In the hopes of providing additional assistance, LGBTQ Nation spoke with Heather Simpson — a queer Black marriage and family therapist associate in Portland, Oregon — about how she’s advising her clients to help protect their psychological well-being over the next four years.
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The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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LGBTQ Nation: What things are you hearing from your clients these days?
Simpson: When I’m looking at my Black clients in particular, I am seeing a lot less focus on “I need to be front and center of the movement.” I am seeing people really reflect on, “What do I need to do to make it through these next four years?”
I’m looking to give my clients plans of action. So what are some of the things that you can look forward to in the next week? The next three months? The next few years? [Now] is not where things stop and end, right? We were not out here campaigning, marching, having Prides for decades to not continue with that energy.
I relate this to clients: that we look through the energy of our ancestors. What sort of mentality, energy and forethought did they need to have to get them through those years? Because they did. So we will too.
Which ancestors do you mean?
I’m not just talking about blood kin. When I think about the queer community, I think of our ancestors more broadly: the people that I lived in community with, who they lived in community with. When you go to a protest, that is family to me. Anytime you show up at a Pride, is it not like seeing everybody [like a] cousin at a family reunion?
So I ask that people take that sort of energy. We are not strangers to each other. We are neighbors… Think about going to your local libraries and looking at your LGBTQ elders. They have the knowledge because they were there before….
We have a right to be sad, we have a right to be angry, and I’m sure so many people are already expressing that. For me, I want to prevent people from being stuck in the shame and the guilt that will be pushed upon us over these next few years. I want people to remember that the [emotions and anxieties] that they’re feeling are absolutely real, right? … So let’s honor that. This is not a time to sit in your guilt and shame pile.
What does “honoring” our emotions look like?
When I talk about “honoring the self,” I mean honoring your body, honoring your feelings. Your feelings are not disconnected from your body. They work in tandem to give you an understanding about yourself.
So that anger you’re feeling, that is a push to action. Anger wants you to act. So we want to honor that, but we don’t want to express it in a way that might push us away from our long-term goals. So, yes, feel the anger when it shows up. What does that mean to you? Check in with your body. Does anger mean you need to move? A lot of people have been stuck sitting in boxes, right? [Maybe] you need to move your body, move your body in community. Then you’re getting twofers, right? You’re getting to connect with people, and you’re getting to move your body.
A march is not the only thing you need to do [to express your anger]…. I love a march…. But a march needs to lead somewhere, okay? … That means to me, have a goal in mind. Anger without a goal is going to send you spinning. So if you’re going to get angry to the point where you need to respond, have another goal in mind of where you want to go.
Do we have to be similarly goal-oriented when expressing our other emotions too, like sadness or anxiety?
The goal for a lot of these feelings — to shift them and change them — is to express them. Now, expression can look a variety of ways. We don’t want to drive people into “This is the only way that you can express this feeling.”
I tell a lot of people, “Sadness is there to give you a message. Don’t push it away, because it’s trying to tell you something. All of your emotions are trying to tell you something, and sadness is there to tell you about what you lost, what you cared about, and what you regretted, and it’s important that you need each of those things. Don’t push them away.”
It’s important to honor we lost a lot in what, [just the first 24 hours of Trump’s presidency]. Right? Yes, acknowledge it by speaking it into existence. Don’t act like it didn’t happen. We want to acknowledge the care: We care about things. We’re not going to leave this and act like we don’t…. All of those [emotions] when you meet them, all of those answers … ultimately gives you the goal to move through.
How can we find a supportive community over the next four years?
Over the last like, 20 years, we’ve really bifurcated our communities; we have thought a lot more individualistically about community… as something very defined to where we have [pre-existing expectations of what] of a queer person looks [and acts] like, in a very individualistic sort of way.
When we were doing the whole [Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in 2020], I saw white folks in particular really try and say, “I am safe. I am a safe person. I know all the things [about] BLM [and] data.” And I realized, like, it looks like spectacle… But this notion of spectacle doesn’t actually create safety, right?
[So] I want us to allow for things a little bit more. When you are in community, you are going to have to change your distress tolerance. Frankly, you can’t be thinking, “I need the community to make me feel safe.” … When we’re talking about community, you actually need to embody safety…. Community needs to start with the self and build out: “How can I create safety for myself so that when I’m in community, I am safe with others, and they can physically see that safety rather than just performing safety?”
And how do we do that?
When I talk about safety, I am talking about what you need to really understand yourself…. [You’re not always going to know the effects of your past traumas, triggers, and neuroses] until you’re in community. Being in community is the challenge of maintaining that, so it does come with a risk, as does everything.
Are you willing to risk the idea that people get to see you in your fragileness, in your work-in-progress, and [trust] they are still going to hold you to that sense of wholeness of self? There are people who will actually do this more often than not, [but] fear tricks us into thinking that our neighbor is not going to see us as our neighbor. We want to reduce the fear in this world as much as possible. But that requires the risk of showing up as your authentic self, and that is the pride that’s been instilled in me every Pride month.
Anything else?
I lean on the fact that our communication, our messaging may need to change. We may not be able to be as open as we would like to be, and that is a sad reality… You may need to think of yourself as a rose amongst the thorns for a bit.
I can speak as someone who has been a survivor of abuse: Sometimes the bathroom can be your best friend. Sometimes the bathroom is where you get to be you. So make that space. Find places of privacy to be, so you get that idea of every time you’re in the the bath or in the bathroom, you’re playing music so no one can hear you, so you can express yourself in that way.
Also, you’re going to need to be a little more discerning about your friends. I hate to say it, but… Particularly, I’m talking about your trans folks, but this also applies to gay folks as well, particularly young folks. Be careful about who you tell information to remember how they respond to certain pieces of information, okay? If they’re the type of person who’s a little vindictive, you may not want to give them all of your info, right?
We might be moving into a time where a lot more trans folks are going to have to be stealth. And I hate to say that, but if you’ve got to do it, you got to do it.
[Also], we do not clock people out here. [i.e. do not publicly out people as queer to others]. This is not the time of clockability. You guard your sister, you guard your brother. And we don’t say nothing about nonbinary people, because no. This is a time where you show up for people and it just, and it can be in a little way, but you need to affirm people’s dignity, because, you know, other people are going to test and try people.
How can cisgender white folks show up for their more marginalized siblings at this time?
I honestly think we need them most of all, because without them, we cannot see another path. Fascism is out here to design a very specific path for those folks. And if you dissent with that path, it is so necessary for you to show the other options. I need to see the other ways of living.
I need white men to go and explore, “What does white mean to you?” Just as we’ve asked Black people for a century and millennia to go back into our family dramas, into our ancestors, and understand the roots of things. I need white men to do the same.
I worked with a client recently on perfectionism in particular, and I was like, “You know, that’s that sounds like the Protestant work ethic?” And they were like, “Oh yeah, it is.” And I’m like, “That’s white supremacy, my love,” and they were like, “Oh, yeah, that makes it easier for me to ignore.” And I’m like, “That’s where you go wrong.”
White supremacy is born out of desperation. It was born out of desperation and a need to want to be on the same level as those elites in England that [the first British colonists in North America] wanted to distance themselves from. And until you heal that desperation, we will go over this again and again and again. So I ask of my white men, please go forth and investigate how you relate to desperation, how that relates to how your ancestors handle desperation. And can you forge a new way forward that doesn’t mean the destruction of everyone else, because it destroys them too.
I feel like [“white] privilege” is not even the word, because “privilege” means that you’re winning in some way. And I think the language that we’ve used it — like this is a “privilege” — belies the fact that white people lose every time you lose, a sliver of yourself, your wants, your needs to align yourself with something that you ultimately are not, right? So I wish there was another way to put it, because I feel like that would allow for people to receive their own humanity.
Because that’s the problem with our conversations. We’re often thinking about how we want to share it, but we’re not thinking about how, how can we share the thing and the way it will best be received. That is something that comes with power, right? Those who are powerless often have to worry most about how it will be received.
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