Healing Oppression-Based Trauma

When I was 21 years old, I started seeing a therapist. I had just fully come out, leaving the last relationship that had tethered me to the confines and semi-comfort of heterosexuality. While I had slept with women before, this breakup with a boyfriend allowed me to finally give myself over to the queer unknown and all it held.

It was a rough time. My straight friend group saw me as the “bad guy” for breaking up with my boyfriend. My family said they were grieving what they thought my life was going to be—following in their footsteps with a normative relationship and life trajectory. I felt certain about who I was but trapped and scared at the same time. Jumping headfirst into queer dating was terrifying. Would I ever be as loved or as safe as I thought I had been with a cisgender man? Would I ever find stability with a queer or trans person? What would life as a gay woman even look like?

I needed support; I needed to process that breakup and all that was unfolding in my life. But working at a sex toy store while finishing up college meant I was pretty much broke. So I found a therapist who took my insurance and had availability. Those were my only criteria.

The therapist was an older straight white woman who specialized in trauma. She soon became convinced that my father had sexually abused me and that was why I was a lesbian. She told me, “I think I know where your fear of penises comes from.” This wasn’t based on anything I had said or even alluded to. I wasn’t afraid of penises; in fact, I worked in a store that proudly displayed an entire table of them in every shape and size! I had never felt so misunderstood in my life.

It was hard enough to be fully coming out and coming into my queerness, experiencing the trauma of my family’s and society’s homophobia, and reckoning with the impact of six years of dating and having sex with men as a closeted gay woman. To have my sexuality be so misconstrued, reduced to something that wasn’t even accurate, was devastating. What’s more, for years to come, I was plagued with intrusive images of abuse that had never actually occurred.

It’s no surprise that I stopped seeing that therapist and avoided therapy for years. I have since realized that coming out as a lesbian was only a piece of the whole that I was struggling to understand. I had inherited trauma as the granddaughter of persecuted people, I had terrible OCD and anxiety, I was addicted to alcohol, and I was profoundly impacted by the death of my cousin in a car crash when we were young. Not to mention growing up in a society that shamed women’s sexuality, queerness, and any body that wasn’t thin. I had starved myself physically, emotionally, and sexually for years. But none of those issues was addressed in the therapy room because I had been unseen and shamed.

After my negative experience, I stopped believing in the potential of therapy. Instead, it was the queer and trans folks around me who guided me through the process of being fully out. My lovers and friends were the ones who gave me what I needed: space to question what a queer life would mean for me, space to cry and scream about the blatant homophobia I experienced, space to feel and be validated.

With them, I learned to love my queerness, to finally accept my abundant body and neurodivergent brain. Understanding how essential community had been to my healing, I went to school to get a master’s in social work, preparing for a career as a community organizer.

At the time, it didn’t occur to me to seek out a therapist who was also queer; I wasn’t even aware that was an option. It wasn’t until grad school that I finally met with a queer therapist after losing a dear friend to suicide. The friend had been a lover and a queer mentor to me. I was so deep in grief that I felt I had no other choice but to seek therapy.

That first therapeutic relationship with a queer therapist changed my life. It showed me therapy could be a safe place for me as a queer woman and for everyone who has felt marginalized. This experience helped me understand even more the importance of being fully understood and seen in therapy. It even eventually drew me to the one-on-one work I do with clients now.

Everyone, especially those with oppressed bodies—whether we are marginalized for our identities or our differences—needs to be seen and accepted for who we are, to be embraced physically and emotionally, and to be given the safe space to heal. Queer community saved me, and helped me find my true sense of self as a lesbian woman. And not just because I figured out my sexuality but because the things about me that had never quite fit anywhere—my queerness, my body and brain, my difference—were loved, seen, and held. And it was that first queer therapist who helped me see the need for more representation in the mental health community.

The right therapist and the right community can provide you space to be held and to heal. They are downright lifesaving for oppressed and marginalized communities who have experienced the trauma of feeling unseen and unsafe—people of color, immigrants, women, neurodivergent folks, anti-capitalists, anyone horrified by war and violence and the blatant destruction of Earth by their fellow humans. For those who have experienced homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism, religious discrimination, ableism, generational trauma, and more, it is vital to understand why we hurt and how we can heal.

Why We Might Not Trust Therapy

The world of therapy has long failed to look at the unique trauma caused by oppression. In fact, therapy has a tragic history of itself being a source of trauma for those of us at the margins.

LGBTQ+ people were criminalized and/or institutionalized in psych wards for hundreds of years across the US, and they continue to be in many parts of the world. Today in the US, trans people continue to be criminalized, denied health care, and, for trans youth, at risk of being taken from their homes. The predominant “treatment” for queer and trans folks used to be electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)—which at the time was a severe procedure with extreme cognitive implications. (Today’s ECT is milder and is only used with the client’s informed consent when they are resistant to other treatments, often for severe depression, suicidality, and psychosis.) Conversion therapy, a traumatizing and non-evidence-based “treatment” that attempts to “cure” people of their queerness and transness, is still used today, and is still legal in about half of the US. And I’m not just talking about religious conversion therapy or camps—it is still used by some psychotherapists and psychiatrists as well.

Many of my clients who are processing religious trauma have had traumatizing experiences with therapists who do not disclose that their therapy style is deeply influenced by homophobic and transphobic Christian “values.” To be clear, Christianity is not the only religion that perpetuates harmful beliefs about queer and trans people. Many of the world’s organized religions are homophobic or became that way due to the impact of colonialism and extremism, and there are plenty of secular cultures saturated with homophobic biases.

Today, trans folks also face additional challenges. While cisgender people are able to make whatever changes they please to their bodies without being evaluated by a mental health professional, trans people often must go through exploitative, humiliating, and expensive psychotherapy to access hormone therapy and gender-affirming care, and have faced hundreds of bills attacking their health care.

Queer and trans folks aren’t the only ones for whom psychotherapy feels unsafe and inaccessible. The centuries-long history of medical experimentation on people of color has left whole communities wary of psychotherapy. People living with chronic illnesses also have reasons to not trust psychotherapy. Many of my clients have been told that their chronic illness and pain are all in their heads. Those of us with abundant bodies have long found therapy to be a site of body violence and shame. Those who are disabled and neurodiverse have also avoided therapy due to the near impossibility of finding therapists who share their experience.

Therapy hasn’t been accessible to poor and working-class folks either. Many are only able to access mental health care through nonprofits, if at all, as most private practices, mine included, either don’t take insurance or are priced in a way that is impossible for anyone without disposable income. Nonprofits can certainly provide good mental health care; however, these counseling centers often have long waiting lists and offer little choice in which therapist clients work with, which is especially important for anyone who wants and needs their identities to be reflected in their therapist. I have clients who sought in-network or free counseling, only to discover the organization itself had religious and homophobic values that were not disclosed.

So of course, those of us at the margins feel therapy isn’t for us. Why would we spend our time, money, and emotional energy on something that doesn’t see our identities clearly, that doesn’t even consider our trauma to be real?

What is Oppression-Based Trauma?

Oppression, the systematic domination of one group by another, is dehumanizing. It results in a lack of basic human rights, and even access to essential resources like food and housing and safety. To be oppressed is to be forced into experiencing a diminished sense of self and worthiness. We feel like it is not safe to be ourselves, and so we fracture our inner selves in order to survive. The shock waves of trauma that we feel are as real as those of any experience that has long been recognized as trauma.

Historically, oppression hasn’t been considered to be trauma. But that’s finally changing. It is high time to name the truth: Oppression-based trauma is real and devastating.

There are many books on trauma healing that have changed my life and my clients’ lives. Yet, when my clients have asked for recommendations for books that reflected their own experiences as a queer or trans person—books that name the daily oppression we experience as trauma—there was not a single book I could suggest. There was little or nothing that spoke to the specific traumas those in my community experience: homophobia, transphobia, “corrective” sexual abuse, institutional injustices, medical trauma, body dysphoria, being deadnamed and misgendered, or growing up in a religion that sees you as an abomination.

In a recent Gallup poll, 10 percent of millennials and 20 percent of Gen Z identified as LGBTQ+: How is it that we make up such a significant percentage of the population of these core generations, and yet there is nothing out there written specifically for us and our healing journeys?

We’re not alone. People with disabilities and chronic illnesses face isolation and discrimination at every turn. People living in poverty—of any race, gender, ability, or sexuality—live through the daily trauma of not having their basic needs met, or in fear of losing them at any time. The world of therapy has only just begun to crack the surface of the ongoing traumas people of color survive every day living in a white supremacist world, and the ways centuries of violence have manifested in people’s bodies and our society as a whole.

The Trauma Symptoms of Discrimination Scale (TSDS) is a recently developed psychological tool used to measure symptoms of oppression-based trauma such as nervous system dysregulation, feeling disconnected and isolated from others, and negative changes in cognition and mood. Not surprisingly, these are the same symptoms listed in the PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 (PCL-5), a tool for assessing PTSD and its severity. In a study using the TSDS, 97 percent of the participants who were people of color reported racial discrimination that led to traumatic stress. Additionally, 86 percent of participants experienced discrimination that led to traumatic stress based on disability, 81 percent based on their sexuality, 68 percent based on their religion, 56 percent based on their age, 38 percent based on their social class, and 31 percent based on their gender. All oppressed people live with the impact of discrimination, in their physical and emotional bodies.

Stress from discrimination shows up in the body as trauma and triggers the same protective and adaptive responses the body uses to keep us safe after any trauma. Add to this the fact that people often experience multiple oppressions due to their intersecting identities, and you can see how these add up—the more oppression one experiences, the more trauma and stress on the body. For example, my clients who are queer and trans people of color face the ongoing stress of white supremacy and homophobia or transphobia on a daily basis. It’s nearly impossible for them to experience safety and stability in the here and now.

With all of the research on the chronic stress of oppression, we know what it does to someone’s mental and physical health. Yet many therapists do not and are not yet trained to acknowledge these experiences as trauma, making therapy for many marginalized clients uncomfortable at best, and catastrophic at worst.

These are desperate and frightening times, especially for those of us at the margins. Trauma healing has to be as radical and as urgent as any movement in the streets. We need to understand the impact of stress and trauma on our nervous system now, we need to feel more whole and compassionate toward ourselves now, we need to feel freedom in our lives and bodies now, we need to feel in community with others now.

While things have greatly improved for queer and trans folks since the 1950s, I have clients who get denied basic medical care every day. Prescriptions for hormones get mysteriously deleted at their pharmacy, letters of referral for gender-affirming surgery to be covered are denied, contractors refuse to work on someone’s home because they are an openly gay couple. Yes, people can be more out and proud, but it literally comes at a cost. My clients who are people of color physically do not feel safe under white supremacy. The toll that takes on their bodies and sense of self is profound. My sick and disabled clients get labeled crazy, defiant, and lazy, and because of it, aren’t getting the lifesaving care they need.

“It’s not just this,” my clients tell me. They remind me the world is also literally on fire. People are still denying the long-term impact of COVID. People are genocided. The climate continues to collapse. Masses suffer. The richest 1 percent own more wealth than 95 percent of humanity. All of this can make people feel hopeless, powerless, extremely depressed, and anxious.

So where do we find the hope?

When we do the work to heal ourselves, when we practice trauma healing for our oppressed bodies, we can walk back out into the world with a greater capacity to support ourselves and others. This is where I see the hope. In this overwhelming, out-of-control world, what we can control is how we care for ourselves and how that in turn allows us to care for others.

Your Turn Exercise: Checking In with Your Body

Bring to mind a positive memory. This could be a life highlight or a nice everyday experience that feels really warm and safe. In this memory, what do you see, hear, smell, feel, maybe even taste? Bring yourself into this experience with all your senses and take a few deep breaths.

Once you are there in the positive memory, take a second and check in with your jaw. Maybe you even bring your fingertips there. When you press down on your jaw with your fingers, does your jaw muscle feel hard and tight, or soft and loose? Notice that.

Refocus your awareness on your memory. Now check in with your throat. Is it easy or hard to swallow? Next, take a breath. Is it effortless to take a deep breath in, or do you find yourself shallow breathing only into your throat?

Refocus your awareness on your memory. Now place a hand on your heart. Bring awareness to your heart space. Does it feel open like energy could pour in or out or does it feel closed, like there is a wall in front of your heart? Does it hurt or is it warm?

Come back to that memory again. Move your hand to your gut. Does it feel sick or calm? Rooted or queasy? Notice any other sensations.

Thinking of the memory once more, bring your awareness to your hands and feet. Do they want to move? Do they feel heavy or light? Do they feel buzzy or calm? Are they sweaty or dry?

And finally, scan your body for any other missed sensations while you think of your memory. The more you notice your body and the internal signals you receive from it, the easier it will be to stay connected to, take care of, and enjoy your somatic self. This attunement to your body’s messages takes time, especially in a world that encourages us to disconnect from our physical experience all day, every day. The more you notice your body, the more ingrained those networks in your brain will become to tune in versus tune out your body. Be gentle and compassionate with yourself when it’s hard to listen to your body, and remember you have basically been trained to ignore it.

Tuning in is a radical act of resistance.

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From HEALING THE OPPRESSED BODY by Andrea Gutiérrez-Glik, published by Penguin Life, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Andrea Gutiérrez-Glik.