The Social Work and LGBTQ Sexual Trauma Casebook

Phenomenological Perspectives

Miriam Jaffe, Megan Conti, Jeffrey Longhofer, Jerry Floersch, Miriam Jaffe, Megan Conti, Jeffrey Longhofer, Jerry Floersch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138351042
• eBook ISBN: 9780429788277
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This inspiring text offers a collection of case studies from expert clinical social workers who work closely with survivors of LGBTQ-related sexual trauma.

The book covers a wide range of topics, such as gender and sexual minority asylum seekers, the embodiment of queer identity, the role of religion, regionality in the LGBTQ experience, and effective use of gay affirmative therapy. Each chapter is framed by key questions that encourage students and mental health practitioners to "think through" the specific needs and challenges of LGBTQ individuals who have experienced sexual trauma. Additional resources include an example of effective supervision and an example of a case conceptualization.

Drawing on the importance of narrative social work and the record of experience it provides, The Social Work and LGBTQ Sexual Trauma Casebook is an essential text for students and clinical social workers working with LGBTQ survivors of sexual trauma.

Section One

1

QUEERING TRAUMA THERAPY

The Case of Ariel, a Gender Non-Binary Undocumented Latina Immigrant in the US

Miriam Jaffe

Pre-Reading Questions

1. What does the verb “to queer” mean to you? How can one “queer” therapy?
2. What does “Gender Non-Binary” mean to you? Do you know any other terms that might correspond to “Gender Non-Binary”?
3. Given the title of this chapter, what kind of “trauma” might Ariel’s particular intersectionality produce?

In “Queers are like Jews, Aren’t They? Analogy and Alliance Politics,” Janet R. Jakobsen explored the historical relationship between “Jewish” and “Queer.” She found that “the similarities and differences of the two categories are not fully separable. They are overlapping–intertwined even–but not co-extensive” (p. 77). One extension of her argument, the whole of which is too important in its complexity for me to gloss here, reveals the negative connotations of the “Jewish” and “Queer” pairing: “Jews” and “Queers” are different, reviled, abstract threats, complicit in subversive activity (Jakobsen, 2003). However, for the purposes of this case study, I am more interested in Jakobsen’s idea that a “Jewish” and “Queer” alliance has advantageous possibilities if managed with constant curiosity about individual autonomy. Specifically, I am taken by Jakobsen’s idea that a positive correlation between “Jewish” and “Queer” emerges as “a space of difference that didn’t just produce a new identity…but might also allow us to remain in the space of difference itself, without being trapped in identity” (p. 92).

In my psychotherapy work with Ariel, a gender non-binary, undocumented Latina, age 25, I contextually used Jewishness to form an alliance and to create an alternate space where Ariel could escape the chronicity of anxiety, which was symptomatic of traumatic stress. Here, I present a case study of our human experience.

The Case of Ariel

“Ariel. That’s a Hebrew name. Old Testament.” Ariel sat before me at our first meeting. I made this comment as a point of connection and also as a point of curiosity. My name is Hebrew and Old Testament in origin, and I am an American-Jew. Ariel identified as an undocumented Latina gender non-binary “human” who preferred “she/her” pronouns. In Hebrew, Ariel means lion of God—a male name, though you’d never know it from Disney’s Little Mermaid. My name, Miriam, means “sea of bitterness,” and I never thought it fit me. Immediately, I felt that we would challenge categories.

“My parents are very religious,” Ariel said. They had converted from Catholicism to Jehovah’s Witness soon after they had come to the United States. Ariel was struggling with her faith, which denounced her non-binary identity, and she was not out to either of her parents when we met. Later, she and her mother would develop a tacit understanding of the situation.

She initially came into treatment, however, because she was in mourning; her first love, Olivia, had hung herself after a particularly meaningful visit with Ariel.

We spent our first months together talking about the suicide. Ariel cycled the same loop of self-blame and uncertainty for miles and miles. She scrolled through her phone during sessions, reading me intimate text messages, including the one from the night before the suicide. Everything had seemed fine, status quo, so to speak. Ariel never noticed any warning signs. She showed me a picture of herself with Olivia in front of the LOVE monument in Philadelphia from a day together that seemed full of possibility and freedom. There had been no note with the suicide. And Ariel had no explanation; she imagined that Olivia had financial problems or that Olivia’s family would never have accepted their same-sex relationship. “Maybe she died because I made her hopeful or happy for the first time. Maybe she couldn’t take it.”

For some reason, I responded allegorically. I told Ariel the storyline of a film in which the main character feels guilty being happy after surviving the Holocaust. The main character was in the resistance, and he had watched his closest comrade die beside him on a mission—but he had no choice but to keep fighting. Initially, I thought Ariel had come to therapy to rid herself of survivor’s guilt. Ariel was compelled to keep on fighting, to keep on being alive. For insurance purposes, I’d diagnosed Ariel with PTSD, even before I’d heard the story of her border crossing. But I hoped that our work could move beyond that label. I hoped that Ariel could once again feel full of possibility and freedom, that I had could help her build a self-LOVE monument without the traditional barriers of metal sculpture.

Border Crossing

After some time, Ariel told me about her early childhood. She and her family had migrated from Mexico to the United States. They came in two waves. First, her father, mother, and two older siblings crossed the border; she knew little about the crossing because she was distant from her father and two older siblings into adulthood. Ariel had a twin brother, Meyer, who had been her closest confidant. They had been left together with an Aunt and Uncle in Mexico who kept Ariel and Meyer in a dark room with a TV and a mattress; the Aunt and Uncle stole all the money and gifts that Ariel’s parents sent to them from the States. Once, Ariel saw her cousin riding a new bike that her parents had meant for her. Ariel and Meyer stayed like this from age four until they were six, years when primary attachment figures are all-important and attachment styles are formed (Bowlby, 2008).

Then, their mother suddenly appeared to accompany Ariel and Meyer on their border crossing. She had raised enough money to pay a smuggler. Ariel remembers the journey vividly: Ariel spent days stuffed under the false bottom of a flatbed truck with her mother and brother. “Keep quiet,” her mother said as they bumped wildly through the turbulent desert.

Right at the border, Ariel developed hypothermia. “The temperatures drop quickly in the desert at night,” Ariel told me,

and I almost died. My mom broke away from the camp to seek a border agent. Better to be caught then to have me die, she thought. She never found an agent. But she was punished. Once we got over the border, we had to stay in a house somewhere for a few weeks. And there she was punished for trying to save my life.

Without words, Ariel said that her mother had been raped. I didn’t ask how many times. I didn’t ask anything. I felt a knowing and a not knowing.

By the time Ariel and her twin came “home” to the East Coast, their dad and older siblings had developed alcoholism. Their own personal histories had been fraught. The alcoholism was the reason that the family began to attend the Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a sect that forbids drinking and the celebration of man-made holidays. Ariel respected the power of the sect because it had saved her mom from abuse by her now sober dad. But she struggled because the sect also forbade homosexuality, and she’d known since age ten that she was not attracted to males. Moreover, Ariel had never felt, exactly, that she was fully or only a girl. Only her brother Meyer knew this information, but he believed in the sect’s dictates enough to lose respect for Ariel over time. Losing Meyer was more painful than Olivia’s suicide; after all, Meyer had stepped in to help Ariel during middle school and high school, a period of seven years when she was bullied—and assaulted—incessantly. Even though she had never come out, the boys that were her comrades in elementary school turned against her when they realized she often wanted to be like them instead of “liking” them as potential boyfriends. Ariel told me about the horribly violent experiences of her formative years with nonchalance—and only toward the end of our two years of treatment, as if those years had been comparatively easier; I suspected that Ariel often dissociated and willed away huge chunks of her memory.

Shannon E. Wyss (2004) wrote that while the statistics are too few, it appears that 9% of heteronormative youth are bullied at school compared to 50% of youth on the LGBTQ spectrum, who experience name calling, beatings, rape, and sometimes even murder. Wyss (2004) cited that teachers rarely intervene because they believe that queer teens bring it on themselves:

As a result, many LGBTQ students spend their time in school not learning but quite literally trying to survive… On reaching puberty, girls are no longer supposed to be friends with genetic males, are expected to date heterosexually, and are supposed to conform to heterosexual norms of beauty… which can be quite painful.

(p. 710)

Part of Wyss’s point is that youth who experience queer phobia are considered high-risk for maladaptive behaviors and mental illness. But Ariel would reveal nothing close to a hint of maladaptivity, if it was there.

The Undocumented Closet

I must pause in this narrative to describe Ariel’s appearance: her dark hair was short, but long enough to be feminine. We spent a lot of time talking about her hair and her desire to shave the sides: “But that won’t be appropriate,” she explained, her right knee held tight over her left knee, suddenly, as if she had transformed into someone wearing a short skirt, her ankle twirling, as if her leather flats were stilettos. Ariel’s manner of dress was impeccably professional. She worked a full-time office job in the same field she was pursuing part-time at community college, yet she looked like she could have been the boss: structured suits, sometimes with feminine ruffles, always in dark powerful colors. Her body was tiny and child-like, but she accessorized with distracting oversized costume jewelry. Most noticeable was her perfect smile: bright white teeth in a row like soldiers, guarding anything that might come out of her mouth. She was always smiling, even when she told me about the suicide and the border crossing. Ariel’s demeanor—the consistent smile, specifically—made me more curious than anything she had verbally disclosed.

* * * * *

I didn’t know that I was undocumented until my senior year. I’d earned a merit placement at a summer program that offered a college scholarship for urban minority students who demonstrated potential. They needed my social security number to give me the money at the end, and that’s when my mom told me that I didn’t have one. I think she thought it was better that I didn’t know until I needed to. Anyway, long story short, I became a DREAMer. Now the president is threatening to end DACA, so everything is up in the air again.

she said with an unnerving calm. The daylight pouring in through the blinds created a shadow that looked like bars over her face. “Many nights, I wake up sweating, and I can’t feel my hands. And sometimes, I can’t feel my tongue, and my chest hurts,” she reported. “It feels like I am going to die.” But Ariel rarely went to the doctor. She was scared of needles, and moreover, she was scared of deportation:

Federal, state, and local laws have created a state of fear among undocumented immigrants that they could be deported from the United States at any time, necessitating that they constantly hide information about their status and avoid the purview of authorities.

(Villazor, 2013, p. 6)

Going to the hospital, for Ariel, was worse than the repeated experience of severe anxiety, which made her feel near death every time.

However, Ariel’s eternal smile and flawless appearance, not to mention her work ethic and familial piety, betrayed none of her anxiety. She fit the DREAMer narrative, which is “built upon a discourse of exceptionalism and privatized notions of citizenship” and “emphasize[s] the respectability and worthiness of some to remain within;” Ariel’s appearance of success was not only protecting the secret of her non-binary identity, but it was also an appeal to neoliberal nativist policies, the invisible walls off the undocumented nightmare, which “criminalize immigrants” and preserve rhetorics that exclude people of color (Cisneros & Gutierrez, 2018, p. 85). She felt pressure to be a model minority figure.

About a year into our relationship, Ariel began a serious romance with Jael, the daughter of a Jewish plastic surgeon. “Their house was built from scratch just for them. They designed it. And they want to take us out to dinner and an opera,” Ariel said, describing Jael’s family. Ariel also showed me videos and pictures of them together from her phone. In one of the videos, Jael and Ariel were leaning against the back of Jael’s bright red sports car. Jael was flaunting her long curly hair and pivoting to find her best selfie angle. Jael’s face, photo ready, was caked in makeup. Ariel was a natural beauty with skin like a dark pear, but it seemed to me that she was always wearing a mask. Goffman’s (1959) seminal idea that people consciously use cultural assumptions to portray the direct opposite of their hidden selves popped into my head as I learned about their relationship.

“Wait… Her vanity license plate reads J.A.P.?” I asked dramatically.

“Yes, those are her initials.”

“Do you know what that means? What J.A.P. means?” I shifted into a sort of stereotypical Jewish accent, which came off both accusingly and comedically. I often overplayed my Jewishness, if that is possible, in order to sooth potential cultural tension. Also, I often taught Ariel Yiddish words as a way of helping her to express complex emotions.

“Oh, like a Japanese person?” Ariel laughed her quiet laugh at me. “Jael said that she and her family are, like, the most liberal people in America. Her mom is an inner-city public school teacher.”

“Well, that’s cool, but,” I shifted back to myself, “it means Jewish American Princess, which can be derogatory. It’s like a spoiled brat, kind of.” Ariel googled Urban Dictionary immediately and started laughing again, confirming that Jael fit the definition, but not totally. I was distracted because during our dialogue about this, Ariel kept laughing through her teeth. I never believed that she was actually laughing. Her laugh reminded me of my daughter’s antique doll, which has a string at the neck that when pulled, produces a mechanical giggle in response. Ariel’s “laughter” was prompted by a thick noose of institutionally driven “hidden assaults” to civil and human rights that DREAMers endure; she was gagged from the start of her American life by the “benign language of assimilation” (Yoshino, 2007, p. 295). Together, Ariel and I explored how she used her “laughter” to control what people really knew about her, and without any expectation that I could change this coping mechanism, I told Ariel my own version of how the “JAP” came to be:

Jews’ sought their way out of oppression after oppression, for better or for worse, through upward social mobility, and in America, and in most places, money felt like safety, even though it never really was. It is just a facade. A way of trying to fit in. But it’s not the whole story.

I used this moment to explain transgenerational trauma using my family’s holocaust history, but for the purposes of this chapter, I turn to Tihamer Baku and Katalin Zana (2018), who say what I was hoping to establish:

Traumatic experience deeply shocks the traumatized person’s feeling of security in the world…Traumatized persons may create an internal world where sufferings are elaborated only in a selective manner. In this intrasubjective process, felt threats to security gain a permanent quality that keep individuals in a condition of permanent readiness. This experience will express itself in the body, in memory, and in act...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction: Writing to a Question: What is LGBTQ Sexual Trauma?
• Section One
• Interlude
• Section Two
• Interlude
• Section Three
• Index