COUNSELLING GAYS AND LESBIANS

By Paul Martin
Having access to good quality counselling can be incredibly important for almost everyone at some stage of their lives. Anyone who’s had good counselling can tell you how well it works. Talking to a well trained and experienced person who isn’t involved in your life, has no ulterior motives, is objective and can support and guide you to feeling better in a confidential setting can be just what is needed at times. Given the years I’ve been specialising in working with GLBT, it’s been incredibly important for me to know that people in our communities are getting the best quality counselling possible.
In many ways, we’re the same as straight people, but there are also many things about us that are unique. If a counsellor has little understanding of our ‘sub-cultural norms’, language, lifestyles and deeper psychological dynamics, it can be easy for them to go off on a wrong tangent or not address the relevant issues. This can happen without them even being aware of it. I’ve had so many clients over the years who have said that in the past they stopped counselling because they thought the counsellor just didn’t understand, or they didn’t tell them certain intimate things about their lives as they felt it would make the counsellor feel uncomfortable.
Other clients have said that they have felt as though they were educating their therapist as they had to explain so much about the ‘gay world’. Sometimes counsellors can also feel uncomfortable about gay sex and therefore without knowing it can avoid talking about important sexual issues. This can take a lot away from what the client can get out of the counselling process. For example, I have worked with many clients in the past as couples where one is into more extreme sexual activities such as fisting and the other has no interest in it. It is sometimes important to go into great detail about these activities and if a counsellor didn’t understand what it meant and felt anxious about discussing it, it would mean that these issues may not be dealt with adequately. Luckily there are many counsellors who are very skilled and even without this knowledge can still do a great job. There are many instances though where a deeper understanding can make a big difference.
The fact that so few counsellors have a deep understanding of gay and lesbian issues has driven me to go on a bit of a mission to educate as many counsellors as possible. So with psychology graduates from the University of Queensland and my experience in this area, we put together a workshop called ‘Working Effectively with Gay and Lesbian Clients.’ We’ve been recently running these around the country and it has been featured in Sydney media. We’ve had both gay and straight counsellors and students saying that as a result of doing the program they have a deeper understanding and would be more effective working with gay and lesbian clients.
Some areas covered in the workshop include understanding some of the deeper psychological issues such as ‘concealable stigma.’ A stigma is something which is considered in society as being negative, such as being black in a white racist community. For many GLBT they have to conceal the stigma of their sexual orientation by keeping it secret. Secrecy can lead to a split between what a person feels and how they act. I remember this so well from my own childhood! In the research phase of developing the workshop we were quite stunned at how secrecy and concealable stigma can have such a massive impact on both mental and physical health.
For example the rate of HIV can progress much faster when people have concealed their sexual orientation.
It is a great privilege running these workshops knowing that it is having a positive impact out there for people in our communities.
The Brisbane workshop will be held in the city on Saturday February 27th
for more details please visit
www.cfhp.com.au/seminars/glb