LGBTQ+ Stress, Trauma, Time, and Care

Abstract

This article examines how family rejection, religious/spiritual violence, homelessness, adverse school experience, interpersonal violence, and other experiences common among LGBTQ+ people and communities can be reframed as part of a stress-trauma continuum. The pressures and compulsions of white heteropatriarchal society (e.g., of identification, heterosexuality, monogamy, gender expression, etc.) harm us all, yet uniquely expose LGBTQ+ folks to a life of surveillance, stigma, prejudice, erasure, regulation, discipline, and violence. Multiple social psychologists have elucidated how the social conditions of white cis-heteropatriarchy thus engender a kind of chronic stress unique to LGBTQ+ populations (c.f., Meyer, 2013), a stress which accumulates. That accumulation can be understood as queer allostatic load, which falls on a continuum of the stressful to the traumatic, depending on the availability of social supports, access to resources, and coping mechanisms. This article follows historical efforts in the LGBTQ+ community to depathologize trauma by contextualizing the LGBTQ+ lived experience in terms of a stress-trauma continuum. This shift nuances trauma as not only an individual experience but perhaps more importantly as a simultaneously neurobiological and sociocultural experience. Therefore, such a framework helps us examine not only the violence of current social conditions, but also the experiences of chrono-stress and traumatic temporality related to the threat against queer futures and the absenting of queer pasts. This article concludes with several proposals for the spiritual care of queer and trans lives whose experiences fall along this stress-trauma continuum.

From the church, the school, the courthouse, to the family—the explicit message to an overwhelming number of queer and trans people1 is clear: you are not welcome here, not wanted, not cherished, not loved. This message is repeated not only in myriad acts of abuse, rejection, and violence against the mind-body-spirits of LGBTQ+ people and communities; it is also encoded into the political discourses and social structures that organize our life together, including the “family” and even the “future.”

The article begins by presenting data about potentially traumatic and adverse experiences common to LGBTQ+ life in the U.S. context. This data unveils the deception in society’s myth of inevitable progress, which ironically employs LGBTQ+ rights as evidence of progress while simultaneously working to undermine those rights and elide LGBTQ+ history. For example, research into the lived experience of rejection due to being LGBTQ+2 correlates with societal attempts to erase queerness and transness from the school’s curriculum, the government’s history, the church’s community, and even the family’s name and lineage. Some will counter, of course, with citations of the growing number of affirming LGBTQ+ representations in media, or perhaps with the growing number of affirming faith communities. Such invocations of progress, however, function to obscure the continued attacks on LGBTQ+ life. For example, over 340 anti-LGBTQ+ bills have been introduced to state legislatures in the first two months of 2023 alone (Human Rights Campaign Staff, 2023).

In the next section, we trace statistics like these, which are meant to serve not as self-evident facts but as glimpses into an unfolding picture of the patterns of violence against LGBTQ+ personhood and community. We argue that the range of responses to social pressures and violences falls along a continuum of stress and trauma (Dulmus & Hilarski, 2003) and is significantly related to one’s context, culture, and support system.

However, unlike other cultural violence, the attacks on LGBTQ+ life and community frequently emerge from “inside the house”—i.e., from the site of the family (including the family of faith). Attending to the Black gay and lesbian experience, Horace L. Griffin (2006) writes,

Lesbians and gays generally emerge from heterosexual parents and families strongly opposed to them. Lesbians and gays enter the world of invisibility, not knowing other lesbian and gay people, and most times find themselves battling not only society, but the very communities that most oppressed groups have counted on to help them confront injustice: their own families, churches, and communities. (p. 156)

For pastoral theologians and spiritual care providers working with queer and trans folks, the family cannot be unproblematically cited or celebrated as a primary mediator of other sociopolitical oppressions but rather becomes revealed in many cases as a traumatic extension and expression of these oppressions.

Importantly, what is at stake for queer and trans people is not only the care and belonging of family but also the assets, resources, and supports tied to lineage, social network, and inheritance. These inner and outer resources are integral to surviving and coping with the anti-queer stressors and violences embedded in a White cis-heterosexist capitalist world order. They are also vital for imagining a family and a future with queer people in it.

Spiritual care with LGBTQ+ people requires responding to the range of disruptions and dysregulations experienced by the individual and the community (which fall on a continuum of stress and trauma), as well as intervening in the conditions of society and family that make being queer so precarious and potentially traumatic in the first place. Importantly, this entails building up the relational, material, and even temporal resources for LGBTQ+ persons to survive, cope, and connect here and now as well as there and then. Holistic spiritual care is thus a search for the resources, families, communities, histories, and futurities necessary for the full flourishing of all life.

Surveying the lived conditions of LGBTQ+ life

The National Child Traumatic Stress Network (Barba et al., 2021) published a two-part resource calling for all care providers and organizations to use a screener to assess for trauma exposure and post-traumatic stress symptoms when working with LGBTQ+ youth. The rationale is that LGBTQ+ youth are disproportionately exposed to a range of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and potentially traumatic events (PTEs) compared with their cisgender, heterosexual peers. Consequently, these adverse and potentially traumatic experiences correlate with an increased risk for a range of mental and physical health challenges (e.g., depression, addiction, homelessness, suicidality) and an increased risk for relying on desperate coping methods (e.g., substance abuse, risky sexual behavior).

In part 1 of Identifying the Intersection of Trauma and Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (Barba et al., 2021), the National Child Traumatic Stress Network surveyed data from a range of studies to posit four primary areas of research into the connection between LGBTQ+ experience and trauma: a sense of safety (in school), physical and sexual harassment and abuse, family rejection, and mental health (p. 2). We can map these four categories as the primary arenas of violence against the personhood and community of LGBTQ+ children and youth. In this study, we also begin to see a picture of how queer, trans, and ally communities are making sense of these violences through the category of traumatization.

A sense of safety is fundamental for optimal development of the child’s nervous system, brain, personality, and community. The GLSEN (pronounced “glisten”; formerly the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network) National School Climate Survey (Kosciw et al., 2018) reported that 59.5% of LGBTQ+ students felt unsafe at school due to their sexual orientation and 44.6% due to their gender expression (p. xviii). Additionally, 62.2% of LGBTQ+ students experienced discriminatory policies at school, and an overwhelming percentage of LGBTQ+ students reported hearing homophobic and transphobic remarks from peers and teachers (98.5%), with 91.8% feeling distressed afterwards (p. xviii).

What does it do to the mind-body-spirit of an LGBTQ+ child to hear violent language about one’s own emerging sense of self in the very place where one is expected to gain an education and learn how to function in society? We can only postulate about the multiple educational disparities for hypervigilant and stress-aroused LGBTQ+ students, whose sense of threat and ensuing stress can impair their cognitive abilities to concentrate, participate, learn, and retain.

The violence against LGBTQ+ children and youth in school also appears in the omission of LGBTQ+ history and comprehensive sex education from the school curriculum, which is also a refusal to teach LGBTQ+ students that they have a community. According to research published by the Columbia Law Review, “[A] comprehensive survey shows that anti-gay curriculum laws actually exist in twenty states” (Rosky, 2017). The Human Rights Campaign (2023) declares that 2023 already marks the year of the highest amount of anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced at the state level. This absenting of community and history is ultimately the denial of belonging—to a history; to an ancestry; to a present, alive, and vibrant community of diversity. Give the numerous overt attacks and censorships, the evidence is clear: “Schools nationwide are hostile environments for a distressing number of LGBTQ students” (Kosciw et al., 2018, p. xviii).

Thus, it is no wonder that, as a response to feeling unsafe amidst the increased risk of threat and harm, a majority of LGBTQ+ youth avoided extracurricular activities (70.5%), one-third (34.9%) skipped at least one day of school in the past month, and 10.5% skipped four or more days (Kosciw et al., 2018, p. xviii). Turning from the school to the community, the Trevor Project’s 2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health reported that 73% of LGBTQ+ youth experienced discrimination due to their gender expression or sexual orientation, with 36% of LGB youth and 37% of transgender and nonbinary youth reporting an experience of being physically threatened or harmed (p. 15).

Skipping school and extracurricular activities does not necessarily mean staying home for many LGBTQ+ children and youth. The Trevor Project (2022) reported fewer than 1 in 3 transgender and nonbinary youth feel affirmed in their home (p. 4). According to a national study by the Human Rights Campaign, 78% of LGBTQ+ youth are not out to their parents due to fears of repercussions, most specifically of abuse or rejection (Human Rights Campaign Staff, 2018, p. 4). Familial rejection is no mere threat as 29% of LGBTQ+ youth have experienced being unhoused (Trevor Project, 2020, p. 4), and, among that population, 75% of LGB youth and 90% of transgender and nonbinary youth link their homelessness directly to the experience of family abuse and/or rejection (Choi et al., 2015, p. 5). Experiences of abuse and rejection haunt many queer and trans people well past childhood and adolescence. The Pew Research Center (2013) found that about 39% (4 out of 10) of LGBTQ+ adults stated that they had been rejected by a close family member or close friend (p. 1).

The relational cutting off by family and close friends is simultaneously spiritual and material, entailing the removal of care and belonging as well as the withdrawal of social networks, political protections, cultural assets, and familial resources (e.g., land, housing, wealth, and inheritance). As a result, LGBTQ+ folks who experience family rejection are even more at risk for a variety of other challenges—food insecurity, homelessness, victimization, self-harm, suicidal ideation and attempt, and a range of mental health disorders. The removal of support networks and material resources also makes LGBTQ+ folks more vulnerable to a variety of communal and environmental stressors: the Covid-19 pandemic, natural disasters due to climate change, systemic racism and oppression, and a number of other crises. As Servigne et al. (2021) make clear, “It is well established that the most important factor for resilience (from the first minutes after the tragedy) is the closeness and helpfulness of family and neighbors (or even strangers) who can aid in overcoming fear, give care and bring touches of joy and optimism” (p. 42). The quality and efficacy of such support is dependent upon the existence of a social network before the communal or environmental disaster occurs. For many young queer and trans people, these networks are precarious.

Data also shows that when LGBTQ+ youth reach out for help and services (e.g., government programs, housing shelters, lending services, healthcare), they are frequently met with higher rates of stigma and discrimination than the general population. Service discrimination becomes not only another source of violation and stress but also another cause of the economic, employment, health, and housing disparities for LGBTQ+ youth, especially those who are Black or Indigenous (Rooney & Durso, 2017). The shortage of culturally specific understandings and services then compounds the alienation for those brave enough to reach out for help, setting up LGBTQ+ folks to experience cycles of abuse, neglect, retraumatization, and isolation.

Of course, these accounts are largely silent about harm done to LGBTQ+ people in the church and other religious communities, which frequently sacralize the exclusions and abuses of the family and state. More specifically, religiosity is frequently the common denominator of households that exile their queer children (Janssen & Scheepers, 2019). Harmful religious narratives and theologies thus are a factor in interpersonal and intrapsychic violence, for these narratives “set life on edge, make life seem unlivable, and often lead to suicide” (Sanders, 2020, p. 1). One study concluded that 9.3% of LGBT youth met DSM-5 criteria for PTSD in the previous 12 months, and the rates exponentially increased for youth forced into conversion therapy (Mustanski et al., 2010). Within-group differences in these studies are rarely accounted for, meaning these numbers may be higher, the risk much more severe, for LGBTQ+ folks of color and of varying physical abilities and immigration status.

There are few spaces of respite for a large percentage of LGBTQ+ people and even fewer for children and youth. Whether in the home, school, community, or church, many LGBTQ+ folks find themselves unable to escape hostile social environments. This inescapability reveals the very structures and institutions of life to be dehumanizing, deforming, and often destructive for those whose lives, loves, and bodies deviate from the social norms and expectations of the dominant society and its mirror—the nuclear family.

In the 2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health, 45% of LGBTQ+ youth reported they “seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year,” and the rates were much higher for LGBTQ+ youth of color (Trevor Project, 2022). When LGBTQ+ children and youth are abused by and/or cut off from primary relationships and meaningful community, including the material resources tied to those connections, they are thereby cut off from a vision of the future with them in it. This is not an incidental violence but an intentional one. It is the systemic and structural intent of a cis-heteropatriarchal society to either assimilate or eradicate queerness from all facets of our shared life together: the family, school, community, and church, as well as the mind-body-spirit of the person.

The crises of trauma in/as queerness

Obviously not every LGBTQ+ person experiences the range of stressors and “potentially traumatic events” surveyed above. A variety of factors influence not only risk exposure but also the resources for coping and managing stress and trauma—the primary resource being a robust and holistic social support system. But again, for queer and trans folks, rejection from social networks and community is a frequently shared and common experience, even if not a universal one. Several important patterns can be distilled from the above reportings: first, LGBTQ+ people are extremely vulnerable to a range of violent experiences throughout life; second, the withdrawal of social support marks an ongoing fear and threat for LGBTQ+ folks; and third, organizations like the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, the Trevor Project, and the Human Rights Campaign, like many local queer communities, have the urge to “count” and name these violences against LGBTQ+ folks as traumas.

How do we understand this collective urge from within the LGBTQ+ and ally communities to count the adversities and violences they experience as traumas? We suggest that the purpose is less about pinpointing trauma in empiricisms and more about charting collective and cultural patterns of violence and then naming (i.e., validating) those experiences through the very diagnostic category used against them historically in psychological and cultural discourses: the category of trauma.

The instinct to inventory patterns of violence and name them as traumas must be understood in the context of the historical perpetration of violence against LGBTQ+ personhood and community and the systematic undervaluing or elision of LGBTQ+ suffering altogether. In such instances, the source of trauma becomes located in events (e.g., community harassment and assault, family rejection) and in institutions (e.g., the family, the school), which constrict the diversity and expansiveness of human potentiality and relationality to binary gender and monogamous heterosexuality. Pastorally, this naming externalizes the sources (blame) of stress and trauma onto events and institutions, locating them outside the personhood of the LGBTQ+ individual and community. Such a shift is vital for creating community and for bringing a sense of comfort and agency to hurting souls.

Yet, in response to these formulations, some scholars and professionals may worry about the slippage between trauma as response to an event versus trauma as the event itself or even as descriptive of an entire culture. Elaine Miller-Karas, developer of the Trauma and Community Resiliency Models (TRM and CRM)^®, embodies a way to hold both approaches together: thinking about trauma in terms of events that culture deems “traumatic” while also recognizing trauma as a neurobiological perception and response to an event or accumulation of events (though culturally we may or may not acknowledge the event nor the accumulation as traumatic). Miller-Karas’s (2015) work invites us to think about the politics of communally naming certain shared experiences, cultural discourses, and social institutions as traumatic. Additionally, we can understand the queer person’s response to such attacks as one that is neurobiologically, emotionally, and socially specific (even mediated), expressing itself in a range of potential responses along a continuum of stress and trauma.

Many LGBTQ+ people are trying to survive, to love themselves and make new families, to find a place to belong and rest their tired heads. They are also searching for a language to make sense of their suffering and their pride. There are defensive reasons why LGBTQ+ communities find themselves using trauma language to describe frequently shared experiences One particularly important reason is to acknowledge and condemn the multivariate ways in which White cis-heteropatriarchy deforms the mind-body-spirits of queer folks in patterned ways, ways intended to maintain societal and familial homeostasis; Murray Bowen (Kerr & Bowen, 1988) would remind us the two are intimately comingled, even co-constitutive. From “Don’t Say Gay” bills in the school to fundamentalist religious movements like Focus on the Family, the attack on LGBTQ+ life comes from multiple vectors and is systematically aimed at the erasure of our community, history, and future. How else to collectively imagine that violence aimed at “the destruction of experience” (Di Nicola, 2018, p.19) except as a kind of collective trauma?

Anti-queer discourse and practice have long histories. In just the history of psychology, theories of trauma and sexuality have long been entangled. Sigmund Freud famously explored the connection between psychological states and somatic symptoms, linking the “symptom(s)” with not just one traumatic event but a “series of associatively linked episodes, beginning in early childhood, all of which needed to be exhumed” (Mitchell & Black, 2016, p. 10). For Freud, trauma indexes the repetition and reenactment of unclaimed and unassimilated experiences, particularly those that completely overwhelm and impair one’s abilities to self-regulate, cope, connect, and make meaning. Freud’s conception of trauma as repetition and reenactment has since received sustained attention, but less attention has been directed towards the context in which his theories of the unconscious and trauma emerged—namely, in the analysis of infantile seduction, childhood sexuality, repressed sexual and identificatory fantasies, and adult sexual perversity.

As Diana Fuss (1995) elaborated, “[I]t is Freud who gives us our most familiar and denigrating sexual typologies, most memorable among them ‘the male homosexual’ . . . and ‘the female homosexual’” (pp. 1–2). Freud (1935) maintained that homosexuality “cannot be classified as an illness,” yet he also declared it to be “a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development” (p. 787). Despite Freud’s own nuanced attention to sexuality, the ways that psychoanalytic and psychological ideas have been picked up culturally and politically have historically conflated trauma and unhealth with queerness itself, as if the roots of all psychic traumas are sexual perversity and/or gender incertitude.

While current medical, psychological, and social scientific discourses now work to decouple queerness from illness, defect, and perversity, the association between queerness and unhealth persists in the ways that the “homosexual,” the “transgender,” and the “queer” are still reproduced in cultural and political discourses not as persons but as figures of rupture, break, and discontinuity, marking a crisis and threat to the family, to democracy, and to children, which, as Edelman (2004) famously argued, is a threat to the future itself.

For LGBTQ+ and ally communities to count the common adversities and attacks on LGBTQ+ life as traumas (or potentially traumatic events) is thus an intervention to disassociate the rupture of queerness from the split of trauma. The inherent risk of this strategy is to make trauma “thinkable” and to “lose the spectrality, rupture, nonlinearity, and non-integrability that mark the traumatic as such” (Rubenstein, 2018, p. 286). Yet, if any community can simultaneously mobilize a category, critique it, and keep its signification open, it is the queer community. Di Nicola (2018) writes that “trauma” is not a master term but a flawed one, with a complicated history and no “unified discourse” (p. 18). The same can be said of queerness itself. As with the term queer, queer and trans communities have been reclaiming the word trauma from its solely individual and pathological roots to index sociocultural processes of identity formation, which reveals how a violent world order stresses, traumatizes, and deforms the mind-body-spirits of LGBTQ+ folks by conscripting White cis-heterosexual roles, embodiments, and relations. (It is worth noting that we believe cis-heteropatriarchy harms all people—queer and straight alike—though that harm registers differently for those whose lives rub against the norms and thereby refuse cis-heteronormative assimilation.)

The collective efforts in the LGBTQ+ community to demedicalize and depathologize trauma (Cvetkovich, 2003, p. 25), and to now use this language more broadly to describe a culture, is ultimately a strategy to externalize the source of violence from a problem of the individual to a problem of the social environment. In this sense, LGBTQ+ stress and trauma may be read as appropriate and even adaptive responses to a violent context that seeks to do them harm—again, through strategies like assimilation, abuse, exclusion, silencing, or eradication. Throughout LGBTQ+ history, depathologizing trauma has been a consistent and reliable strategy for establishing queerness on new terms (which is not to deny that trauma may have pathological dimensions). By externalizing the source of their suffering (e.g., I am not the problem; the White cis-heteropatriarchal capitalist world order is), LGBTQ+ folks claim a kind of community, agency, and resistance from within the site of violence. They open new space for rethinking the terms of queer and trans subject formations apart from the ways they have been deformed—i.e., the possibility of queer continuums of resilience-growth-hope in response to but not totalized by queer continuums of stress and trauma.

Queer continuums of stress and trauma

Addressing concerns about oppression and trauma more broadly, feminist psychologist Maria Root (1992) expands traditional notions of trauma to include the “traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or threatening to bodily well-being at the given moment but that do violence to the soul and spirit” (p. 240). Root (1992) coined the term insidious trauma, arguing that the impact of oppression “shapes a worldview rather than shatters assumptions about the world” (p. 240). Insidious trauma reframes colonialism, racism, homophobia, trans-antagonism, and all such oppressions not as interruptions of an otherwise lithe and free subjectivity but as constitutive of the context and conditions that constrain our emergence as subjects in the first place—what kinds of subjects we can be and what kinds of interactions and relations we can enjoy.

Similarly, Meyer and Frost (2013) support the idea of a “minority stress model,” which “suggests that because of stigma, prejudice, and discrimination, lesbian, gay, and bisexual people experience more stress than do heterosexuals and that this stress can lead to mental and physical disorders” (p. 252). Like insidious trauma, minority stress is a model for attending to the social stressors embedded in the context of a life, inquiring into the impact of both quotidian and explosive stressors such as prejudicial events, structural exclusions, expectations of rejection, pressures of concealment, internalized homophobia, and experiences of harassment and violence (Meyer, 2003). There is no doubt that this short list describes norms and instances of harm and stress. The question is how such “minority stress” impacts persons and communities in the short term and across a lifetime. Meyer and Frost (2013) contend that the assessment of minority stress thus necessitates inquiry into the ways that “health outcomes are determined by the balance of positive (coping and social support) and negative (stressors) effects” (p. 262).

Minority stress and insidious trauma become two ways of conceptualizing the impact of violence—structural, discursive, interpersonal, and intrapersonal—on LGBTQ+ personhood and community. LGBTQ+ people are disproportionately exposed to a range of potentially traumatic events, what many call shock traumas (Stanley, 2019, p. 31), but also to the buildup of chronic minority stress, the accumulation of which we can understand and assess as queer allostatic load.

While, culturally, many of us think of stress and trauma as separate, “[T]hey share a neurobiological basis. Stress and trauma are not inherent in the event—they are internal mind-body responses on a continuum” (Stanley, 2019, p. 32). Traumatic stress then indexes one pole of that continuum, marking the most dysregulated of responses to cis-heteropatriarchal violence when our personal, relational, material, and structural resources for coping and connecting become overwhelmed or destroyed entirely. Whether gradual or sudden, traumatic stress is “the result of a complex interrelationship among psychological, biological, and social processes” and not “a unitary disorder consisting of separate clusters of symptoms” (van der Kolk et al., 2007, p. ix). Remembering that trauma is on a continuum with stress is crucial to help extract queerness from its historical conflation with trauma and relocate trauma in a range of defensive and adaptive survival responses to the stress of oppression.

The stress of oppression is chronic and insidious, like the pressure to conceal a relationship or repress a bodily knowing. It is also sudden and explosive, like physical abuse and family rejection. The ability of LGBTQ+ people to effectively manage and cope with that stress is directly connected to our past experiences (e.g., whether we found support outside and within to complete the stress-recovery cycle) and the ways those experiences live on in the mind-body-spirit and community. It is especially connected to our early social environments and parental attachments, which, to reiterate, are often the sources of LGBTQ+ stress and not its relief. As Felitti et al. (1998) famously revealed, “[T]he impact of . . . adverse childhood experiences on adult health status is strong and cumulative” (p. 251). In other words, those who are already stressed and traumatized are more vulnerable to an ever-accumulating onslaught of stress, trauma, and adversity across a lifetime.

Pastorally, we might ask specific questions about, for example, how the constant neuroception of danger and threat along with the chronic pressures to identify and conceal all build up as stress in the mind-body-spirit of LGBTQ+ people. When such stress is repeated and unmetabolized, frequently due to a lack of social support, it changes the mind-body-spirit system of the person and impairs their capacity to cope, manage future stressors, and even imagine belonging to the future. The concern for us in spiritual care becomes about how we can lighten the queer allostatic load, as well as increase the resources, resilience, and resistance of LGBTQ+ persons to stave off the chronic, insidious, and traumatic stress of interlocking systems of oppression.

The real challenge is how to respond with care to LGBTQ+ stressors and traumas while also confronting their sources. One of the most persistent issues with research into LGBTQ+ stress and trauma is that too often the agents of perpetration go uninterrogated—especially when those perpetrators are pastors, parents, and teachers. In Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick (1990, 2008) argued that most discourses about sexuality tend to reproduce a minoritizing view of the subject, conceiving of, for example, same-sex attraction as the exclusive concern of particular people and thus reasserting a neoliberal, autonomous, stable subject. In contrast, Sedgwick advances a universalizing view, one that understands any questions and conflicts of sexuality and subjectivity to be issues of “continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities” (p. 1). In this view, sexuality, like identity itself, is tenuous, contingent, and relational, and its effects are not isolated to one person or group but extend to the entire social order of relations. This is not to say that all people are the same but rather that all are connected. It is this connection we have forgotten when we attend to LGBTQ+ stress and trauma but not to holding accountable their abusers—which are both personal and intimate (pastors, parents, teachers) as well as social and cultural (discourses, institutions, structures).

When it comes to assessing LGBTQ+ experiences that fall along the stress-trauma continuum, then, everyone must be implicated, including and especially those who benefit from the preservation and reproduction of the White cis-heterosexual ideal—in the family, school, church, and society. This requires holistic attention to the web of relations and contexts in which identity and social formations occur (Miller-McLemore, 1993, 2005), as well as specific attention to LGBTQ+ stress and trauma as concerns for everyone. Such a project is invested not merely in applying trauma theory to LGBTQ+ lives but also in letting the lived crises of queerness throw all our conceptual tools and subject positions into crisis, ultimately revealing a new starting place based in our interconnectedness and indebtedness to each other.

As Rose (1993, 2017) wrote, “I am abused and I abuse / I am the victim and I am the perpetrator” (p. 31). To think of ourselves in both positions is to locate LGBTQ+ oppression in the discourses, systems, and structures that overdetermine who we can become, who we can connect with, and what those connections entail; it is also to locate the world’s violence in us, not only in our emergence and formation as subjects but also in our quotidian and habitual perpetuation of oppressive norms and practices.

Responding to LGBTQ+ stress and trauma with care first requires attention to our own complicities and propensities to cause harm. Care also requires attention to the range of psychosocial effects and bodily materializations of anti-queer “soul violence” (Sanders, 2020), as well as to the resources and gifts of the LGBTQ+ community for resisting and transforming a violent world order—both in the world and in us. A challenge will always be to respond with care to LGBTQ+ stress and trauma without collapsing queerness back into its conflation with unhealthiness and defect. After all, queerness may predispose a life to crisis, stress, and potential trauma, but only insofar as the world is disordered by White cis-heteropatriarchy. After all, queerness also mobilizes us toward previously foreclosed modes of desire, contact, embodiment, eroticism, community, and even futurity.

Temporality in queering the stress-trauma continuum

As van der Kolk (2014) described it, the experience of trauma involves the tyranny of the past over the present in the lives of traumatized people who “chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies” because “the past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort” (p. 97). The violence experienced in the past becomes so intolerable and overwhelming to the mind-body-spirit system that a series of splits and fractures occur that haunt victims of trauma and return in flashbacks, triggering experiences, and intrusive memories—creating unbearable pasts recapitulating in the present.

While much of what van der Kolk offered is also descriptive of the traumatic experience of some queer people, there are additional ways in which queer experience intersects a stress-trauma continuum along the axis of temporality. For queer people—individuals and collectives—the tyranny of the present over the future and the absenting of collective pasts express two forms of chrono stress and traumatic temporality that should be considered within a pastoral theological assessment of stress and trauma for LGBTQ+ people. These experiences are not entirely unique to queer people, however, and attending to them in the temporalities of queer collectives can also benefit practical theologians and spiritual care practitioners in understanding experiences along the stress-trauma continuum for many others harmed by temporal possibilities conscripted by chrono hegemony.

Additionally, practical theologians and care practitioners exhibit a paucity of focus on temporality in our work to date. As Lester (1995) pointed out nearly three decades ago, “Pastoral theology . . . has ignored a significant aspect of the human condition, namely our temporality—the fact that we are constantly embedded in the context of time, which includes both past and future” (p. 4), limiting our ability to adequately address the dimension of ultimacy bound up with the notion of “hope.” Thus, a queering of trauma frameworks through the lens of queer temporalities may benefit scholars and practitioners in the field more broadly.

Tyranny of the present over the future

The future is always already foreclosed to queer people in “straight time” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 25), that is, the linear time of neoliberal progress, the unending growth of extractive capitalism, and the future portended by heteronormative familial progeny (i.e., heterosexual biological reproduction). This is a temporality in which the organization of time is tied to the organization of bodies in time and through time. In straight time, the present is a hegemonic construct, and any time to come is beholden to a form of presentism in which economic, political, and techno futures are only derivative versions of the present, always presumed to be getting “better” (but for whom?). Here, it is not the past that is continually revisiting the present but instead the present that is continually projected into the future. As Muñoz (2009) stated, however, “The present is not enough. It is impoverished and toxic for queers and other people who do not feel the privilege of majoritarian belonging, normative tastes, and ‘rational’ expectations” (p. 27).

It is not enough to survive the present if potential futures are projections, albeit slightly tweaked, of the current status quo. And it is the future that is at stake in many pervasive experiences of stress and trauma among queer people—not simply the future of the individual but the possible futures for living lives of queerness against the grain of the cis-heteronormative regime.

Those who cannot (or who refuse to) reproduce the proper family or embody the norms of ideal citizens exist outside of time’s straight flow from past to present to future. If trauma involves the experience of being stuck in an unending violent past in which there is no hope for escape or vision of a different future, it must also account for unending projections of violent futures in which there is no possibility for the flourishing of life.

Ratcliffe et al. (2014) argued that in traumatic aftermaths “the experience of time is itself affected. Rather than a change in what is anticipated, arising against a backdrop of intact temporal experience, there is an altered sense of temporal passage, of ‘moving forward’ in time, along with a change in how past, present, future, and the relationship between them are experienced” (p. 1). What is eroded in the traumatic temporality resulting in a foreshortened future is a “style of anticipation.” They explained,

Hence a sense of foreshortened future is not a judgment to the effect that the remainder of one’s life will be short and that one has little or nothing to look forward to. It is a change in how time is experienced: an orientation toward the future that is inseparable from one’s experience of past and present, and also from the short- and long-term “passage” of time, is altered. (p. 8)

While the discourse of trauma does not encapsulate the entirety of what needs to be addressed in our relationships to futurity, the concept of a foreshortened future is a helpful framework to explore the nature of care in/for the future with queer and trans people.

The type of traumatic response of a foreshortened future that Ratcliffe et al. (2014) described also seems especially pertinent to the work of spiritual care in larger collective futures of extreme loss and collapse caused by climate change (to name one among a variety of examples of disaster), which compounds chrono stress and traumatic temporalities of queer and trans collectives:

The longer-term sense of time is also very different. When the person looks ahead, the future lacks structure; it is not ordered in terms of meaningful projects, and so a coherent sense of long-term duration is absent. Hence the all-enveloping dread she feels before some inchoate threat is not situated in relation to a wider pattern of meaningful temporal events. There is nothing meaningful between now and its actualization, and so it seems imminent. A loss of interpersonal trust that is central to this form of experience is also what sets it in stone. Without the possibility of entering into trusting relations with others, the predicament seems unchangeable. There is no access to the process that might otherwise reveal its contingency and allow her to move beyond it. The person is isolated from others in a way that is incompatible with “moving forward in time”; her life story has been cut short. (Ratcliffe et al., 2014, p. 8)

This loss of trusting interpersonal relationships with others, as noted above, is often a hallmark of queer experience, starting with the family of origin and moving into experiences of school bullying and interpersonal violence. While this has long been noted as a feature of queer experience, its effect on an experience of time and imaginations of futures is lacking in the literature.

A sense of a foreshortened future is similar to what Freeman (2010a, b) described as “narrative foreclosure,” characterized by the conviction that one’s story—the constitutive material of life’s livability—is effectively over. Freeman described this as “the conviction that the story of one’s life, or life work, has effectively ended. At an extreme, narrative foreclosure may lead to a kind of living death or even suicide, the presumption being that the future is a foregone conclusion, an inevitable reiteration of one’s present suffering or paralysis” (p. 125). This recapitulation of the present into the future may have effects as damaging as the tyranny of the past over the present and should be considered as a factor in queer and trans trauma and suicidality (see Sanders, 2020).

But the future is also queered in the lived experience of LGBTQ+ lives. Queer and trans people live into other futures in their very bodies with new names, new expressions, new community constellations, new bodily comportments, even transformed bodies through surgical and hormonal treatments. Whether these potential futures are cut off or not depends on a variety of factors, but even in their failed or curtailed “appearances,” the queer community catches a glimpse of an otherwise world and future. The embodiments of queer futures can be seen in what Muñoz (2009) called an “anticipatory illumination of a queer world, a sign of an actually existing queer reality, a kernel of political possibility within a stultifying heterosexual present” (p. 49). These “otherwise possibilities” (Crawley, 2017) are a threat to powers that are invested in the present regime and are committed to a presentism that extends the status quo into the future. We can observe the stress-trauma dimensions of the temporal in Lothian’s (2018) words pointing to “the affective force that representations of unpleasant futures can carry when they invoke the impossible possibility that there might be no future at all” (p. 57).

Queer and trans communities, through diverging from straight time and the inevitable future of presentism, are confronting the impossibility of that future with “them” in it; antagonizing futures that are unimaginable, intolerable, and ill-fitting for the flourishing of queer lives. A spiraling queer chronology is more shocking, random, and unpredictable than straight time. Queerness helpfully mobilizes a multiplicity of futures, keeping the question of the future always open to resignification and reimagination. As Muñoz (2009) said, “The present must be known in relation to the alternative temporal and spatial maps provided by a perception of past and future affective worlds. . . . [T]he then that disrupts the tyranny of the now in both past and future” (pp. 27, 29). Yet pasts—and their seeming absence from queer consciousness—are another area of potential chrono stress and temporal trauma for queer and trans people.

Absenting of collective pasts

The production and reproduction of the dominant cis-heteropatriarchal capitalist status quo through the organization of bodies via “chrononormativity” (Freeman, 2010a, b, xiii) visits its violence upon collective pasts as much as— in service to—the foreclosing of myriad futures. Caruth (1995) argued, “The ability to recover the past is thus closely and paradoxically tied up, in trauma, with the inability to have access to it” (p. 152). Queer and trans individuals often experience a dearth of past collective stories to integrate into current constructions of the self and future imaginings. From a constructionist standpoint, this might be viewed as a form of constitutive violence taking place at the level of narrative availability. There is no given “community” in the lives of queer and trans people in and through which these stories of collective pasts are kept alive and transmitted to the individual—neither the biological family, social institutions, or churches. While now, more than ever, stories of queer collective pasts have been systemically uncovered, explored, written about, and archived digitally, how these narratives of queer collective pasts are discovered by LGBTQ+ people is much more haphazard. And very few institutions—LGBTQ+-affirming mainline liberal Christian churches included—have taken up the mantle of intentionally telling these stories in pulpits and public forums.3 Thus, one important particularity of experiences that fall along the stress-trauma continuum for queer and trans people is the typical lack of a cohesive sense of belonging to a larger queer/trans collective through time—past and future as much as the present.

As Erikson (1995) argued, “In order to serve as a generally useful concept, ‘trauma’ has to be understood as resulting from a constellation of life experiences as well as from a discrete happening, from a persisting condition as well as from an acute event,” pointing to the possibilities of addressing “traumatized communities” rather than simply “assemblies of traumatized persons” (p. 185). “Trauma can create community” (Erikson, 1995, p. 185). Yet, as Erikson also acknowledged, trauma typically has the effect of damaging the texture of community. In queer and trans collectives, we can observe both the creative and the damaging effects of trauma upon communal possibility, in addition to the lived present of community or the lack thereof.

In some sense, LGBTQ+ people can be considered a “community” because of the perpetuation of injustice and violence against us. We are not bound together by biology or nationality or race or religion. We have no necessary experience of queer kinship until kinship ties are created, and these have often been cultivated to provide affinity spaces within dominant cis-heteropatriarchal publics as well as activist spaces to counter institutional and societal discrimination and violence against queer and trans people. We are bound together by a collective experience of being targeted by our biological families, the legal structures of our nation-states, and our religious communities and are often without a larger queer and trans collective to support us individually or provide us with a sense of a shared collective past.

As Brison (2002) argued, “‘Personal’ stories must be framed by longer historical accounts and by broader social and political ones” (p. 34), but for queer and trans people who have little to no access to narrative sources of a collective past, even as they experience the foreclosure of futures, the chrono stress of absent pasts exacerbates present experiences of stress and trauma. While increasingly archived in the literature and in digital spaces, there may still exist few narrative resources of the broader sociopolitical pasts of queer communal resilience and organizing that are readily available for queer and trans individuals to draw upon in forming “personal” stories that can serve as a bulwark against an encroaching violent present and its vanishing of futures.

Practical theologians and spiritual care practitioners must recognize the possibilities for hope and resilience in the collective past narratives for racial, ethnic, national, and religious minorities—among many others—in addressing the persistence of marginalization, injustice, and violence in the present. Lothian’s (2018) words are instructive here:

The lingering presences and possibilities of past futures open possibilities for thinking and living the present in different, deviant ways. If a forward-oriented narrative of historical development signifies the time of capitalism and colonialism, then the time of the colonized, excluded, and othered is most frequently to be found in the past. (p. 20)

For queer and trans people, caring praxis at the site of stress and trauma often lacks the buoying resources of resistance found in these “possibilities of past futures.”

Indeed, as we can witness in the rise of conservative political organizing against teaching the history of race in the United States and in scrubbing public school curricula of any mention of LGBTQ+ people, intervening in the possibilities of collective memory is, itself, a form of violence. This is true not only in the context of the collective but also in the experience of the individual who is kept from knowledge of pasts to which they are connected. This is akin to what Keeling (2019) called the “micro-terrors . . . that we have habituated ourselves to accept” that sever us from “our roots and pasts and histories” through histories of White supremacy, coloniality, and cis-heteropatriarchal power (p. 78).

From a relational view of the self, violence that creates contexts of stress and trauma occurs not only at the level of present ruptures of relational life but in our ruptures with collective pasts as well. Nelson (2001) argued, “Because group identities, like personal identities, are complex narrative structures of meaning . . . oppressive master narratives cause doxastic damage—the damage of distorting and poisoning people’s self-conception and their beliefs about who other people are” (p. 106). Recovery of these absented narratives of collective pasts serves the function of bolstering queer and trans lives against the continued perpetuation of injustice and violence.

In addition to the ways that queer communities have been forged through past experiences of collective trauma and the experience of marginalization and violence, we must also recover queer and trans collective narratives of pleasure, possibility, and flourishing. As Muñoz (2009) stated, “Past pleasures stave off the affective perils of the present while they enable a desire that is queer futurity’s core” (p. 26). Just as queer and trans lives should not be totalized by narratives of trauma and violence in the present—though these are part of queer experience in a dominant cis-heteropatriarchal society—neither should our collective pasts be totalized by these narratives. Queer and trans people have formed community at the margins of family, church, and society for generations, and these collectives of queer life and possibility were shaped by pleasure and relationality outside the restricting dictates of past status quos. These narratives, once recovered, hold the potential to serve as resources for resilience in the living of a queer present and constructing of queer futures.

Constructive proposals for care along a queer stress-trauma continuum

From our examination of queer individual and collective experience along a stress-trauma continuum, four constructive proposals emerge to guide practical theological engagement and spiritual care praxis. Each proposal is an experiment with possibilities for how the notion of a stress-trauma continuum may serve theologians and practitioners well in addressing the myriad harms, injustices, and violence faced by LGBTQ+ people that create stress and trauma in the lives of queer and trans people.

First, a stress-trauma continuum would be helpful to practical theologians and spiritual care providers due to its ability to provide a framework for mapping dysregulation and responses to stressful contexts and traumatic circumstances. As this article demonstrates, LGBTQ+ people encounter myriad occurrences of trauma, injustice, violence, and stress. Key to the usefulness of a stress-trauma continuum for queer and trans persons, however, is the ability to narrate this stress-trauma continuum and the map of dysregulation and response to stressful and traumatic circumstances from queer perspectives. Psy discourses have long perpetuated violence against queer and trans people. A new language and framework for understanding LGBTQ+ stress and trauma should foreground the perspectives of queer and trans folks and not be beholden to diagnostic criteria, which, formulated without queer and trans people, have reinforced heteronormative and gender dichotomous assumptions in psychotherapy (Butler & Byrne, 2008). Relatedly, this framework must acknowledge that experiences that fall along the stress-trauma continuum are a part of queer and trans experience but that LGBTQ+ subjectivity is not totalized by trauma.

Second, in this vein, we hope that a stress-trauma continuum will also prompt the development of a resilience-growth-hope continuum, highlighting the myriad ways that queer and trans people behave agentially, with creativity and great resolve, to resist the violence that is perpetuated in relation to us. And this resistance is a part of the personal and communal response to trauma in our history and experience. Traumatic experience has, in part, helped to form us into a community because of our ability, demonstrated again and again, to resist the violences of a cis-heteropatriachal status quo. These resistance experiences (and absented pasts) must affect, inflict, and inflect the stress-trauma continuum for the framework to center care on queer and trans people as well as beyond queer experiences. Our conviction is that queer and trans experience has much to teach us about stress and trauma more broadly, going beyond the specificity of LGBTQ+ experience, and that many of these lessons rest upon a resilience-growth-hope continuum of resistance.

Third, trauma discourse—and perhaps even a stress-trauma discourse—too easily focuses upon the experience of the traumatized while eliding focus on the perpetuation of the injustices and violence that create the stress-trauma experience in the first place. Of vital importance in our sense of this framework’s usability is its ability to locate violence in discourses, systems, and structures that (over)determine who we can become, with whom we can connect across time and space, and what those connections entail. While it is essential to focus upon healing those who have been victimized by stress and trauma, it is also vital to name the locations from which the perpetuation of harm emanates. We too easily name these locales of injustice and violence on an individual level—also the level of the trauma upon which we typically focus—without noting the institutional and systemic levels at which they are perpetrated. With a focus upon the sources of violence and trauma, we must also locate the ways that violence works to conscript something in us or about us, charting the introjection of those violences and examining how we become formed and deformed according to a discursive, political, material regime of White cis-heteropatriarchal normativity.

Finally, we hope that a stress-trauma continuum would allow for a more robust engagement with the ways that stress and trauma are experienced across temporalities as well as how they are experienced temporally. Interventions that develop in the wake of a queer stress-trauma continuum should be interventions that not only address the relational and material experiences of queer and trans people in the present—of critical importance, no doubt—but also lead practitioners and theologians into investigating ways of restoring absented pasts and reimagining vanishing futures for and with LGBTQ+ people. We need a collective history to survive and thrive in a present that continues to attack our bodies and assail our souls. And if we are to have a future, it will be a future of flourishing beyond the restricting dictates of a cis-heteropatriarchal persisting present that continually conscripts the possibilities for queer and trans life.

A queer stress-trauma continuum, along with a queer resilience-growth-hope continuum, must take shape as a spiraling temporality that continually draws upon past collective experience to meet the violence and injustices of the present, projecting queer imaginings of a future that is not conscripted or overdetermined by a projection of the present into a future overdetermined by the White cis-heteropatriarchal present. The past, the present, and the future must be open, fluid, undecided, and resilient—therein, they must be queer.

Declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.