Soren!
Chris!
This is our last episode of Season 1.
Yes, it is.
Episode 10.
Ooh.
It's been a journey.
It's been a journey, my friend.
So for this final episode, we really wanted to lean in, I think, more to the conversation
of family, especially as it relates to families and queer youth.
And we've received some feedback along the way that it might be helpful to give folks
listening some tips, some tricks, some perspectives from the perspective of a queer youth and
the perspective of a queer adult and social worker.
Yeah.
And so I'm going to put you on the spot first.
And I'd love for you, and I think you've hinted at this over the last nine episodes, but I'd
love for you to just share your experience of growing up queer in your home.
Well, okay.
So from my youth, I've actually, I did have several girlfriends.
Third grade, I had a girlfriend.
As we all did.
When I was six, I had a girlfriend at my playground, not playground.
What's it called?
Daycare.
But I came out fairly unceremoniously in fifth grade.
And I've been a loud and proud homosexual ever since.
Can you share, when you say you came out in fifth grade, what did that look like for you?
I, well, I had been like, I didn't really know what being gay was as like a societal
thing until like fourth grade.
But obviously my parents have always been like allies of the queer community.
And they actually, they didn't have a real wedding because queer, gay marriage wasn't
legalized in Maine yet.
So they were very allied.
Yeah.
They had a protest.
Yes, very much.
Do you remember when, was it a sit down conversation?
Like mom and dad, I got something to tell you, or was it just you being you and it just
blurted out one day?
My mom was watching TV in her bedroom and I walked in and I think that we were like
having a conversation about something.
And then I told her that I think I am into boys.
I think I like him a lot.
And like, obviously she's very supportive, but at first she was like, are you sure?
Because fifth grade is like, I think people see that as a very early time for people to
tell what their identity is, right?
What they enjoy.
And a lot of fifth graders are quite irrational little creatures.
So she was like unsure.
And she was concerned the adversity that I would face as like a queer individual operating
in society.
Yeah.
She was scared.
Yeah, obviously.
And she wanted the best for her child.
And I remember having a number of conversations with her after that, still in like fifth and
sixth grade.
Like in car rides, just sort of justifying my rationale to some extent.
And obviously she was, she didn't react with hate.
She was just like, are you sure?
And then it just continued as that.
And I was very quickly accepted into my family.
I faced no backlash, which is a quite unique situation.
And especially at like such a young age.
And then from there, I've just always been embraced by my family.
And a good portion of the people that I've chosen to surround myself with.
Obviously in middle school, there were several exceptions.
However, like the vast majority of people around me have been very supportive.
And I've faced very little backlash for it.
And I'm very grateful for that.
And obviously having like my community at home was super important, especially when
I was facing backlash in school.
Because I had a safe place where I could be myself.
Right?
Yeah.
And I know that your situation was different.
Well, different in the sense that I didn't say those words so young.
I waited until much later, even though in hindsight, my parents will say, no shit.
Like I was the kid that knew all the cheers.
I was more interested in what the cheerleaders were doing than what the basketball and football
players on the field were doing.
And I knew all the dances.
You know, I loved the idea of painting your fingernails, but it was more about the color.
Like I love the idea of, oh, there's ways that you can integrate color without.
And you and I have talked about this expression of dulling shine and who dulls whose shine
as we grow.
And I quickly learned to dull that shine.
But as I grew older and the bullying intensified, it was better for me to dull my own shine
rather than somebody dull it for me in an aggressive or violent way.
So I lived a very dulled shine high school, middle school years.
And I remember, and I'll probably never forget this moment of the day after I woke up from
like the project graduation, my senior year, where I woke up and I distinctly remember
I'm done.
Like I never have to do that again.
Yeah.
Yet I stayed closeted for another four years and didn't come out to my parents formally
in a letter and writing until 1999.
And you and I have referenced this before.
One of the things that was really pivotal to my coming out story was the murder of Matthew
Shepherd in October of 1998.
And that was so impactful to me on a personal level as much as I knew at that point I was
going to be a social worker and I'd been working in the health and human services industries
across different settings.
That death and the media attention of that death and the duality of the public outcry
and the serves them right outcry that brought me to this place of making the decision to
live my life more authentically.
And my parents were incredibly supportive, like to the point of me going, well, that
was lame.
Like why didn't I do that six years ago?
I had done what I think is very common for folks of my generation.
You play around with coming out with some friends, you tell siblings, and then you keep
these multiple secrets.
Who knows?
Who doesn't?
Waiting with bated breath at every family dinner.
Yeah.
Who was going to say something inadvertently that was going to.
And so when I made the decision to come out, soon after I introduced parents to my partner
at the time, he was welcomed with open arms.
And I remember Soren feeling this sense of guilt of not only letting them down, because
I didn't give my parents and family and friends the opportunity to know me sooner, but letting
myself down.
And so a lot of my work now is spent working with families, working with youth.
And I have kiddos that I work with as young as four or five who are questioning for them.
It's the gender piece of this isn't my body.
And supporting families through that.
And then with pre-adolescence and adolescence around sexual orientation, where puberty is
coming and those feelings are starting to intensify.
And so you and I have different but similar stories where we were met with, let me say
it a different way, the only hesitation we were met with wasn't about us.
It was about the world we were living in.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Fear and anxiety of what might, especially again in my world and the heels of the Matthew
Shepard murder.
And then you at your age, we are living in the time where this stuff is still happening.
I think of Next Benedict in Oklahoma, the 16 year old non-binary teen who was killed
by several classmates in Oklahoma.
This stuff is in the media all the time.
So parents come by that fear, rightly.
It is not misguided.
And I think that we have a gap in the last 10 years or so where there's been very limited
hate towards the queer community.
Although there has been a large amount of it, it hasn't been picking up.
It's been decreasing.
Yeah, that's an interesting perspective.
Now I think we're starting to see, at least in the media and in some political groups,
an increased amount of hate.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
It's picking up.
I see what you're saying.
So it had slowed down a bit.
And I wonder for my generation, that is one of the MTV.
I think about some of the benefits of MTV.
The first real life gay man I saw on TV was on The Real World, which was an MTV show season
after season.
It was my generation's version of Survivor.
Putting a bunch of strangers into a house in a huge city and just letting the cameras
run.
And so my first real life, not TV media like we've talked about in previous episodes where
the audience rolls eyes and groans and makes disgusting comments.
But my first televised same sex kiss was from The Real World.
The Real World was also where the AIDS epidemic from the 80s started to get more attention
and more mainstream.
Yeah, publicized.
And so I love, yeah, I think what we are seeing now is the legislation of hate.
Whereas maybe before it was the outward violent of hate.
And I would argue, and anybody that knows me knows I talk about this often, I would
argue that the legislation of hate, what we're seeing in legislatures all around the country
is the legislation of hate.
The attempt to erase LGBTQ plus identities, especially youth under the guise of parent
rights.
Yeah.
Under the guise of protecting our youth from the evil queer agenda.
Well, like it's state sanctioned empathy reduction, right?
Like I feel like a few years ago, there was a vote in Maine about whether or not conversion
camps should be allowed.
And that is like, you are legislating whether or not a parent can abuse their child.
Right.
Or a health care provider can abuse that child.
And beating your kids was like, just a little beating was something that was legislated
on years ago, whether or not that was okay.
Is it within the parent's right to hit their kid when the kid is misbehaving?
Or teachers.
Yeah, exactly.
Like is corporal punishment something that should be allowed on children?
And I feel like conversion therapy is a similar debate.
Is it within parents' rights to abuse their kid?
Even, and you and I feel very strongly about conversion therapy because what we both know,
what we know personally as well as what I know professionally is that conversion therapy,
which is any attempt to change somebody's sexual orientation or gender identity, typically
within the guise again of counseling, a retreat, pastoral counseling, any attempt to convert
somebody from being LGBTQ to being cisgender or heterosexual or straight is conversion
therapy.
And as you were referencing in Maine, that has been banned for several years.
It's against the law for a licensed provider to do anything that tries to, for youth, that
tries to change who they are or who they love.
Yeah.
That is not the case in other states.
No, it's not.
And what we've seen in other states where conversion therapy has passed, laws attempting
to where a ban on conversion therapy has been passed, new laws trying to revoke the ban.
Yeah.
So legislated hate, legislated abuse, like again, parents come by this fear rightly.
Yeah.
And what I've talked about with your mom and other adults, other parents, family members,
is how do parents hold space for two things to be true at the same time?
I can unconditionally love and care about and support my child and I can be scared to
death for them.
Yeah.
Well, I feel like those are one in the same.
Like if you love someone and you're concerned for them, it naturally comes with fear.
That's one of the side effects of caring for somebody.
Yeah.
And I think that a lot of conversion therapy and stuff, it does come from parents caring
about their kids.
Yeah.
Like these aren't heartless parents that want their kids to suffer.
These are people with a very misguided worldview and a lack of understanding about what it
means to be queer and what that is psychologically.
And I think what I know, and I've never had this conversation with my mom before, in that,
so today at 50 years old, my mom seeing the life that my husband and I have and have had
for a decade plus now, she wouldn't change a thing.
She wants more grand babies and I get that.
I get that.
She wants a lot of grand babies.
But I think what I know today is she wouldn't change a thing about who I am and the relationship
I have with my husband.
Thirty years ago, if you had given my mom one magic wish, she didn't wish me any harm.
She doesn't wish any harm.
Would she have wished my life different?
Maybe.
And it's not because of any animosity or any prejudice or any hate that she has in her
heart.
She is one of the most caring individuals I know.
But it's the world that we live in.
And so to your point, parents in desperation want nothing but the best for their kid.
I believe parents universally wish that their kids have a better, easier life than the life
that they had.
Like in every generation wants their offspring to have it easier.
Which has come with some other challenges and other problems.
But I think this idea of I just want my kid's life to be easy or easier is part of being
part of love, part of being a human, part of being a parent.
Which is why I think it's so like sort of springboarding to another thing dealing with
parents and youth.
Parents love their kids and want them to feel better and feel good.
So when a child is in crisis and a parent is interacting with them, it's an extremely
tenuous and difficult emotional situation for the parent and they feel powerless.
Parenting is a thing of action to some extent.
It's a verb.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
And like when you rob a parent, like you listen crisis to some extent, rob their parents
of the power to take concrete action.
And makes them feel powerless.
And then parents with all these extreme emotions can lash out because they want to take concrete
action to their kids.
And then sometimes that concrete action can be interpreted by their kids as negative,
right?
Right.
That's right.
Yeah, that's right.
You know what?
Here's also what I know.
Every parent, every single parent I've ever met, whether their kid fell and scraped their
knee, whether their kid came out and is experiencing bullying, or whether their child is dealing
with depression and anxiety or a mental health issue and is in emotional pain.
Every single parent I know at that moment in time would wish for whatever is causing
the pain to go away.
Yeah.
When we live in a world, unfortunately, that stigmatizes, oppresses, and tries to fix queer
youth.
That's pain.
Yeah.
So what parents wouldn't want that to go away?
Yeah.
And if they could blink, make a wish, blow out a candle, and that which is causing the
pain would go away.
I get that.
That is different than saying, I wish my kid were straight.
Yeah.
I wish my kid were cisgender because I think LGBTQ plus youth are damaged or less than.
Yeah.
Or sick or twisted.
Yeah.
What parents are wishing is for the pain to go away.
Yeah.
And it's heartbreaking.
And being queer, in I would say most cases in today's youth, comes with some degree
of mental illness.
The rates of mental illness for trans and queer youth is so much higher than for heterosexual
and or cis youth.
And why?
Why is that?
I waver so heavily on that.
Like,
Let me ask you this.
If being queer, we're not stigmatized, we're not placed in the box of being sick or damaged
or pathological.
And I'm going to tip my hand here to my bias.
If being queer, we're not stigmatized, that identity was not stigmatized, would the rates
of mental health and those disparities be different for queer youth?
My bias is no.
My bias is that the mental health stuff that we're seeing in higher rates in queer youth
is a part of the minority stress that those queer youth are experiencing.
It's the response to discrimination and oppression and turning on the news every day and seeing
what states are doing to queer youth.
Just knowing that conversion therapy exists and is doing harm to kids.
I feel like that's a huge reason.
It's no different to the reason that I think BIPOC kids, black, indigenous people of color,
black and brown kids experience disparities in their wellness as well.
It's a response to being marginalized, being other, being excluded, being oppressed.
I agree with you to some extent, but also even if there was no stigma around it, it
is still like you are still different.
I think that comes with its own stress.
I completely agree.
I think something unique about being queer is you are diverging from the majority identity.
You are different from others.
By diverging from your preset path, you have to figure out who you are.
Even without any social stigma, that still causes a lot of internal turmoil.
I think queerness and being trans isn't a mental illness, but it is difficult in and
of itself.
Yes, without a doubt.
I think that that contributes to mental health difficulties.
Also I think engaging with social media in my youth, I don't really engage with any of
it anymore, but a lot of the queer communities are also communities where mental illness
is normalized and festered.
By engaging with other people that are like you, you are also engaging with communities
where there's a lot of mental illness already existing and being normalized.
Regardless of the cause, it's there.
It's there.
I'm not saying you soar, but I know you soar.
Social media wasn't a thing when I was growing up in the 80s and early 90s, obviously.
I compared myself to my other male peers watching them date, watching them hook up, watching
them play sports, all the things I didn't do, that process of knowing I was different
and myself wishing I wasn't different.
If I could have blinked and taken it away, I would have.
That which was causing me pain.
There was a very large period of my life where I was like, I'm so tired of being this way.
Of being different.
And I, for a large period of my life, wished that I could have just been straight.
100%.
Could have been normal.
And I still have idiosyncrasies in my personality that differentiate me significantly from my
peers.
Sometimes I do find myself being like, I wish I was just a normal kid.
Whatever that even looks like.
Whatever that even is.
But at the same time, I love who I am.
And if I was straight, no offense to straight people, but I'd be boring.
Yeah.
That's a great point.
One of my favorite topics in this category and what I work with families on all the time
is the idea of queer joy and gender euphoria.
Where we spend so much time pathologizing the identities, we don't spend nearly enough
time celebrating the uniqueness and difference.
There's something that's so cool for me now.
Granted, it's taken me years to get here.
I love going to theaters.
I love watching shows.
I love singing show tunes at the top of my lungs.
I love listening to Taylor Swift.
I love boy bands.
I love Britney and Pink and Christina.
I love watching 16 Candles and The Breakfast Club over and over and over again.
And all of those things may be cliche, but those things bring me queer joy.
Yeah.
And when I'm...
You want to see the smile on my face?
Like I'm watching Heartstopper and I'm watching queer joy.
I'm watching sex education and I'm seeing queer joy.
I'm seeing all that could be.
I am my best self when I'm living authentically as a gay man.
And now I wouldn't change it for a billion dollars.
Well, for a million dollars.
I would change it for a billion dollars.
Living easy.
And so I'm thinking about how do we, you as a 17 year old, me as an almost 50 year old,
how does this translate into supporting families who are wrestling with this?
How do we help...
So much of our work, you with your peers and me clinically, is helping queer youth realize
that it does get better.
Yeah.
And just to hang in there.
It gets better.
I truly believe that.
Better days are ahead.
Best is yet to come.
Yeah.
It gets better.
And I'm realizing we're not doing justice to the families who are supporting those kids.
How do we help them?
Well, like me and Chris were discussing this episode topic a little earlier.
And like I said a few minutes ago, parenting is like a thing of action for the most part.
And obviously there are, like if you're kids in a mental health crisis, something of that
nature, there are decisive actions that you can take.
A therapist attempts to consult a primary care professional about medication.
A variety of steps that you can take.
However it is all about listening.
It's not about deciding, being decisive, attempting to dictate changes.
It's about hearing what the child in crisis is feeling.
Yeah.
Right?
It's about empathy.
The best thing that you can do to help your child is not to attempt to dictate their life
or attempt to augment their choices so that you think that they'll be behaving in a more
healthy way, but rather listening to why they're making their choices, how they feel.
And from there, you can build an understanding and a healthy relationship and dynamic so
that you can start encouraging those better decisions, right?
The number one thing is to first get your child to trust you and believe that you are
working together to help them.
Yeah.
Authentically.
Yeah.
Like you're not saying you've got to trick them into thinking you're...
No, no.
It's really...
Oh, sorry.
I love this.
It's really like, I got you.
I love you.
All that unconditional stuff.
I'm a safe person.
You can be...
We don't even have to label it.
You can be whatever you are and that is okay.
And it's allyship.
I believe that parents have to be their kid's first ally.
Yeah.
I have a friend whose father always calls himself a manager and both of his parents
are...
They assume the managerial role.
Parenting in late teens, it can't be management anymore because your child needs to develop
those skills.
Yeah.
They need to develop executive processing skills.
Yeah, it's coaching.
It's not a management role.
It's a cooperation.
You're now collaborating with a semi-formed young adult to figure out what is best for
them and what is best for their future.
When they're kids, it is to some extent managerial.
You can't engage with them on the same platform.
But once they're 15, 16, 17, 18 and beyond there, you're now in a team.
You're working together.
The roles shift.
Yeah.
And you need to engage with them like you're working together.
Obviously you are in a position of authority and power, but that dynamic creates unhealthy
dynamics in the future.
And it makes the relationship difficult to handle for both parties.
It just is all about cooperation and empathy.
You just need to listen and work with rather than against or for.
Yeah.
Yes, all of that.
I want to take that up a notch.
A couple of weeks ago, we were talking about responding to criticism and we were talking
about strategies that you have found helpful for you when you're in the moment of criticism.
And one of the things you said was to be mindful, to own it, to name it.
And so this feedback for families is awesome.
And I want to add to that, families also have to be mindful about what's going on for them.
So again, in my world, I love holding space for two truths.
I can support you and love you and care about you and I can be scared to death for you.
I can be your ally and I can be your champion and in your corner.
And I can really wish that things were different.
And so part of what you're saying, I also want to direct back to families of listen
to your kid.
It's not your job to change them, to name it as a phase or something they're going to
grow out of or any of those other non-affirming statements, but you've also got to listen
to yourself.
And you've got to be mindful about what it is that you as the parent or the caregiver
need to be your best self in front of your kid.
And so all those same strategies of getting your kid a therapist, working with the kid's
doctor around some of the mental health stuff that you were sharing, I would apply that
to families too.
Parents and caregivers go through a coming out process that oftentimes is a couple steps
back to the process the kid is going through.
And it makes sense, right?
The kid's been living with this in their head their whole life.
For some parents, this might be really new information, scheme of time.
I've only had a month to process this.
You've had years to process this.
Well, that's what I think is so beautiful about adapting from management and subordinate
to a team and cooperation.
Partners.
Partnership, sorry.
Because now your parent and my parents express to me their emotions, which helps us build
a relationship.
You need to be open and honest on both fronts and your kid needs to have an idea of your
emotional state.
But if you want them to open up to you, you have to open up to them.
It's mutualism.
It isn't like a one sided relationship.
This is give and take.
In order to form that bond, you have to be willing to open up about your emotions and
be willing to engage with your kid in the same way that they're engaging with you.
Yeah.
Yes.
Because I believe, here's my bias, I believe it is healthier for a parent to say, Soren,
I love what you're wearing.
I'm worried that if you wear this to school today, kids are going to come at you.
So are you prepared to have kids coming at you?
Rather than the parents saying, get your ass back upstairs.
You ain't leaving the house like that.
You're going to change immediately.
I would rather just have that sense of vulnerability and authenticity with the conversation.
It's okay for a parent to say, Soren, I'm scared for you right now.
Instead of trying to control, manage the situation.
I think that that makes teenagers so much more receptive to criticism, constructive
criticism.
By giving your rationale, rather than just saying, I'm the boss, do this.
You make your child want to listen to you.
And you make your child think that, oh, this person has my best interest in their mind.
Because you're explaining how it will be better for them if they follow your advice.
That's right.
It's teaching the skill, the skill of, it's a social skill, right?
That if I walk into a job interview and I'm maybe presenting in a way that doesn't speak
to the professionalism of the setting I'm looking to get hired in, I might not get the
job.
And so the social skill is there.
Learn how to accessorize your shine and turn your shine, your uniqueness to your, as a
parent, your strength, not as something that's going to hold you back.
As a parent, you're a teacher to some extent.
And by teaching, you need to teach the logic behind what you're saying.
People learn things so much better when they know the backstory and the reason for it.
By parenting saying, oh, you need to do this without explaining it.
Because I said so.
Yeah.
It's the same thing as having a kid memorize their times tables without understanding what
multiplication is.
Right?
Right.
You need to teach them the basis of your ideas and advice.
Right?
Yeah.
You and I were not the kind of kids that I told you so would ever work on.
Right?
And so that's like one of my number one things to families is that building, I love what
you're saying.
It's about building and fostering this new relationship that at some point when kids
go from this room of their house to this room of the house to go back to last week's conversation,
that you as a parent are shifting rooms with them.
Yeah.
And evolving and growing with them.
Totally.
And meeting energy where it's at.
Like the I said so, so do it and do it now does not work.
And it breeds resentment.
It sure does.
Yeah.
Yeah, it sure does.
So I'm hopeful that as folks are listening into this, maybe they're getting some suggestions
for how to maybe approach some of these conversations in their own worlds, in their own living rooms,
and kitchen tables, and front seat of cars.
And if it is rough, pay attention to that.
Yeah.
I'm a big believer in finding community and for families to find community.
I wish we had more support groups for lack of a better word, where parents who are going
through this with queer youth could get together and talk and give ideas, give support, give
shoulders to cry on because it's hard.
Yeah.
Nothing that we're saying is easy.
It takes practice.
These are muscles that have to be worked and exercised.
I don't know, Soren, what do you think?
I think that that's a fantastic spot to end off the episode.
So this has been an incredible experience.
I just want to thank you for bringing your shine into this podcast studio every week
and having these conversations with me.
I love talking to you and I love to talk.
So this has been a fantastic time for me.
And I think it's presenting a really exciting prospect.
Yeah, I do too.
So for our listeners, if you've hung in there with us for the last 10 episodes, thank you.
This isn't the last time you'll be hearing from the Inspired Insights podcast.
Soren and I will be back.
We'd love to hear from you in our downtime over the next couple months.
So please reach out and let us know your thoughts.
What do you want to hear more of?
There are certainly other voices beyond just Soren's and I that we're looking forward to
maybe welcoming some guests into the podcast studio for season two.
But we want feedback from you.
We want constructive criticism, dare I say, from you all of how we can work with you all
as listeners and engage you all as listeners in this journey that we're all on to finding
better days ahead and finding our better selves ahead.
Yeah.
So in the short term, I am Chris McLaughlin.
I'm Soren Peterson.
This has been the Inspired Insights podcast season one.
And thank you so much.
Bye.
The Inspired Insights podcast has been brought to you by Inspired Consulting Group LLC.
Edited and produced by Amanda Seidel.
Music by Derek Herter.
Copyright 2024.
All rights reserved.