourselves were queer.
These experiences deserve to be taken seriously, even decades later.
4. Medical and Therapeutic Harm
Many LGBTQ2IA+ people have unique healthcare needs.
But many LGBTQ2IA+ people have also been harmed within the very systems that were supposed to help us.
Thankfully, here in Canada, the abusive practice of conversion therapy has been banned.
That’s a good thing.
However, that ban only came into play in 2022.
As a result, many LGBTQ2IA+ Canadians still live with the scars of being forced into a form of “therapy” that tried to change them on a fundamental level.
But today, many of us still experience harm in a medical and therapeutic environment.
While conversion therapy itself is banned, transgender people still face unnecessary barriers to accessing care.
When faced with an unrelated healthcare question, doctors still focus too heavily on gender and sexuality when discussing unrelated issues.
Trans people have called this “trans broken arm syndrome”.
Gay men still face barriers to accessing reliable sexual health care.
Any of us could be told, by a healthcare provider, something that made you feel less safe than when you walked in.
These experiences make it harder to trust helping systems.
5. Everyday Microaggressions and Chronic Hypervigilance
Earlier, we looked at how expansive queer trauma can be.
We looked at how the small accumulation of experiences can build on it.
The misgendering that happens over and over.
The invasive questions from people who think curiosity gives them the right to ask anything.
The erasure of your identity in conversations and in media.
The constant, low-level work of assessing whether each new space is safe enough to be yourself in.
Individually, each of these things might seem small.
Together, over the years, they add up to something the body experiences as an ongoing threat.
And that deserves to be named for what it is.
6. Internalized Shame and Self-Rejection
We live in a hateful world.
As a result, it’s hard not to internalize that hatred.
Many of us spend years – even decades – unlearning the racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and other forms of prejudice we were taught as children.
But that can hit even harder when the prejudice is directed at your own identity.
When the messages we receive about your identity are hostile or dismissive, we may end up doing the work of the oppressor from the inside.
Internalized prejudice is common.
It’s not right, but it doesn’t make you a bad person for having them.
We didn’t get to choose to be born into a hateful world.
But it’s still our responsibility to heal.
And that healing them requires a space where all the parts of you are welcome.
That includes the parts that are carrying the shame handed to you by someone else.
Why Standard Trauma Therapy Can Fall Short for Queer Clients
Most trauma therapy frameworks were developed without queer experiences at the centre.
A therapist who doesn't understand minority stress may treat your hypervigilance as an individual anxiety problem.
RELATED: A Holistic Approach to Anxiety
But it’s actually a rational adaptation to a world that has genuinely felt unsafe for you.
A therapist who treats your identity as background information rather than something central to your healing may miss the most important parts of what you're carrying.
And a therapist who isn't familiar with the specific texture of queer pain can, without meaning to, replicate the kind of invalidation you've already experienced too many times.
That isn’t conducive to building a trusting therapeutic relationship.
What Queer-Affirming Trauma Therapy Actually Looks Like
So, what is queer trauma therapy?
It’s therapy that starts with a therapist who understands that your identity isn't the problem.
The world's response to it is.
From there, it means working with approaches that account for the full complexity of what you've been through.
The minority stress.
The difficulty you have trusting.
The fact that you’ve learned to hide parts of yourself in order to survive.
At The Witch's Therapist, we might include a wide range of approaches to help explore this.
This may include:
And others
Let’s take a closer look at some of these approaches.
1. Internal Family Systems (IFS)
It’s a type of therapy that’s particularly well-suited to queer trauma.
This is because it honours the parts of you that learned to hide.
It approaches those protective parts with curiosity and compassion rather than trying to override or eliminate them.
For many queer people, this is the first therapeutic experience that feels genuinely safe.
Every part of you, including the ones that are still afraid, is welcome in the room.
2. Somatic Therapy
Trauma lives in the body.
And many queer people have a complicated relationship with our bodies.
Before we accept who we are, many of us police our own actions for fear of behaviours that make us “look” queer.
Gender dysphoria can make our bodies feel alien to us.
Medical scrutiny doesn’t help.
And of course, that’s on top of all the millions of ways capitalism tells everyone we’re not good enough.
Somatic therapy can help you reconnect with your body’s inherent wisdom.
3. Shadow Work
Shadow work invites you to turn toward the parts of yourself you've been told to hide or feel ashamed of.
For queer clients, this can be profoundly liberating.
It's the work of reclaiming the aspects of yourself that were exiled.
Through shadow work, we can learn to understand these “exiles” weren’t actually dangerous to us.
Rather, the world couldn't hold them at the time.
Bringing those parts back into the light, with care and intention, is some of the most meaningful work therapy can do.
4. Ritual Integration Therapy
Spirituality has been used as a weapon against many of us.
The traditions that were supposed to offer comfort instead offered condemnation.
Reclaiming a spiritual practice that honours all of who you are can be a powerful part of trauma healing.
At The Witch's Therapist, your relationship with spirit, ritual, and magick is welcome as part of the work.
Whatever that relationship looks like.
Reclaiming Queer Joy
You may have heard people say before that queer joy is revolutionary.
But what does that fully mean?
It means embracing your true self in a world that wishes to suppress it.
It means taking up space as you, without apology.
It means recognizing what you need from life, and working to fulfill it.
It means reconnecting with what your trauma cut you off from.
That's what we're working toward.
And you deserve a therapist who understands that.
Book Your Appointment with The Witch’s Therapist Today
At The Witch's Therapist, all parts of you are welcome.
Your queerness.
Your spirituality.
Your grief.
Your rage.
Your fear.
We provide virtual therapy across Canada for LGBTQ2S+ clients who are ready to come home to themselves.
But if you’re not sure, we offer FREE 15-minute intro sessions.
During that session, you’ll speak to a therapist who takes the time to listen to your concerns.
They’ll answer your questions and help you decide what’s right for you.
Book your FREE 15-minute intro session with The Witch’s Therapist today.
The Witch's Therapist
609 William St. #101
London, Ontario
Canada
N6B 3G1
1-226-977-1660
► London Ontario Holistic Psychotherapy
The Witch's Therapist is located in London, Ontario and offers holistic psychotherapy therapy throughout London and surrounding areas.
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