Pride, Identity, and the Therapy Room
Pride, Identity, and the Therapy Room
The Quiet Corner | FS Psychotherapy
June is Pride Month, and for many LGBTQIA+ people it is a time of visibility, celebration, and community. But for others, it can also bring up something more complicated. A reminder of the distance between who you are and who you were allowed to be. A moment to take stock of how far you’ve come, and how much the journey has cost. A time when the gap between the public celebration and the private interior can feel particularly wide.
Wherever you find yourself this Pride Month, this post is for you.
Identity Is Not a Fixed Destination
One of the things that makes LGBTQIA+ experience so varied, and so resistant to easy summary, is that identity is not a single event. It is a process. Coming out, if that is part of your story, is rarely a one-time moment of clarity. It tends to be ongoing, layered, and context-dependent. You might be out in some areas of your life and not others. You might have arrived at a comfortable sense of who you are and still find that certain environments, certain relationships, or certain moments require you to make a choice about how much of yourself to bring.
That navigation is real work. And it deserves to be taken seriously.
What the Therapy Room Can Offer
For many LGBTQIA+ people, therapy has not always felt like a safe space. The history of psychology and psychiatry’s relationship with LGBTQ+ identities is a complicated one, and the legacy of that history does not simply disappear because the official position has changed. Many people carry a reasonable wariness about whether a therapist will truly understand their experience, or whether they will find themselves in the position of educating the person who is supposed to be supporting them.
That wariness is valid. And it points to something important: not all therapy is equally equipped to support LGBTQIA+ clients, and the fit between therapist and client matters enormously.
What a genuinely affirming therapeutic space offers is not a therapist who treats your identity as incidental, nor one who makes it the defining lens through which everything is interpreted. It is a therapist who holds your whole self with curiosity and care, who understands that your experience of the world has been shaped by your identity without reducing you to it, and who can sit with the full complexity of what that means for you.
The Things That Don’t Always Get Said
There are particular experiences that LGBTQIA+ people often carry that can be hard to bring into the therapy room, or anywhere else. The grief of years spent not knowing, or knowing and not being able to say so. The specific pain of family rejection, or the more ambiguous pain of families who are technically accepting but who have never quite been able to meet you fully. The exhaustion of code-switching, of reading rooms, of carrying a vigilance about safety that others don’t have to think about.
There is also, for many people, the complicated relationship with the LGBTQIA+ community itself. The ways it can feel like home and like another place where you don’t quite fit simultaneously. The particular pressures and hierarchies that exist within it. The experience of being multiply marginalised, of being LGBTQIA+ and also neurodivergent, or an immigrant, or from a culture where your identity carries additional weight.
These things deserve space. Not to be fixed or resolved, but to be heard.
On Being Neurodivergent and LGBTQ+
Research increasingly suggests that there is a meaningful overlap between neurodivergent and LGBTQIA+ populations. Many autistic and ADHD adults come to an understanding of their gender or sexuality later in life, sometimes alongside or as part of the process of understanding their neurodivergence. The two are often deeply intertwined, both touching on questions of identity, of fitting and not fitting, of a lifetime of adapting to a world that wasn’t quite designed for you.
If this is part of your experience, it is worth finding a therapist who can hold both dimensions of it without flattening either.
You Don’t Have to Celebrate If It’s Complicated
Pride Month is many things. For some people it is genuinely joyful, a time of visibility and community and colour. For others, it brings up grief, or anger, or a quiet sadness about the parts of the journey that were painful. For many, it is all of those things at once.
You don’t have to perform joy if what you actually feel is more complicated than that. You don’t have to have arrived at a settled, peaceful relationship with your identity in order to deserve support. And you don’t have to wait until you are in crisis to reach out.
Wherever you are in your own story, there is space for it here.
A Note on My Practice
I work from a non-oppressive, inclusive framework that is affirming of all sexual orientations and gender identities. I have experience supporting LGBTQIA+ clients navigating questions of identity, coming out at various life stages, family relationships, and the particular intersections of LGBTQIA+ experience with neurodivergence, cross-cultural life, and other aspects of identity.
Sessions are available online across the UK and internationally, in English or Italian. If you would like to explore whether working together might be a good fit, I offer a free 20-minute consultation with no obligation to proceed.
Federica Savoré is a BACP Accredited psychotherapist and COSCA Practitioner offering counselling, supervision and training in Aberdeen and online across the UK. To get in touch, visit https://www.fspsychotherapy.com/contact-me
