How I Use EMDR Therapy With LGBTQ+ People
- Lisa S. Larsen, PsyD
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Do you feel the extra fear of a government that doesn’t seem to care about you, and in fact sometimes persecutes you because of your gender identity or sexual preference? Does this amplify your existing personal traumas?
As an LGBTQ+ person, you might experience trauma from a variety of different sources, including childhood trauma, occupational trauma, loss, natural disasters, accidents, etc. However, you also face additional stressors such as:
· Bullying and harassment;
· Discrimination at work or school;
· Unmet medical needs;
· Efforts to change your orientation or gender identity like conversion “therapy;”[i]
· Family and friends rejecting you;
· Internalized negative beliefs; and
· Microaggressions.[ii]
These additional stressors can compound your traumatic experiences and make it harder to heal, because in order to heal, you need to feel safe and supported. In the recent political climate, which especially targets issues like transgender people using certain restrooms or attacks on the constitutional right to marry, you might feel even more unsafe. Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is an effective, empirically validated trauma therapy used with a variety of people with many different types of traumatic experiences. You might wonder if EMDR therapy for LGBTQ+ people is as effective as it is for heterosexual, cisgender people. I have found that it can be very helpful, and I tailor it just for each client.
What can be done to make LGBTQ+ people feel safe in therapy?
As an ally and LGBTQ+ affirming psychotherapist, I try to empower you to feel seen and honored just as you are. I use gender-affirming names and pronouns, discuss gender, racial, and other aspects of identity openly, and try my best to foster an environment of inclusivity and inclusion.
I also strive to be humble and open, inviting feedback if anything I say or do makes you uncomfortable. It’s your therapy, and it’s vitally important that you feel free to say what you like and don’t like, what makes you feel comfortable or uncomfortable.
While I’ve done a lot of training and reading about therapy with LGBTQ+ people, I also realize that there is so much variance in any group of people. What some LGBTQ+ people might feel comfortable with might not work for you. I don’t have a cookie-cutter approach to therapy, and believe that therapy works best when it’s tailored to you individually.
What does EMDR therapy with LGBTQ+ people look like?
Beyond the usual trauma processing with all my clients, I like to use EMDR therapy with LGBTQ+ clients to address internalized shame and stigma that become embodied and part of the your internal dialogue. Internalized stigma might keep you from speaking up for yourself, seeking support from others when distressed, and sometimes taking care of your basic physical and psychological needs.
I spend extra time on the negative beliefs because they can come from everywhere. If you grew up in an invalidating environment, you might have heard negative messages about you so much that you’ve come to believe it. It might be hard to separate your identity from what you’ve been told, so teasing those out might take a little more time and effort.
I use moments of emotional and body awareness to build a target for desensitization and reprocessing, which we can reprocess spontaneously or later on. I find it’s best to reprocess it in the moment (if the previous steps are in place and you’re sufficiently prepared). This also helps prevent the perpetuation of toxic shame in your daily life.
Building resources to weather the storms
EMDR therapy doesn’t just neutralize negative emotions and traumatic leftovers. It can also be helpful in strengthening your ability to handle stress. This is part of the preparation that we do before embarking on reprocessing the traumas. We might use EMDR therapy to establish a safer, calmer state or place, to bring forth the feelings evoked by safer people in your life, or to amplify your strengths and resources.[iii]
EMDR therapy can help you recognize your strengths and ways that you’ve grown as a person in the face of all you’ve endured. As I’ve written before, you might have some post traumatic growth that others might not because of your difficulties. It’s important to honor the ways you’ve succeeded and grown, and the resources that stress and tragedy have called forth. It can feel very empowering to realize that homophobic and transphobic people might have hurt you in the past, but they haven’t taken away your strength and integrity.
What if you’ve distanced yourself from your somatic awareness?
Unfortunately, sometimes trauma survivors get through their trauma by distancing themselves from their bodies. I’ve also observed that some transgender or nonbinary people use intellectualization as a way to distance themselves from their bodies. Feeling uncomfortable and wrong in your body can make you want to check out or dissociate from your body on a regular basis.
If you’ve coped with trauma by dissociating from your body, we might need to do some preparatory work to re-inhabit your body enough to pick up on the sensations that come from the traumatic memories. The sensations might be there, but might come up randomly and mysteriously without explanation.
Of course, I would want you to check out those sensations with a medical doctor to make sure they’re not an actual injury or untreated medical condition. However, if they aren’t a medical condition, they might just be leftover feelings that you have in your body from the trauma. Somatic Stress Release is one way we can help you start to build awareness and relationship with your body.
Are you ready to experience EMDR therapy?
If you’re tired of dealing with the traumatic stress from all the different sources of stress and heartache, EMDR therapy with LGBTQ+ people might be a good fit for you. I’d be happy and honored to discuss your needs more, so please call me if you’re interested or click on the button below.