Last week, I had some friends read a poem I wrote and reflect on how strongly it captures the idea of opposing forces. I wrote the poem as a way to process and give feedback for a friend’s short film, but it ended with a line of wondering that has felt familiar to me across my life and that I often consider as a therapist: “Can things be different?”

Wrestling With Identity, Faith, and Belonging

I’m not surprised that the creative writing I do ends up centering on themes of tension and indecision. There are many ways I have felt the American and evangelical Christian cultures around me try to narrow the way things should be or the way I should strive toward a single standard. I know these are common messages many people encounter: “Be more masculine. Be honorable and upright in this way. Success is having a family, stable work, and commitment to church.”

For much of my life, though, it has been hard to actually live amidst such messages when I have felt the pulls of different identities—what can feel like opposing forces. “Am I Korean enough to feel like I am honoring my family culture? Am I American enough to fit in at school and other social settings? Is my expression of faith acceptable to others and to God? Am I building a strong character as a man? Am I allowed to be queer? Is there space for both my queerness and my spirituality?”

Navigating Queer Identity in Christian Communities

I start this with a little more personal exposition because it is important for me and the ways I practice to name the places I am coming from as an affirming therapist for queer spirituality. I know I am not alone in wrestling with questions like these, but I still grieve for a younger self that often sat tortured with these uncertainties alone.

The personal side of my work in graduate school for both marriage and family therapy, as well as theology, has often gravitated toward reconciling faith and identity precisely because I know how difficult and valuable it is to explore this intersection. So, let’s jump in a little further into what it might look like to explore identity and faith in therapy, or just for later consideration.

A Therapist’s Lens: Reconciling Faith and Identity

I practice from a biopsychosocial-spiritual lens, meaning that spirituality is an essential piece of people that I recognize and want to make room for in therapy. When outside dominant forces block a connection for a person with that piece of themselves, try to control it, and rigidly set what that part of being ought to look like, it is painful and destabilizing.

Spiritual rejection can be particularly painful when religious communities are often presented as places of love, family, connection, and belonging. The real loss of community that people face in the process of deconstruction or re-examining beliefs is overwhelming, in addition to the already unsteady way it feels to process internal ideas and beliefs that don’t seem like they are meant to go together.

The Pain of Spiritual Rejection and Exclusion

In my own Christian upbringing, I was taught that my relationship with God should represent a sort of ultimate and safe attachment. Despite how my own family relationships may have set the tone for what to expect around the themes of love and acceptance, God’s love for me was taught as something unimaginably great and important.

The problem with what I was taught, though, is that the promises of unconditional love that were offered were not truly offered in good faith, at least not for me. The message that I came to internalize, one I know many others have as well, is that there is something profoundly bad about our own existence.

Whether I would hear it explicitly or more subtly, I was left believing that something was wrong with me to my core unless I could shed who I was to become someone new. More specifically, I was led to believe that my queerness held me back from getting to experience this amazing kind of connection I was hearing about, and that remaining in wickedness and suffering was the direct fault of my own will.

Healing at the Intersection of Queer Spirituality and Therapy

Now, I am glad that I can and do believe that yes, things can be different than the narrow vision of what I thought was possible or acceptable before. There is more than just one way forward, even if some of the other paths are ones that seem far less trodden, and this journey onward does not need to be made alone.

It is not an easy thing to re-learn what it is to give and receive love or trust what a healthy relationship looks like after internalizing such strong negative narratives. From both my personal and clinical experiences, though, I know that patient love and steady healing are out there. My story is my own, but I care about working at this intersection of LGBTQ spirituality and therapy because of it.

Embracing Ongoing Healing and Wholeness

Though I am a therapist who now holds some theological training, I don’t view my role as one of giving a person a new set of beliefs. However, I am highly curious about exploring past and current evolving beliefs with folks.

As stated previously, I don’t think there is one way or path towards healing around how a deep spiritual relationship can get twisted to become based in fear and self-doubt. I also don’t think there is just one way for folks to navigate or resolve the tension they may experience between identities that are seemingly at odds. For some, there may be a bit of tension that never totally goes away, and others may find that new beliefs look radically different than what they held before.

Rather than healing being a final arrival somewhere, I often view it as an ongoing process. What I ultimately hope people may continue to hold for themselves is that their wholeness is valued, appreciated, and loved. Spiritual and religious communities do exist that invite a fullness of self and that even draw particular attention to the unique perspective and power that can come from being queer. Belonging is possible.

Lament as a Queer Spiritual Practice

As one representation of what it can look like to hold queerness and faith together, I want to leave folks with a practice to try or engage in. Lament for me has been personally meaningful as a means of spiritual connection in which I am allowed to bring forward my full self and my full range of feelings.

A lament takes the form of a sort of prayer or cry outward, but it can also be a work of poetry, a personal journal entry, a letter, or some other adaptive and creative expression. When writing or speaking a lament, it’s helpful to address it to someone, whether that is God, a past self, the Earth, or a beloved relative.

A complaint is made, and the plaintiff is encouraged to speak honestly—the anger or desperation expressed can be contained and handled because there is real trust in the recipient's power. Pleas for intervention contain a bit of hope even as the reality of the lament is laid bare. The final thing I appreciate about practicing lament is that it is often a communal action and reflects the community’s voices; our pain may be faced together.

An Invitation to Connect

If spiritual practices like lament sound interesting to explore further or if folks are curious about anything I’ve touched on here, I’d love to connect.

I’ll end by sharing some snippets of a brief lament I wrote in the past as I was reflecting on the weight that can come about in the everyday:

“I come in the quiet of uncertainty and the apathy of overwork … I feel so feeble and pathetic, but you remind me that you want all of me, me fully. Help me to hear and to trust that you are also present in the silence.”

Go gently,

Aaron