Welcome to Insight Mind Body Talk. 

Today’s episode is “The Coming In of Coming Out” and my guest is Alexander Einsman, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. Alexander, pronouns he/him/his, is a psychotherapist practicing in Madison, Wisconsin at Harmonia Madison center for psychotherapy. 

In addition to treating anxiety and depression in adults, teens, and couples, he specializes in psychodynamic therapy, focused around LGBTQIA identity, the Queer shame-pride continuum, and trauma. Alex relies on several treatment modalities in his practice, including ego state or parts therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy, also known as EMDR and clinical hypnosis. He also mentors and offers his clients the same mind-body connection he practices, derived from yoga, meditation, and hypnosis.  

Alex graduated with a BA from the University of Wisconsin Madison and he received his MS in Marriage and Family Therapy from Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, where he researched protective factors for queer youth development. 

He completed his clinical internship at Briarpatch Youth Services, a Dane county nonprofit offering teen and family counseling and a youth shelter for at-risk youth. He has published columns and articles on therapy and psychology in Our Lives Magazine and the Wisconsin State Journal.  

Alex, I am so happy you are here. 

We have been therapy friends for quite a while. We met at Briarpatch Youth Services when you were doing your clinical internship and I was working in street outreach as an AmeriCorps member. We were driving around to schools and also providing therapy at the center itself. I remember it being a really meaningful time for me, learning from you and practicing our work together.  

Today, we’re here to talk about The Coming In of Coming Out. What does that mean?  

It’s language that came up for me as we were talking about this episode and thinking about the process of pride and shame for members of the LGBTQIA+ community or the Queer community as we’ll refer to moving forward. 

We think of coming out as language that’s pretty common which, in a way, represents a step away from shame to pride. Oftentimes coming out is focused on seeking that external acceptance or validation, which is so important when we have any aspect of identity that we feel could be shameful or bad. 

In parallel, for many people who identify as part of this community, there’s a process of coming inward. Even when we come out, there’s still this process of internally connecting. Most people who have had an aspect of their identity that they’ve hidden, or felt shame about, have experienced a disconnection within the self. 

The coming in of coming out refers to how we can come inward and move toward ourselves even if we’re not getting the type of external acceptance that we want. We create a coming toward the self, ultimately showing up as a whole person. 

Let’s talk more about the continuum between pride and shame.   

First, Alex, what does pride mean to you?  

Pride to me has really expanded in my own experience and definition and has changed throughout my development as a as a young person, a young gay man in this world.  

I first experienced and thought of pride as the opportunity to be out in this world and to show who I am or who we are without any apology. Basically, to show up in a way that we can be seen and accepted. The way that’s expanded for me, and I think for many people, is that I realized that the coming inward of pride was something that was really necessary. I love the celebration and the embracement, but over time I’ve thought about pride more as how can I show up for myself and for others in the community?  

Both a connection outward and inward.  

It reminds me of some ways of Dr. Kristin Neff’s work in self-compassion. She talks about how we need tender self-compassion as well as fierce self-compassion. 

There’s this balance of energies to create wholeness where there’s the tender self-compassion of accepting ourselves to alleviate suffering and working on that inner healing. The coming in. And there’s also the fierce self-compassion of taking action to alleviate suffering; protecting yourself, drawing boundaries, providing for yourself, saying yes to your own needs, connecting with your community, and learning how to grow and change within the world. 

What you’re describing is this delicate balance. If we have too much of one and not enough of the other, that can shape whether we’re there for our whole self or feeling as though our full self is being nurtured.  

That is such a great perspective and I love that idea of the balance between being fierce, which is often necessary, and tender.  

Fierce self-compassionate has such a great ring to it. It reminds me of the original nation of pride. If we look back at Stonewall, the idea to fiercely push back against police brutality to members of the Queer community was just necessary. And also, that inward process of providing gentler self-compassion inside. That’s a lovely, expansive way of looking at it.  

Alex, you said pride is ideally the absence of shame. What did you mean by that? 

I really see and conceptualize pride as the antithesis to shame. When we’re stuck in shame it can be really hard to feel prideful or engage in pride. I also want to acknowledge that there is a continuum between pride and shame that offers a sense of freedom. Things don’t have to be either/or. They can be both. Pride on that continuum connects the lightness to the darkness or the connection to the disconnection. It can be helpful to think about those terms together. That allows us to really look at our own experience of shame, whether it’s consciously or unconsciously, and find ways to explore pride in a personal way, collectively and individually. 

Shame is the belief that something is wrong with who we are. A sense of unworthiness. In your clinical opinion, how does shame manifest itself within the context of queer identities?  

Shame is really a universal experience. It’s one of our ways of coping.  

When I think about shame within the context of queer identity, I think a lot about the internal and external rejection of self and how we often think about shame as something that is learned in both overt and covert messages throughout our development. 

When we think about queer identity, there can be overt attacks with language and even mixed into our language. For example, the use of gay when referring to something bad, wrong, or different. These attacks are pretty ingrained into our language.  

Shame can also be manifested silently. Something that’s not talked about at all.  We get these messages that like, Ooh, there is, there is something bad about that.  

Often, when I’m describing shame to clients, it’s about the dichotomy between guilt and shame, something that comes from Brene Brown’s work. Guilt being, I did something that I feel badly about versus shame being, I am bad as a person. There’s something wrong with me. Possibly even something that can’t be fixed.  

Shame is the internalization of a lot of these negative messages and can often come as an explanation too. As a young human in this world, if I’m not cared for and loved the way I ideally should be, or worse, if I experience abuse or trauma, shame can be the explanation. There must be something wrong with me that caused this.  

I think that’s why within the queer community it can be so challenging to navigate from there is something wrong with me to a place of pride or even fierce pride or fierce compassion. This is me and I welcome this.  

It reminds me of Janina Fisher’s book, Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors. She talks about how when we experience trauma, and I think about chronic shame as a very significant trauma, the messages we get, even just from society, are misrecognition, not being seen clearly, not being loved as we are. They can start are early as infancy and our brains aren’t fully formed until we’re 24. 

Often when we experience trauma, we’re not in the front of our brain, our prefrontal cortex. Because of that, we don’t have concrete memories to later go back to later to understand what happened. We’re left with these body memories or emotions. Sometimes what’s left are feelings of shame or confusion or low self-worth. That becomes the narrative, simply because our brain was offline, and our hippocampus didn’t make a memory. We can’t pinpoint that the person was wrong to do that. It wasn’t about me. We just have residual emotion, which sometimes becomes a shame narrative.  

We then believe the narrative. One way we can challenge these narratives of shame and fight this story that there’s something wrong with us or that we’re unworthy is by looking at it with curiosity. What was my brain doing? What was my brain experiencing? Can I see if my brain decided it was my fault because the only data it has is leftover residual emotion? 

What you’re saying reminds me of how shame in its origin, is very concrete. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s about good or bad, right or wrong. Very concrete thinking. 

What you described in the process of exploring our personal definition of pride is really an expansion of that entire story and perspective. It’s looking at, yeah, there was a lot going on there. Maybe realizing that that shame goes far back. When we look at sexuality or gender, a lot of times we realize there’s an early awareness of this pivotal aspect of identity that is going to be rejected or hurt or harmed. 

That brings me to Polyvagal Theory. I was watching a Ted Talk by Crystal Rasmussen, A Queer Journey From Shame to Self-love. Crystal referenced that at certain points safety was more important than curing shame.  

When we think about the language of being in the closet, what we’re describing is hiding. One of our oldest forms of survival, our most powerful, is the freeze or kind of hide response. 

When we access that dorsal vagal reaction. Sometimes people have the idea of pride that’s very concrete, you come out and then you’re good. I really agree with Crystal, and it really resonates in working with youth, that safety is the most important. If you are an environment or a contact or situation where you could be unsafe by coming out, then you may choose not to. That may be one of the best choices that you have, particularly because all around the world, people with queer identities are still victimized and targeted and attacked. We’ve made so much progress and there is still so much to be made.  

Thinking about the aspect of safety within hiding can de-stigmatize it a little bit. Sometimes we can get down on ourselves for being in the closet, or the longer we stay in it can be harder to come out. To really look at that from a survival lens, what you’re doing to surviving. Then, how can we look at our internal and external environment and understand, how can I safely do this? How can I engage in pride? That can come in a lot of different forms. But just validating that that is an appropriate human response to survival.  

How else do you see shame manifest behaviorally?  

I personally think that within a lot of different mental health symptoms, shame is the underlying fuel. We can see shame influence the experience of depression, of anxiety. We can see it manifest in a hyper-focus on the body or a hyper-focus on what we do with our bodies. It’s really quite fascinating, the myriad of ways that our psyches can cope with shame, this deep disconnection. 

In preparing for our talk, I had my own experience of shame that brought some awareness to me that I wasn’t consciously aware of. I noticed myself procrastinating on preparing for this. When I sat with that and tried to connect with what part of me was feeling that resistance, I realized that it was a teenage part of me that had really procrastinated on accepting an aspect of my identity.  

I came out in my teen years, but at that point there had already been several years where I knew this thing about me and did everything I could to avoid it.  

It was fascinating for me to realize, I have been out for a couple decades and truly, honestly, fully embrace myself and think that I feel no shame, but also underneath the surface, the idea of coming and talking outside of the therapy relationship, which is pretty intimate and confidential, just to speak to queer identity and my own experience, I really noticed that young, closeted part of me and had a really interesting experience with connecting with that and reminding that part that there are other resources here and this is something we’re choosing to do. This is about sharing and ideally helping other people and not so much about performance or the perception of rejection. It was fascinating to uncover a bit of shame hanging out in there. 

Sharing that part of your story really exemplifies how we work with shame. As you were talking, I saw you put your hand over your heart for a few moments when you were speaking to that part. As a therapist, I hear compassionate-self energy going towards that younger part who is feeling scared or apprehensive or unsure. Being present and soothing and gentle and kind and allowing that part to share its fears and concerns. At the same time, supporting it in moving forward in a way that is healing. 

I find that for myself and for many people, that more than one truth can exist at the same time. We can have come out and feel tons of pride about who we are and our queer identity and a lot of times those younger parts are still there. The idea of pride being like, how can we really show up for those inside parts that may still get scared. How can we shift that?  

I tapped into lots of self-compassion but what I didn’t mention is that prior to that, there was a different framework. What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I do this? To shift, to change and to be like, wait a minute, what part of me is this coming from? How can I really show up for that part of myself? For this part of myself, offering a sense of choice was quite powerful and soothing.  

With humans in general, but particularly with our queer community, it’s really about showing up for that teen or young part. There are so many things that happen early in life that really impact and imprint on us. Around teen years we’re coming to awareness of some aspects of sexuality or gender identity. It happens at different times for different people. Maybe think about, what was that like for me? When did I start to know about that? How did I cope at the time? Could that still be occurring in some ways in life?  

Outreach, LGBTQ+ Community Center’s hosting Madison’s third annual Magic Pride Festival as a sort of virtual/live hybrid event this month, August 22nd, 1-5pm.  

We’ve started talking about ways in which people can make pride celebrations more personal, even more, intra-personal, the relationship with the self. 

What are some different ways to help people celebrate pride within themselves as well as with their community?  

Outward celebration within the community is so powerful for many people because it offers that opportunity to co-regulate with others and to just be seen and have fun. That outward and external expression of pride can be really fun and is often a necessary part for people. 

When we think about pride in a more expansive way, we can look at ‘how can I make this more personal?’ The example I gave was identifying with the part of myself that may have still been holding a little bit of shame and showing up for that part of myself. Essentially, we’re talking about self-acceptance.   

So much of what causes us to hide and feel shame is the perception or actual experience of rejection. Without even realizing it, we end up rejecting those parts of ourselves. Showing up for those parts of ourselves with a sense of pride can often relate to engaging in first recognition, right? The identification that there is a part of me that still feels that.  

I really like the concept of healthy multiplicity. We can have many parts of ourselves, and we should. Using that awareness to witness those aspects of pride and shame within us. Writing is a purely powerful tool for that. It’s about being present and offering witness to something.  

You can journal with your parts. Identify that part and then from that self-energy, an Internal Family Systems technique, the self-healing aspect that we all have within, communicate with those younger parts or that part who feels shame. Journaling back and forth sometimes opens things up and builds that relationship. That’s where I think a lot of that healing can happen.  

Journaling puts us in the front of our brain. If we look at it neurologically, we’re in our prefrontal cortex, we’re not reliving the shame. It gives us space to work with the shame and communicate with the parts of ourselves that might be holding shame. Writing is often an expression of goodwill towards parts of ourselves and an expression of ‘I see you and I’m here with you.’ We want to look at the original wounds, often rejection or trauma, and provide something else. Sometimes that can come with writing.  

Music can also be really powerful. Sometimes I’ll throw on some music. What does that part of myself want? Do I want to have a dance party to my favorite song in my house? Do I want to dance with other people? Maybe I’ll throw on music from that time in my life, some 90s. It can be really fun. Just the idea of playing. That could be at a celebration or out in a park meeting with friends.  

Ultimately focusing on that idea of reconnection in some way. Shame, at the end of the day, is a relational wound and there’s a relationship we can build upon within ourselves. 

Alex, thank you so much for shifting the perspective. Not only can someone heal through relationships with others, but also sharing what a person can do to facilitate internal pride. 

Often throughout the day we can have awareness of that. If we feel a sense of shame come up. I often describe shame as this invisible emotion that can camouflage itself in different ways, sometimes we’re aware of it, sometimes we’re not. There’s often a pretty somatic experience to it. We can feel that response. Feeling your gut, your face might flush, maybe our shoulders roll in, tension.  

If you think about it, it almost makes our body contract. It’s a pulling in. What better way to survive in hiding than to close our bodies. The shoulders come forward, we get smaller in an attempt to protect. If we notice those feelings or shifts in our body, we can bring awareness to that, expand our body, open those arms a little bit, and, or even just acknowledge that feeling or that part. I’m here with you. I see you. Sometimes even just acknowledgement can be a really powerful experience. 

Thinking about the body on a continuum as well. We roll our shoulders in because we’re protecting our organs, the most vulnerable aspect of our system. It’s so natural for all of us to pull in, but maybe completely sitting up and exposing ourselves feels like too much.  

Perhaps someone can practice with opening up with only one hand while putting the other arm across their waist and then noticing if they’re feeling safe. Can we bring compassion to that area of the body? Building that relationship with those parts that are often pushed away because we hold this trauma in our bodies. When we can acknowledge and feel it in our system, we become more fully present, more fully whole. The mind and body are so inherently connected. 

We can heal by movement and for so many of the members of the queer community, a big aspect of the healing journey is working with the body. If anyone’s not ready to sit down and talk with the therapist, you might find a similar amount of healing by engaging in movement-based techniques.  

It can be really powerful because we’re no longer hunched over protecting our organs in survival if we’re expanding, if we’re doing yoga, walking, dancing. Ecstatic dance can be a really cool and powerful way for people to embrace themselves and feel a sense of pride.   

Thank you so much, Alex. Until next time, take care.