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Part 3: Coming out to the culture Culture is an umbrella term used so frequently that we risk losing track of its meaning. It is a complex phenomenon that helps to shape an overall group identity within society. The overarching themes are broad enough to make space for pockets of variability that still fall under the umbrella of the larger identity; subcultures. To identify as an American has very different shaping implications than to identify as a Korean, for example. To identify as a part of K-Pop culture within American identity is very different than identifying as a part of country music culture within American identity. Add to that the intersectionality of ethnicity, gender, socioeconomics, education, nationalist philosophies and social rules, and it becomes easy to understand why we can sometimes misattribute the effects of culture to personal or more divine sources. I had a not-joke that I used to tell my friends in the bitter aftermath of leaving my faith. “What’s the difference between a cult and religion?” I’d ask. The answer? “Popularity.” All of the interactions I’d had with family and friends from my faith culture had been deeply painful, and a majority of them traumatic. One of the symptoms of trauma is hypervigilance; scanning the environment for danger and going into nervous system high alert for anything that provides a hint of familiar threat. After a few surprise doorstep interventions with various family members, some of whom flew from Canada to confront us, my family took refuge at our friend’s house for about a week. We needed to create a sense of safe space that would allow us to process our pain and grief; home was no longer safe for us. We didn’t ever feel any physical threat, but the possibility of nonconsensual confrontation, judgment and gut-wrenching perspective stalemate put my then-wife and I into stress overdrive and breakdown. We decided to formally separate ourselves from our faith due to long-simmering ideological differences with the church over same-sex issues and gender inequality, among others. The aforementioned were, however, our sticking points that we detailed in the letter shared with our families. The swift condemnation we received from some, the immediate shunning from others, and the bait-and-switch tactics from more still prompted me to make an observation to someone (I can’t remember who); leaving our church felt a lot like what I had heard the coming out experience was for many queer people (I had in fact been asked directly by multiple family members if our leaving was because I was closeted, which I now find ironic, since my coming out years later was such a shock to so many of those same people). My joke about cults and religions was ill-made and largely inaccurate, given my research into high control groups (the technical language for a cult). Cults are identified by high levels of behavioral control, entrainment of mental gymnastics to bypass cognitive dissonance, isolation from society, centralized authority, secrecy, and leadership-sanctioned abuses. Certainly not all religious groups operate in these ways, though folks with religious backgrounds may find elements of cult dynamics present in their faith systems. I’ve certainly taken time to scrutinize the tradition I was raised in, and can see indicators of high control groups that still don’t add up to crossing that threshold into true cultism. The deeper a system drifts into high control dynamics, however, the greater the likelihood for rigid responses from group members when someone violates the rules. Not all religions are cults; all religions do, however, inform and reinforce culture. And for all of its useful (not to mention unavoidable) qualities, culture reinforces worldview with all of its blindspots thereunto, appertaining. I spent a lot of energy bashing my head against the metaphorical wall of my family’s inability to really see and hear where I was coming from. In that time I worked as a kind of free-lance gay apologist, scouring religious texts from various faith traditions, philosophical writings, and anthropological assessments to try and find the right wording that could magically make me visible in the way I craved to be. I underestimated the way that culture interlocks and reinforces itself when established around a rigid worldview. Put simply, I came to the understanding that the inconvenience of my gay existence as a beloved family and community member, along with my insistence to be experienced from within my own subjective reality, served as an existential threat to those who knew me. Holding space for the possibility that I could be and live as a gay man (and have that be okay,) alongside the concrete strictures of eternally consequential narratives creates a paradox which threatens to implode all that they live by. This is the challenge of coming out as a queer person to the world around us. It isn’t a matter of whether or not people want to be loving and accepting. It’s instead a question of whether the dynamic cultural forces at play in shaping their reality permit the kind of empathy necessary to allow for that love and acceptance. In a world where subjective realities are treated like unquestionable truths, empathy becomes dangerous. We need look no further than recent political developments, where empathy has been called a sin by our more extremist members, for evidence. To be gay then, means to accept being cast as the villain, the problem, the sinner. It means to accept that because other people’s reality strips us of our human dignity, we acknowledge that our existence is at best inconvenient, and at worst under threat of death and violence. There are three pieces of media I’ve encountered that brilliantly give insight into the lived experiences and humanity of the queer community, which I recommend to you as my reader. The play/film The Boys in the Band  highlights the neurotic effects of living as an undesirable in a society that force-feeds heteronormativity to its members, whether they choke on it or not. The limited series Fellow Travelers  gives a longitudinal perspective of how desperately folks have tried and often failed to live acceptably to society while authentic to their own truths (along with some beautiful historical fiction covering major political events in the realm of queer issues). Pose  is a multi-season exploration of the struggles, resiliency, beauty and mess of the queer community navigating the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s and 90’s. If you can watch any of these media without feeling even a pang of emotion or compassion, then no amount of empathic writing from me or anyone else is likely to help you gain insight, and I leave you to your reality. I remember sitting on my couch several years ago after watching an episode of Pose. Two of the main characters had traveled to Hart Island to visit the grave of a loved one lost to AIDS, only to stand before a massive trench filled with unmarked pine boxes of needless death. At the time, I was in that liminal space between coming out as bisexual and realizing that I was gay. Tears streamed down my face and I fought back sobs as something deeper than empathy washed over me. It was the horror of realization that because of my queerness, there are those in this world today who would not care at all if I were to die, and there are many more who would celebrate it as divinely appropriate. The germ of that sinister idea of justice is something that I’ve encountered amongst known enemies of my sexuality in the highest stations of society, and which I’ve traced through the gestures of well-meaning loved ones fearing for my soul. But I’ve also seen it in the off-hand comments of those I’ve considered allies. A great example of this is when shortly after coming out, my friends and my family had gathered for a New Year’s Eve celebration and, as folks do, I commented on the attractiveness of a performer in the Times Square broadcast. My closest friend at the time responded by saying, “Rob, just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you have to rub (my ex-wife’s) nose in it.” A small cut to be sure, but not at all bloodless. This was a statement made by someone who is themselves a mental health worker, and a social justice advocate. The traces of cultural conditioning and the threads of moral dehumanization run through the fabric of everyone’s internal world, my own included. Sometimes the call from the killer really does come from inside the house. This is what makes coming out to the culture difficult - knowing that there are those whose reality mandates your exclusion, death, or at least passive shame. It then also means mustering the resiliency to stand and be visible, facing the overt and subtle acts of violence because shrinking back and disappearing is a fate worse than death. When I was in my faith, an oft-promised prophecy was delivered to my congregation; the words of Jesus. He said that to be a follower of Christ meant a life of oppression, of being hated, despised and persecuted. I will acknowledge that in many parts of the world and throughout history, that prophecy has certainly been true for some. I find it a great irony however, that in this modern age and in this society, I didn’t experience those words as true until I lived as a gay man. It’s an irony made cruel by the fact that such hatred is now a byproduct of ‘faith’ and often at the hands of those claiming Jesus’ prophecy for themselves. This is why coming out is hard. This is why being gay is hard. Not because it is in itself anything - it’s simply giving oneself the right to be and exist. It’s because other people, in the certainty of their unexamined reality, need it to be a struggle. It’s an easy fight because their lives aren’t the ones on the line. Of all of these three essays, this one has been the hardest to write, because the seed of bitterness is something that I have to prune back continuously. I experience what I can only describe as a divine rage against the easiness of hate, the convenience of ignorant faith, and the smug self-assuredness of closed cultural echo chambers. My words may be easily disregarded as “just another one of those angry gays” who hate faith and Jesus and good ole American values. I hope they won’t be; because in the words of Tolstoy, “There is more faith in honest doubt… than in all the creeds.” I have a more lively faith today than I ever did, doubts and all. I understand the radical love that Jesus talked about, even if I mistrust the historical manipulation of his words; I’ve seen them brought to life in the queer and hetero family that have filled the gaps of all I’ve lost. And I have deep respect and appreciation for the society that allows me (for now) to raise my voice in dissent of its erroneous movements while still enjoying its privileges. I hope that in reading this far, dear reader, that you feel my gratitude for staying with me to take in these words. And I hope that they can be a doorway to greater understanding and empathy for those who’ve read them.

Part 2: Coming out to family One of the key difficulties for my coming out and living as a gay man, as it is for many of us in the queer community, was coming out to my family. We are organisms biologically primed for survival, and our evolutionary inheritance has left us with mechanisms for securing that imperative. We think strategically, constantly gathering data and scanning our environment for signals of danger so that we can plan our steps carefully through the world. Sometimes, and I’d argue the majority of the time, this works well for us; we learn tact and social graces, and cultivate heuristic intuitions that help us to make snap-decisions for responding to an ambiguous world. Other times, these processes can go awry through over-activation, prompting selective attention that brings about cognitive blind spots and less favorable outcomes. After I had come out to myself, I wasn’t sure on which end of the spectrum I would fall as I would let my most important people in on this new revelation. That internal debate keeps a lot of us at an impasse while we try to negotiate the path that exists between truth and safety. I didn’t feel fear in knowing that I was gay, nor did I experience any divine existential condemnation. I instead felt overwhelming dread, anticipating that the pursuit of my truth meant the unraveling of an entire assumptive world that had built up around me. I felt the doom of knowing that pursuing my freedom meant embracing others’ pain and heartache. I felt the primal fear of anticipating my family’s response to what could only have been their worst fears for me growing up. My parents had never openly acknowledged my sexual difference as a child. Instead, there were many cursory conversations that would arise after an ‘incident’ would present itself. I remember finding a book in my dad’s nightstand, loosely titled “What to do when your Christian son comes out,” or something like that. He doesn’t recall ever having such a book, but I trust my memory on that one. It was a chilling find amidst a childhood of slurs and bullying that my parents felt compassion for, but were largely ill equipped to address. I had been raised in their faith tradition and was well-studied on the doctrines of the church, the Bible we read from weekly, and my family’s own “wise as serpents, harmless as doves” attempts to rationalize some of the harsher aspects of our belief. I had a lot of data to indicate where safety was, or wasn’t. I also had the best wife and partner I could ever hope for, as well as a daughter who taught me what it meant to embrace both love and responsibility. The thought of bringing pain into their lives by pursuing my truth was devastating. In my faith tradition, marriage was approached in a unique way compared to other cultures. We observed faith as the guiding process for finding a spouse (after meeting certain practical and spiritual benchmarks). I became engaged to my ex-wife without ever meeting her in person, instead relying on prayer, meaningful dreams, and a collection of personally significant experiences before reaching out to her local minister and extending my offer of marriage. She prayed about it for a week before giving her answer and just like that, we were charted for a lifetime relationship. There are few women that I think I could have had a successful marriage with from that church, and she turned out to be one of them. As friends first and partners second, we had navigated a thorny process of examining and deconstructing our faith, finding solace in each other and our chosen family in the aftermath (the church recommends shunning or at least social ostracism as a response to apostasy). She supported me in first coming out as (I thought at the time) bisexual, and later gave me the encouragement and space that resulted in my first gay kiss. It was knowing what my new experiential knowledge would bring into her life that brought me the deepest grief. I spun into the worst depression I had known, and the moment that I revealed my truth to her will forever be burned into my memory. I feared the worst from her, and felt deserving of whatever she might give me in the aftermath. I share this with you, my dear reader, to highlight the intensity of struggle that every single queer person faces, no matter their circumstance. “Coming out” is not a matter of arrogant self-assertion to others. It is an act of bravery; a willingness to sacrifice all that is not true in the pursuit of cultivating something that is more honest, real, and enduring. In each moment that I shared my queerness with my loved ones, a timeline of shared futures died. All of the givens that we rested on to create a semblance of safety for the coming years were now gone. In short, coming out is an act of disruption. In a poetic sense, coming out is an act of sacrifice, with shared dreams as the bloodied offering. My ex-wife surprised me. In my priming for grief and fear of the outcomes, I expected the worst from her. And, in my expectation I treated her as such, for a time. All of the pain and grief that I predicted would be there certainly manifested, but my scanning of the environment for danger prevented me from seeing the depths of her humanity and love for me. Our path forward would certainly be different than what we had expected some eight years prior when “two flesh became one” as they say in the church…. But she showed me that sometimes, when it counts most, our worst fears are stories more than they are based in facts. My brief retelling here is a flagrant simplification of our journey, and nearly four years later it is still unfolding. Because of her, however, I don’t fear for where it will end. Coming out to my immediate family was very different. To their credit, the response was fairly muted compared to the stories I’ve heard from others in our community. My father only commented on the assured damage that coming out and divorcing would have on my daughter. My mother inquired if this meant I would be coming out as trans soon (a common conversation within uneducated or indoctrinated families). My three sisters’ responses ranged from open attempts at shaming me to pledges for prayer on my behalf. It left them all in a quandary. To follow the strict dictates of the church would mean that I should have been shunned outright, as I had made myself an “enemy of the faith.” The love that they had for me, and the empathy it might give them access to served as an existential threat to the bubble of reality that makes up their worldview. Unlike the time when I had left the church a couple of years prior, this time there was no overt push-back beyond the initial responses; they instead had to resign themselves to the loss of their loved one. There was no room for curiosity or an interest to understand my journey, nor could they allow the largeness of their grief to make space for connection to mine. We became distinct islands of familial loss that will likely never be repaired. Sometimes the worst fears anticipated are realized. Trauma as a concept is fairly new to our social awareness; its earliest public acknowledgment was in the observation of “shell shock” in military veterans during the First World War, and for a long time was thought to be the result of personal frailty. Experts believed that soldiers with trauma lacked the psychological fortitude to handle the rigors of war like other “stronger” men. Trauma wasn’t recognized as a wider phenomenon until the same emotional and behavioral symptoms were observed in survivors of sexual assault. We are less than a hundred years into our research and treatment of trauma, with the bulk of development taking place only within the last 30-40 years. Trauma can be overt or covert; not all trauma is the result of a near-death experience or (lived or threatened) physical injury. The formula for cultivating trauma is remarkably simple: increase threat and danger (physical, emotional, relational, financial, spiritual, etc.) and decrease personal empowerment/autonomy. The more trapped a person feels in their circumstance, the less voice they have to advocate for themselves, and the less access to resources for self-preservation, the greater the likelihood that a trauma response sets in. It is these factors that make being gay and coming out to family members traumatizing for many queer folk. We are pursuing a path of self-realization while walking a knife’s edge that threatens to remove our social supports, our attachment figures, and give access to humiliating or overtly dangerous messages delivered by those we love most. The scale of resources for non-affirming families is much larger than those inherently available to the individual. When families overtly reject their queer loved one, trauma is there. When families covertly reject someone by acknowledging only the convenient parts in order to preserve a relationship strained by inconvenient queerness, trauma is there. When a queer person is fighting to create honest visibility within themselves, the erasure of their voice and its significance by those they love creates an internal experience symbolically akin to being tied up in the basement while the dinner party goes on upstairs. You can scream yourself hoarse, but no one is coming to see or save you. If families of queer people truly love them, they need to empathically connect to this subjective reality. I suspect that without the reinforcing restrictions of thought pervaded by cultural inertia and fundamentalist religions, more families would be able to. All things being as they are however, coming out to family means entertaining the very real risk of relational death, without the socially sanctioned means for grieving and recovering from that death. This is trauma. This is what makes coming out, hard. In my next essay, I’ll explore the societal and cultural forces that make it so difficult for families to unequivocally embrace their queer family.

Part 1: Coming out to ourselves I’ve been out of the closet a relatively short amount of time, given my age. Always a late bloomer, my journey into self-acknowledgment and acceptance followed a predictable path of desperately trying to be who I thought I needed to be, rather than who I was. Overthinking and over-feeling my way along through life, I had to sift through mountains of religious brainwashing (I mean, conditioning ,) enmeshed family dynamics, and my own white-knuckled desperation for a particular brand of heteronormativity before I could come out. If I were an outsider to this experience, I would have guessed that coming out to myself would be the hardest part of it all; the absence of self-honesty is one of the most effective tools for self preservation in our existential toolkit, after all. I was wrong. Coming out to myself was probably the easiest thing in the world. For all the ways and times I had lead myself through a tacit conversion therapy process, there were traces of queerness that defied my attempts at burial or reframing. My inability to feel safe amongst straight, cisgender men. My empathic creativity that always lent a nuanced, outsider’s take on a subject. My insistent sex dreams and furtive, guilt-ridden forays into gay pornography were infrequent enough to let me convince myself that I was simply working through the trauma of being “falsely” bullied for being gay in school; their profundity and ability to throw me wildly off my emotional center, however, made them monuments that dotted my internal landscape. The way that I carried myself through the world was queer enough and self-censored enough, demanding enough of straightness that most folks in my orbit shrugged me off as “artistic;” and after all, I was an upstanding member of the church. A minister, a Bible-class teacher, a loving father and husband. I was genuine and sincere in how I lived my life, even if in retrospect I see how sincerely knotted up I was in my own illusions. Dogged by a constant hunger pain for some kind of authenticity and meaningfulness of being that always eluded me, I assumed that depression and anxiety were simply part of what it meant to be “me.” As I said though, coming out to myself was probably the easiest thing in the world; not because it wasn’t painful, but because it was such an honest, transparent, simple truth. The first time I kissed a man, I felt myself clicking into instantaneous alignment. Like a complex combination lock in some sort of heist film, cogs and pins tumbled into place. Distinct memories and experiences that had long puzzled me or which had been relegated to the shrugs of life’s mystery flashed through my mind with mesmerizing clarity. Only now, they had a unifying thread of context. For the first time in my life, I felt whole. More so than when I found my identity in faith, more so than when I affirmed it in my familial or cultural background, more so than any of the stories I rested in to find a semblance of stability for living. I was sitting on the bank of a small pond as it happened. I had just kissed a man - more than kissed him, I had experienced  him. He had kissed me back. A mystery of butterflies had exploded into a maelstrom of experiential truth. “Are you okay?” He had asked. I’d been sitting for a few minutes in the silence of a brief orgasmic reverie, staring at the water. “I am,” I had said. “I keep waiting for something to happen - for the heavens to open up and the lightning to flash. I keep waiting for that feeling of guilt. Of condemnation. But all I feel is… peace.” When you grow up in a fundamentalist Christian tradition as I had, you’re taught that there are two truths that you rest on to guide your life. The first, is the ‘infallible’ word of God as the arbiter of concrete morality. The second, is peace; the “peace that passes all understanding,” as we’d referred to it. The absence of conflict as pure, sacred truth brings your spirit into alignment with the spirit of the sacred. I had thought I’d known that peace before, and had staked my worldview and my life on it. In that moment, I realized that the peace I’d pledged myself to back in a church pew at age 15 was a promissory note, and not a fulfillment of the reality I was now experiencing. I’d been taught to follow that peace as the spirit of the divine that would lead me in the pathways that god intended for me. In that moment, I knew that the only thing I could do was to follow that peace, and trust where it would lead me. This is what I and my queer brethren wish our heteronormative counterparts could understand, but that somehow gets lost in translation. To understand and embrace our gayness is not a fringe aspect of our humanity; it is a core part of the collected dimensions that define what it means for us to be fully human. We embrace and celebrate it because our authenticity of being is the gateway to accessing all of our gifts and resiliency for living. Attempting to give up or reject that aspect of ourselves is not a noble or holy sacrifice - it’s a granular form of genocide. In the last meaningful conversation I had with my mother, she had encouraged me to live celibately, in accordance with her faith’s teachings. To her, god and my family don’t care at all that I’m gay. They care about what I do with the fact that I’m gay. To them, living out my sexual identity is a black-and-white, non-debatable abomination. A one-way ticket to eternal damnation. She urged me to repent and go back to living the only way that she believes can bring the hope of salvation. For her, it’s a life and death decision. I couldn’t convince her that for me it was a life or death decision too, only for me death would be the annihilation of the gift I had been given. The gift of being who I am. “You say you don’t care that I’m gay,” I had said. “I wish you cared more that I was.” Coming out to ourselves is one of the easiest, most natural things we queer people can ever do. It’s always there, waiting for us in simple honesty to be acknowledged in its indelible truth. And the peace it leads us to is divine. To me, that’s what it means to be gay, at least in part. In the words of the self-described “notorious” drag queen Trixie Mattel, “Being gay is easy, other people make it hard.”  In my next essay, I’ll unpack a little bit more of what she means by that.

Back when I was an interning student therapist at the Faulk Center in Boca Raton some *mumble mumble* years ago, there was a quote by humanistic psychotherapist and theorist Carl Rogers (1995) hung on the rotunda wall in large, shining, impossible-to miss letters: “The curious paradox is, when I accept myself, just as I am, then I can change.” I spent a year passing by that signage so much that the imagery of it is still burned into my brain. As a graduate student and armchair philosopher, this quote would flummox and irritate me; in fact, I can recall having a sermon (in a former [heterosexual] life, I was a lay-minister in my birth-church) on the ‘problematic’ conclusions of such logic! In my mind, unconditional self-acceptance was not only heresy – and I suppose that might in some circles still be true – it was admitting defeat in the pursuit of one’s higher ideals. I couldn’t reconcile this idea of giving myself permission to be imperfect as a gateway to self-development and transcendence. Well, after roughly ten years in the field and a lot personal transformations as a result of that work, I think I’ve parsed it out. Alfred Adler (another psychotherapist and early theorist) introduced the idea of the ideal self versus the perceived self (Dinkmeyer, et al., 1979). The ideal self is made up of our most favorable imaginings about who we could be if the circumstances were jusssst right; in this framework, our vulnerabilities have been overcome, we’ve developed superiority and mastery over ourselves, and we function in our fullest sense of empowerment . Think Dragon Ball Z and being perpetually in ‘super saiyan’ mode – this IS the final form! The perceived self is who we understand ourselves to be in reaction to our experiential reality. Generally speaking, this does not tend to be a very empowered interpretation of ourselves, particularly when our internalized critics serve as a template for evaluation. Neither the ideal or perceived are or need to be reflections of objective reality. Our internal logic and subjective perceptions drive both what we see and what we think we need to be in order to be happy with ourselves (Dinkmeyer, et al., 1979). In this way, the ideal self functions a lot like Harry Potter’s Mirror of Erised – it shows us what we believe will make us truly happy and content with ourselves. Side note: I was late to the game on this, but it blew my mind when I learned that ‘erised’ was just ‘desire’ backwards. JK Rowling’s clever-lazy-cleverness is a true artform at times. You’re welcome if this is new to you as well. Enjoy sharing the tidbit at your next cocktail party while discussing the cultural and political implications of Rowling’s work versus her public presence! Adler proposed that the further apart our ideal and perceived selves are, the more likely we are to feel disempowerment, interpersonal disconnection, and to rely on less-functional solutions to our problems (Dinkmeyer, et al., 1979). This fits so well with Rogers’ sentiment, and becomes clearer when we invert his quote: “The frustrating reality is, when I cannot accept myself, I am locked in a never-ending struggle.” When I become fixated on correcting a perceived flaw, I’m doing two things. Firstly, I’m keeping my deficits at the center of my personal universe; everything revolves around these issues, and so my self-concept becomes dependent on them to preserve a cohesive internal world. Change can’t be possible then, because I have to risk everything about myself disintegrating (an existentially terrifying ego thought) in order to let go of those flaws. Secondly, when I fixate on something I have identified as a flaw, I’m withholding a cognitive capacity to flexibly understand my flaws as having a role to play in my successes. So I can be scatter-brained and tangential (thanks ADHD!) – those ‘flaws’ are what can empower me to be a dynamic, flexible and responsive educator. If I’m berating myself constantly for my inability to lead a discussion like my more neurotypical colleagues, I miss out on the gifts my brain gives to my students that they really enjoy. Bereft of self-graciousness, I then move through the world rigidly, pessimistically, and consistently feeling smaller than I need to feel in my own skin. My ideal self becomes further and further away while my perceived self starts to look and function like a personal boogeyman. It’s only when I can take a step back from my perceptions and immediate reactions to be a mindful observer of myself (in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy we call this ‘cognitive defusion’) that I can understand my personal qualities as having both benefits and liabilities (Hayes & Smith, 2005). Even the things I assume to be my greatest strengths have shadows! Case in point, am I deeply introspective, or am I an overthinker? Yes. Yes, I am. Holding space for the possibility that my most hated features might offer me some of life’s greatest gifts is a birthing ground for transcendence. It allows me to think dialectically; not in an either/or mindset, but rather a yes-and stance. It is that very space where change becomes accessible because everything I am has a good reason for being what it is. Life then, becomes a journey of lovingly leveraging ‘liabilities’ (say that five times fast!) into their optimal strengths while gently course correcting around what we experience as problematic about them. We can also function graciously around our strengths- not expecting them to be a suit of armor to shield us from the world’s hurts, but rather context-bound tools in an eclectic collection that makes up the self as we seek to connect, thrive, and build a meaningful life. References to learn more about concepts discussed in this post: Dinkmeyer, D. C., Dinkmeyer, D. C., Sperry, L. (1979). Adlerian counseling and psychotherapy.             (2nd ed.). Columbus, OH: Merrill Publishing Company. Hayes, S. C. & Smith, S. (2005). Get out of your mind and into your life. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger             Publications. Rogers, C. (1995). On becoming a person: A therapist's view of psychotherapy. New York, NY:             Houghton Mifflin Company.

Sacred Wrath I am irritation. I am annoyance. I am the prickly pit that sits in the space between each breath that never quits and spits in the face of equanimity, predicting calamity, driving you to insanity for refusing to give place to your subjective truths. I am the proof positive that you are made up of negatives, filled with expletives. The dishonorable discharge of your id; that voice of your inner kidding yourself if you think you can blink and breathe away the desire to speed through this moment that Einstein knew would last a lifetime when you spurn my right to earn you a fully human experience, without the ‘shoulds,’ and ‘musts,’ and ‘proprieties at all times’, forcing a false deference to manufactured goods more easily perished than cherished, because I am just as divine as the sublime heights to which you climb. I am the sweat and grime that lets you know that you worked for it, put in the time. I am the prologue that cuts through the fog and lights the path. I am sacred wrath bubbling beneath the barely bound glory hounds who strain for applause because you all somehow decided that I’m better off derided than praised. And as you’re raised to frigid, fragile heights, still I am there to spare you the hollow-point obliteration of gun-to-head conformity; let me impress on you the enormity of your space, your form, your being. Let me whisper to you of what I’m seeing and release you from fleeing that which will not destroy, but define. I am the rebellion of being that knows you are just fine whether you believe it or not because I refuse to let you be caught in a net gain of self-rejecting pain. Honor me, and be free; deny me and be forever held in a crypt of life lived nondescript a legacy of obedient, invisible silence praised only by those who trade your bones for stock in social bondage. -rrf ---- I think this poem begs a bit of an explanation. Anger, irritation, annoyance, frustration... this is one of the pockets of emotional experience that I find myself repressing and denying out of discomfort and avoidance. I don't like the idea of feeling anger, much less using it. In the balance of yin and yang energy, I recognize that I am sometimes out of balance, finding myself feeding the yin (welcoming, softness, openness, receptiveness, yielding) and putting it on a pedestal over yang (firmness, action, initiating, expressing). I tend to categorize my emotions along these lines and also notice a pattern of preferring to lead with a persona of softer (what I tell myself are more socially desirable) features. Lately finding myself drawn to some of the philosophical aspects of Jungian psychology, I've been more and more interested in driving my personal growth through shadow work; this poem is an attempt at processing through some of the discomforting feelings of irritation, frustration, anger, wrath - that whole spectrum of "violation emotion" that gets activated when a boundary has been crossed, a perceived wrong committed, or a personal expectation unmet. The shadow, as Jung talked about it, is made up of the parts of ourselves that we deem unfit for consumption. These qualities violate our expectation of self and contradict the persona we lead with in public life. I tell myself, "If people really knew how selfish and self-absorbed I really am, how petty, angry, entitled, etc..... nobody would want me." In response, I (we) try to minimize, repress, subjugate or disown these parts. I lead myself with shame, because the reality is, if *I* acknowledge how petty, angry, etc. I am, *I* don't want myself. I project anticipatory rejection onto others because I'm playing an internal game of self-rejection, borne from judgment and fear of my own multi-dimensional self. Jung (and those who practice based on his philosophies) argued that confrontation and integration are the necessary steps we need to undergo in order to avoid these denied parts from bubbling up in other unsavory ways, like depression, anxiety, judgment, projection, violence... essentially, if there's something that you look at in society and go "yeeeeeechhhhh," that's the collective shadow, and it's also your shadow resonating with it. It's an indication that there's work to do; because when we take ownership of ourselves, and seek to understand our darker parts, we can honor their utility in our lives. It's in that space of integration that we begin to realize that there is nothing about being human that is inherently flawed. Everything (to borrow from one of Jung's contemporaries, Alfred Adler) serves an important purpose, whether it is immediate, future, individual, or evolutionary - everything exists in our subjective phenomenology with utility (we call this teleology of behavior). So, accept this poem as what it is - a flawed, shadowy human being, just like yourself, who is trying to understand his uglier parts, to embrace them, and find the meaning in them. I hope it can inspire similar introspection for you!

Imagine that breathing was not a habit and you had to hold your heart in your hands every moment a life beginning and ending with the looming question: "Will this go on?" Will we find strength to attend the furnace of our easily-expired flesh engine or will we decide that we are simply too tired to continue on? Imagine how every breath in would feel like a choice and the millisecond of fuel that soothed our aching chest would inspire us to reach for such heights once again a life lived in short spurts of both panic and peace in equal measure a constant reminder of death's granite fingers locked around our throat in a lover's lustful embrace Imagine you let yourself acknowledge the recognition that to breathe in and live is a gift that both inspires and demands without interest in the investments of either neither still would anything more be required to deserve an anniversary of moments whereupon we lavish ourselves with life as a lover his suitor in kisses this is without a doubt a feat for which we seldom give ourselves credit and perhaps if more we could a more perfect love of self might be found. -rrf

Discomfort is not the enemy of a good life not the specter that hounds our American Dreams as media and materialism makes it seem nor is bursting at the seams with surplus the marker of victory in our war against existential dread for while we lie awake in our plush poster beds we are still made uneasy and dreadfully our satin sheets become the linings of coffins and air magicked to our conform to our comfort shifts to the stale stuffy prison of a pharaoh's crypt full of treasures that others measure meant for pleasure but only in metaphor as we toss and turn away from inconvenient truths our luxuries preferred as proofs that the deeper aches of hearts unmoored can be finally ignored and we look towards a future of “better” and even more so we score our successes on avoiding messes while stockpiling suits and dresses stressing our material blessings as evidence that “keep moving forward” is the antidote to ever having to find value in the uneasy ambivalence of unlimited potential in a present moment telling ourselves that peace of mind is a treasure we can only find through the daily grind of time against our mortal coil and that blind faith in what awaits is somehow excuse for merely enduring pain rather than embracing it, dreaming of rainbows and never stopping to shiver in the rain our bodies dancing with the delight of discomfort that says - life is happening now - growth is happening now - everything possible in this moment is happening now - and there is a fullness in it a gravity of consequence as all that unfurls in the space of a second stands on the fixedness of every single thing that happened before a common-sense observation ignored by our existential procrastination, not commutable to the future of only possibility or a reworking of an immutable past no - this - discomfort cries - is all you’ve got - it invites us to attention as it makes mention of what is and what is not; and both what we’ve got as well as correcting what we thought our lives had built to in this moment it bids us foment a charge into the unknown to embrace a race to the center of ourselves as we delve deeper into the caverns of our own potential a whole world at our fingertips if we could only move toward our pain rather than fleeing into the safety of things that keep us still while saying we’re moving forward -rrf

You tell me a garden cannot love you say it's merely complex chlorophyll coursing through the daffodil pulsing and processing the rays of sunshine to make them even more mine because it's not enough that the energy is for us all but like a flower becomes honey, the money shot that brings me in and bids me drink sweet - sweet and musky - why the love of this green man drapes across my husky thighs and you cannot shield our glory, you, shield your eyes but your very sighs of disdain are the orgasmic dance of inhale and exhale of becoming and undoing that circle and spin knowing neither will ever win but it's okay because victories are pointless and it's the dance that holds the beauty in the beast of knowing and never holding, of choosing and always losing, of commitment to aching in the absence of our love's fulfillment, of willing into being a whole universe of possibilities where absolutely anything can happen and does quite frequently, in fact and acknowledging that does not detract from or indicate some other lack in logic or process just because the flaw and crack in our marble crypt of certitude lies hidden beneath our mutual love of the flowers draped out in honor of stories past come to that and doesn't the knowledge that they give air so freely and without preference for one kind of dance partner or the other kind of show the most pure kind of divine love always under our noses but invisible not needing to be seen or spoken of to be true stop and smell the roses? what a shame you merely peek through palmed fingers while the scent of our love lingers to sweeten that which was always and will ever be true: that I am loved by the flowers and so are you. -rrf

you cannot hate yourself into happiness you cannot reject yourself into peace it is love that is the key to unlocking the chains it is love that makes us free -rrf

On faith, and other things: try to see it and you never will allow yourself to see and you'll never stop -rrf

It is sadly an oft-valid stereotype of gay culture to have complicated relationships with parents. Queer people walk such a fine line between honoring our dignity and honoring the desire to maintain our family-of-origin attachments. And, because world-views can be pretty perceptually blinding, family members may not even be aware of the devastating emotional torture that can ensue for their loved one as relationships are actively being reformed. This poem is for the children of families so full of love and so full of faith that a love of god overwhelms love of the child. May you feel seen, may you feel validated, May our pain be honored. "Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter." - proverb (un)Conditional You ask me to love you openly and without conditions yet there are so many barbs and edges that put up hedges and line the pathway between your heart and mine and its a long walk to dinnertime because you expect the sinner to climb down to your lofty heights. You say to lay down my defenses as you erect fences and time becomes recursive because history requires I investigate the fires lit through the fields of our crossed paths and mixed desires your will against my own swallowed by need after need to find peace between us and these things tear at my heart like saw-toothed strings while the question rings over and over and the question tells me it is not safe because I know that laying down the drawbridge is not something spoken of, it’s shown. I didn’t choose to be defensive I’d never wish to be unkind I would never want to hurt you but I need peace of mind I wish that you could love me how I’d like to love you back without exception feeling every day gratitude that I am yours and you are mine trusting that I’m not just an object for you to be proud of or possess alone feeling that you really know me with no fear of your love’s egress as I’d invite you into my closet to know me more because in love there’s nothing to atone when it’s love with no conditions and traditions don’t come first when it comes to your first and only son. I wish I didn’t need to believe you loved me because experience extinguishes the need for faith alone and doubt would be relinquished to the fleeting spectors of nighttime visions snarling of paternal divisions only to be seen as clownish in morning’s light. It’s alright. I’ve come to terms with the path trod and the knowledge that you don’t get to decide which dreams come true and which ones vanish in the night. If only I was not anathema to your god and he had grace enough for all the creation made and the creation you say he let spot and tarnish. I wish yours was not a god who said that shedding blood made it permissible to speak out of both sides of your mouth; it is inadmissible, my opinion, I know and sowing discord was never a price I wanted to afford but the chords struck ring true in the spaces between what is said and what is done as it is there that our petty bitter battles arelost and won. You say I’m lost but the cost of the love unconditional yielded fruits so superficial that they rotted in the blaze of my earnestness and need to be no more and no less than exactly what I am: a vessel queerly made imperfect but still good. I thought I understood what love really was and it frightened me because an unconditional love with so many strings attached while saying that this is unmatched and feeling so incomplete after prompted me to know that I was always meant to represent your personal disasters. I wish that loving me to you didn’t equal serving two masters especially since what we were promised was freedom to be exactly who we are a mosaic of majestic differences forged in the fires of our inconvenient truths. In the bankruptcy of our pain could we set aside our egos and search for instances where consensus is and release the needto be so right and so sure?I cannot endure to live in a love where I am asked to give and be thankful for shame in return. I’ve burned in the fires, faced my desires, I know how I’m wired and find it inspired at last, I love myself in the way your god promised in the way you said you did and I’m too wise now to experience your coldness as warmth. Like a dog beaten one too many times just for being a dog I crave and cower at the arched eyebrow of your love. I’d like to take the high road but it’s hard to reach you from these heights; above it all I find myself dreaming that you could love me seemingly the way that you ask me to love you. Openly, without condition or expectation, as I am willing -and I am willing - but it is killing me to bleed out standing on the glass of our past while I wait for you to brush the crumbs off your table. I am able to feed myself but I’d rather you joined me at the feast; I hope you can find peace. -rrf

I'm sorry love i am broken; broken from bones that were improperly set during an age when things simply couldn't exist and it was safer to cage myself rather than fly free because boundaries of holiness and righteousness were myopically drawn resulting in me wholly ghosting myself building haunted mansions framed with fear instead of curiosity avoidance and animosity replacing discernment with a ferocity and strength that made self-love an atrocity much less loving you to lengths far beyond how I perceived I could measure up despite how much I treasured you and felt the warmth of your love's protection rejection instead of acceptance could only ever be our story's ending because "If you can't love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else" was not the moral story offered to this child soldier bleeding from a battle not needing to be fought cast in an ill-fitting mold predicated on being sold off as a cheerful servant and now I walk with a limp for being too observant fast enough still to catch you but too pained to keep pace feeling so at home and so out of place because I am just learning how to stoke the hearth fires within trembling to hear you caress me with your outpouring of sacred honor I feared the good in front of me because of the brokenness within me and I hope you see the truth in my plea that your heart be not too broken by the hard words I have spoken because being broken is what I need right now to make old wrongs right because for something to heal I must be able to feel the fullness of my length and breadth as I plumb the depths of my despair not to ruminate but repair and while healing is a journey and not an end state I know I cannot co-create the life we dream up without tearing down the edifices of my internal ghetto I will not risk erecting a palace of hope without first shoring up my foundations because I will not risk sinkholes opening up where bedrock once was and swallowing our sacred creations for this I break your heart and mine hoping that when we both heal and feel we can continue on the new things we build will be more lasting both hard fought, and hard won. -rrf