This issue celebrates LGBTQ+ Pride Month, with a theme of new thinking running through much of the content. It made me reflect on the conflicting emotions often created when we come across ideas that genuinely challenge us to reflect on what we believe. I was interested to read in a recent PsyBlog, Dr Jeremy Dean’s long-running digest of psychological studies, about research that shows that even people who value innovative thinking have an unconscious bias against new ideas.1 Although we may justify our resistance by labelling new ideas as ‘wrong’, often we are reacting to a fear of the new – known as neophobia – and to the uncertainty that comes with change.
The aim of much of the writing in this issue is to gently invite us to ‘feel the fear’ while remaining open to considering key issues from a fresh perspective. For instance, what if we let go of the belief that marriage or romantic partnerships matter more than other relationships? In ‘Relationship anarchy in the therapy room’, Emma Hacking challenges society’s conventional relationship hierarchy, and also argues that it’s time we stepped off the ‘relationship escalator’, the notion that there is a set pathway of progression for a successful relationship, and that a relationship has failed if it changes or ends.
Meanwhile in our ‘Big issue’ article, ‘Are you GSRD competent?’, Silva Neves invites us to check our ‘heteronormative, mononormative and cisgenderist’ biases to a number of hypothetical scenarios including this one: ‘If a gay man told you that he goes to sex clubs every weekend to have unprotected sex, how would you feel? Might you perceive this client as self-harming? Or perhaps a sex addict? Or would you be curious about how this sexual behaviour could actually be normative and functional for them?’ Demonstrating ‘cultural humility and cultural competence’ is one of six core principles of GSRD therapy, an emerging modality recently described and defined by Silva and co-author Dominic Davies in the fifth edition of The SAGE Handbook of Counselling and Psychotherapy. Silva’s article is an excellent starting point for anyone interested in assessing or developing their GSRD competence.
"Research shows that even people who value innovative thinking have an unconscious bias against new ideas"
Perhaps one of the more challenging areas of new thinking for many of us is around the concept and definition of gender. Our ‘Opinion’ piece in this issue by John Reilly-Dixon and Sarah Ellis is one of the most clearly articulated arguments I have read for taking a trans-affirmative approach and a ‘non-pathological model of care built on difference not deficit’.
Mental health problems, cancers, heart disease, asthma and other health issues disproportionately affect minority people pushed beyond their capacity to cope, says Paul Mollitt in his article on ‘Minority stress’ – not a new idea but one that is still relatively unknown. I would like to thank Paul for sharing his experience of the long-term health impacts of his internalised homophobia growing up gay in the 1980s. His aim in writing the piece, he says, is to make our profession more aware of when minority stress is presenting in clients, so minorities don’t ‘have to wait for their body or their minds to break down’ before they get help.
As always, I welcome your feedback – do get in touch by emailing therapytoday@thinkpublishing.co.uk
Sally Brown Editor
