Accept Everything or Else!

As I read over the manual for loved ones of people experiencing SSA from Encourage, I am struck, in particular, by its section on the acceptance we want to feel. What stands out to me is the need for that acceptance and the reality that many of us who seek it already have it in our relationships in regard to everything in our lives except our same-sex activity. Because we identify ourselves this way exclusively, and because society encourages us to do so, this behavioral choice can become everything to us. If you don’t accept this, you don’t accept me!

In the video I made for Courage, I say at the beginning that I felt my dad rejected me and that my brother never liked me. This is said as pics of me sitting in my dad's lap with a big smile on my face and a pic of my bro laughing with me when I was a baby are shown. After the video was edited and I saw these images with those words, I recognized the contradiction between what I felt and what these pictures show.

Many of us who carry the cross of SSA also carry the cross of mental illness of some sort. Psychology has tried to separate these two things and present SSA as something separate from mental illness, but it isn’t, in my opinion. Many of us describe similar emotional feelings and experiences in relation to our same-sex parents and peers, but quite often, when those parents and peers are questioned, they do not see things the way we do. They often feel they must have missed something, but I’m not sure that is true. I think, in many cases, we who experience SSA may be the ones missing something about those relationships.

In my case, my relationships with my dad, brother, and same-sex peers were far from perfect, but that does not fall exclusively on their shoulders. Many of my brothers and sisters in the community and I sometimes try to make it out to be that way because of an inability to see clearly and to separate fact from feeling.

Feelings seem to overwhelm many of us who experience SSA. Our intellect sometimes seems to be set aside, and our emotions can dominate us. This is encouraged by those in the LGBTQ community out of a distorted sense of love and acceptance. Whatever you feel happened may be the truth for you, but it doesn’t always matter if it is reality. This needs to be countered with reality in a way that is palatable to the person experiencing SSA, while still giving them the jolt of reality that will help with long-term healing, even if, in the short term, it may push them away a bit.

Human-Written, AI Spell-Checked 5/19/21 AD

Image from WIX AI Image Generator