How to deal with their sexual orientation?
ALL WE HAVE GROWN THE MASS OF QUESTIONS TO THEMSELVES AND THE WORLDwith which there seems to be no time or need to go to a psychologist. But convincing answers are not born when you talk to yourself, or to your friends, or to your parents. Therefore, we asked a professional psychotherapist Olga Miloradova to answer pressing questions once a week. By the way, if you have them, send to [email protected].
How to deal with their sexual orientation?
I want to believe that all the people around are advanced and progressive and, accordingly, can independently deal with such intimate things as their own sexual orientation. So, it would seem, why bother to raise such a question at all? However, many of us do not even realize what kind of public pressure (often tacit) we all have to face every day and as a result how much it pushes us to self-censorship and the suppression of our desires and aspirations.
Olga Miloradova psychotherapist
It seems to you that in modern society no one harms anyone, but even here you can find comments where readers are interested in - what is the right for LGBT people to be considered the norm and how much can you tolerate it? So, for starters, I would like to clarify that, by a WHO decision of 1990, homosexuality was excluded from the international classification of diseases, and the corresponding article was removed from the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation a little later. And this decision was justified not by the mythical "gay lobby" (hello to lovers of conspiracy theories), but by a lot of scientific studies showing that being gay, lesbian or bisexual is compatible with mental health and social adaptation.
Therefore, I would like to once again clarify that the process of sexual identity, from the point of view of psychiatry, is cognition, the discovery of its natural sexuality, and not a matter of choice. And since we live in a heteronormative society, in which even buying a pink stroller for a boy and blue sliders for a girl can still cause disapproval, try to imagine what incredible pressure children and adolescents who are aware of their homosexual, bisexual or transgender nature are experiencing.
If you remember your childhood well, then it’s not a secret to you that in a society of children, let alone adolescents and a smaller difference could make you a scapegoat or a whipping pear. That is why it is often much easier to live like everyone else (or at least try), and eventually get so used to an image convenient for everyone and pleasing dad with mom that you stop thinking about why every sexual contact with an official spouse seems like a heavy duty, and pajamas A party at home with a best friend causes sincere joy.
Periodic fantasies about same-sex partner do not say that you are homosexual
And yet, since the partner may be unloved and / or undesirable for many other reasons, and the girlfriend is just a pleasant person, but you may still be in some doubt, let's discuss the facts from the opposite for a start. That is, those who just do not necessarily confirm that you are homosexual.
Let's start with sexual fantasies. Sexual fantasies can be completely different. Even if a person sometimes fantasizes about violence, as long as it is present in the illusory world, it does not at all indicate that he is a rapist or seriously dreams of being raped or at least inclined to BDSM. Similarly, periodic fantasies about same-sex partner do not say that you are homosexual. Another thing, if these fantasies are always only about partners of the same sex with you, and the opposite sex never appears in them. In this case, you should at least think about possible experiments, but, again, fantasy does not oblige you to anything.
Homosexual experience. The mere fact of having such experience also does not mean that you are gay. Formation of sexual self-identification is a rather complicated process for a teenager, especially if this teenager is not too consistent with masculine (in boys) or feminine (in girls) standards. If a girl prefers short haircuts, loves to play football and collects typewriters - this does not mean at all that her gender will automatically begin to attract her. The same story with a boy who prefers, for example, ballroom dancing and modeling clothes.
If you are not attracted to the opposite sex - this also does not necessarily prove that you are gay
Nevertheless, it is for adolescents who do not ideally fit into the classic cisgender roles that experimentation with same-sex peers is more common. Perhaps, precisely because everyone thinks that he / she looks like a gay / lesbian, such public pressure somehow makes you wonder if this is not true. But, in principle, experimenting with one’s sexuality is generally quite normal for adolescents: for example, according to Sorenson, 17% of boys of 17–19 years old had homosexual contact once in their life, while the numbers are considered underestimated, since many respondents did not consider such "children's games" as sexual intercourse.
If you are a man and you are attracted to masculine girls or you are a woman and you are attracted to feminine men - this also does not in any way indicate how some people think that you are a latent homosexual. Gender and biological sex are not the same thing, gender is a much more complicated thing, and it is impossible to count what percentage of which gender is present in us. Still, we are not Barbie and Kena dolls possessing a “perfect” gender. Isn't that great.
If you are not attracted to the opposite sex - this is also not an automatic proof that you are gay. Perhaps you are not interested in sex, in principle, and you are the so-called asexual. That does not necessarily mean the inability to have romantic feelings and establish any relationship at all.
There is an option that you like men more than women, but women also
And yet if with some enviable regularity you are attracted to people of the same sex, but, say, less often than the opposite sex, then you can definitely say that you are at least not heterosexual. To explain this idea more clearly, imagine a horizontal straight line, on one end of which is homosexuality, on the opposite heterosexual and middle bisexuality. As the world is not black and white, so sexuality is not necessarily clearly located in one of these three points. There is an option that you like men more than women, but women too. Or vice versa - women are more than men, but some men sometimes.
Perhaps, many who are so actively fighting homosexuality, in fact, are also somewhere not quite clearly located on this axis. And maybe that is why they think that “sometimes I get involved too, but I’m so good at it,” maybe that’s why they believe that homosexuality is not a matter of genetics, but of propaganda and influence. And they are very afraid to fall under this influence, because there will be an opportunity to give up slack.