Gay-affirmative therapy

In gay affirmative psychotherapy, psychologists are encouraged to recognize how their attitudes and knowledge about homosexual and bisexual issues may be relevant to assessment and treatment and seek consultation or make appropriate referrals when indicated. Gay affirmative therapy, also known as gay affirming therapy or simply gay therapy, offers a safe and affirming space for gay individuals to explore their experience of being gay in the world, heal from painful and traumatic experiences, begin to understand how internalized homophobia works, and tap into their strengths and cultivate resilience.

Affirmative therapy, or LGBTQ+ affirmative therapy, is a therapeutic approach that validates and advocates for the needs of sexual and gender minority individuals. Affirmative therapy is: an approach to therapy that embraces a positive view of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) identities and relationships and addresses the negative influences that homophobia, transphobia, and heterosexism have on the lives of LGBTQ clients Adapted from Rock, M., Carlson, T.

S., & McGeorge, C. R. (). Most often, LGBTQ-affirmative therapists are either LGBTQ themselves or they have loved ones who are LGBTQ. They are neither externally nor internally homophobic, seeing no real difference. It is a description of practices which arises out of the context of a dominant culture in society which attempts to regulate and specify according to normative notions of gender and sexuality.

It arises out of a discourse of power which asks questions about how operations of power have been and are carried out. The more local domains of psychology and therapy can boast a history of subjugation and oppression in the treatment of lesbians, gay men and bisexuals. Our premise in this paper is that gay affirmative therapy is an indication of a discourse in transition - both within and without of psychology and psychotherapy - and that we should be looking to how gay affirmative practices might be thought of within a practice of critical therapy.

Critical Therapy encourages an idea of a constantly evolving relationship between theory and practice and which recognises the influences on our thinking of different contexts such as race, culture, class, gender and sexuality. Practice Context The ideas we are presenting in this paper are significantly influenced by our experience in setting up and running a counselling and psychotherapy practice for lesbians, gay men and bisexuals in London.

Our clients approach us assuming or knowing that all the therapists in the practice are lesbian, gay or bisexual. We work with individuals, couples and families - only a small proportion of whom specifically seek consultations because they are uncomfortable about being gay. There is a shift from "knowledge" to ethics. Human beings are seen as meaning-generating.

There is a concern with the relationship between meanings and actions and the social contexts within which these arise. Meaning depends on context. We act out of and into contexts. Identity is continually being co-constructed in different contexts.

recommendations for use of affirmative psychotherapy with lgbt older adults

Language is seen as expressing and constructing our experience. We make sense of our experience through the descriptions available to us. Therapy is a context for the collaborative deconstructing and co-creating of meaning. Different descriptions and explanations have different consequences.

Let alone acted on. Our stories, as lesbians and as gay men, as bisexuals and as third gendered people, have barely started to be told or lived. What we work with in "therapy" is, by and large, a set of stories which we call "theories" which come out of stables rarely frequented by queers except in role as "patients". Most psychological theories have, in the modernist past of scientific "realities", subscribed to an idea of revealing the truth of about a subject, uncovering "knowledge" from which general principles could be deduced and applied to the world at large.

Psychotherapy has, and in many instances, still does, participate in this discourse of finding out what is "really" going on with a client. Our attitude to "knowledge" and "truth" is changing. We are beginning to appreciate how subjective "the facts" usually are. What we take to be the case is the consequence of the ways we have available to make sense of the world. Foucault said "The history of sexuality must first be written from the view point of a history of discourses.

Sexuality is a concept which, therefore, has shifting meanings. Given its centrality in our culture, the descriptions we are invited to take on and expected to perform about our sexuality or an aspect of our identity, say a lot about who we are and our adequacy in the world. Those stories act as ways of defining and regulating social behaviour often, for example, by disqualifying different practices.

Pathologising is one form of disqualifying. Power, gender and sexuality are interrelated discourses. It is not surprising, therefore, that ethical questions have arisen for counsellors and psychotherapists concerned with the practices of power both within therapeutic practice and in society at large.