The Grief No One Prepared You For
Coming out was supposed to be liberation. So why does your body still vote against you in rooms full of friends?
He was crying in my office, but not about what I expected.
Not his family’s rejection. Not the boyfriend who left. Not even the promotion he didn’t get after coming out at work.
“I’m grieving someone who never existed,” he said, wiping his face with the back of his hand. “The version of me that got to be a kid without terror. The teenager who could have had stupid crushes without strategizing survival. I’m thirty-eight and I just realized I’ve been mourning a childhood I’ll never get back.”
The tissue box sat untouched between us. He didn’t need tissues. He needed someone to confirm what his body already knew: you can’t process decades of accumulated threat in a single coming-out conversation.
The Myth of Liberation and What It Hides
Here’s the story we tell ourselves about coming out: You say the words. The closet door swings open. You step into freedom.
Nobody mentions the part where your nervous system didn’t get the memo.
One client described it like this: “I thought coming out would be this volcanic moment where everything changed. Instead it’s been this slow drip of realizing how much of me is still braced for impact.”
That’s what minority stress theory doesn’t quite capture. It documents vigilance, discrimination, and internalized homophobia. But it misses the grief underneath all of it.
The grief of realizing your body spent twenty years learning that authenticity equals danger. That the hypervigilance that kept you safe as a teenager is now the thing keeping you isolated as an adult. That you can’t just “relax” your way back to a baseline that was stolen before you understood what baseline meant.
Most gay men I work with describe their anxiety as irrational. Overreactive. Embarrassing.
Then we spend months tracing it back: accumulated micro-abandonments that taught their bodies nobody was coming to help.
The teacher who went silent when you asked about same-sex parents in second grade. The youth group leader who changed the subject when you brought up crushes. Your mother’s face doing something complicated when you mentioned your “friend” was sleeping over again. The pastor who made eye contact with you specifically during the sermon about sin.
None of these moments were violent enough to report. Most weren’t even consciously registered as harm. But your body filed them anyway. Built a dataset. Learned that showing up fully meant showing up alone.
Here’s what I’ve noticed in sessions: When gay men finally connect their current anxiety to these early abandonment patterns, there’s often this moment of collapse. Not breakdown. Release.
“I thought I was just anxious,” one client said. “I didn’t realize I was still waiting for someone to show up for the kid I was.”
That’s the grief nobody prepared you for. Not grief over explicit trauma. Grief over the absence of protection. Over having to become your own witness. Over spending your formative years solving a problem that was never yours to solve: How to exist in a world that required you to minimize yourself to be tolerable.
Why Standard Treatments Keep Failing Us
A 2024 retrospective study from NHS talking therapy services examined over 94,000 patients and found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual individuals showed significantly lower recovery rates from anxiety and depression compared to heterosexual patients. Bisexual patients in particular were less likely to meet criteria for reliable recovery after psychological therapy.
The researchers noted that minority stress processes may undermine therapeutic outcomes. But that’s framing it too gently.
Most standard anxiety treatments were originally developed for generalized anxiety and depression without considering sociocultural or identity-based stressors. Generalized worry without specific origin. Chemical imbalances that need chemical correction.
They’re not designed for anxiety that has a name, a history, and a damn good reason for existing.
When you treat minority stress-induced anxiety with protocols designed for anxiety that has no context, you’re essentially giving someone an umbrella in a flood and wondering why they’re still drowning. The treatment assumes the problem is the person’s reaction to water, not the fact that the water shouldn’t be there in the first place.
This is why medication alone rarely works for us. Pills might lower the volume on your nervous system’s alarm, but they can’t address the decades of data that taught your alarm its job description. They can’t reach the unprocessed grief sitting underneath the anxiety like bedrock.
You can’t medicate your way through the work of acknowledging that your body adapted to chronic threat, and those adaptations cost you something specific.
What did they cost you?
The ability to trust that people will stay when you’re fully visible. The capacity to believe affection isn’t contingent on performance. The option to move through the world without your nervous system running continuous threat assessment in the background.
These aren’t chemical imbalances. They’re survival adaptations that outlived their usefulness and now masquerade as personality traits.
The man who “doesn’t do conflict” learned that disagreement meant abandonment. The one who “just isn’t good at intimacy” learned that emotional exposure invited punishment. The one with “commitment issues” learned that the people who were supposed to protect him didn’t, so why trust anyone with that job now?
These aren’t disorders. They’re résumés from a job nobody should have had to work.
What Grief Work Actually Looks Like
A composite from multiple sessions:
He’d been talking about his partner for twenty minutes. How attentive he was. How patient. How he kept asking what was wrong and getting frustrated when my client said “nothing.”
“Because nothing is wrong,” he insisted. “He’s perfect. I just feel this... tightness. Like I’m waiting for something bad.”
I asked him to sit with the tightness. Find it in his body.
“Chest,” he said immediately. “It’s always in my chest. Like something’s coiled there.”
“When’s the first time you remember that feeling?”
His face changed. “Oh.”
Silence for almost a full minute. When he spoke again, his voice was different. Younger.
“I was maybe ten. My dad asked me about girls at dinner. Who I liked. My brother was laughing, making jokes. And I just... sat there with this thing in my chest, knowing I couldn’t say what was actually true. That I didn’t like girls. That I was watching my brother, not girls. But I smiled and made something up.”
“And your dad?”
“Believed me. Smiled. Moved on.”
More silence.
“He moved on,” he repeated, but this time something broke in his voice. “That’s when I learned it. That telling the truth meant sitting there alone while everyone else had dinner. So I just... didn’t. For twenty years I didn’t.”
His hands were shaking.
“And now,” I said gently, “you’re with someone who wants the truth.”
“And I don’t know how to give it to him,” he said. “Because truth feels like abandonment. My body still thinks truth means everyone leaves the table.”
That’s grief work. Not abstract. Not metaphorical. It’s connecting the tightness in your chest right now to the ten-year-old who learned that authenticity costs you connection. It’s feeling the rage that you had to make that calculation at all. It’s mourning the version of you who could have grown up telling the truth without running that cost-benefit analysis first.
And it’s recognizing that your body isn’t wrong for being afraid. It’s just still operating on old information.
Why This Actually Works
Here’s what happens physiologically when you grieve what your queerness cost you:
Unprocessed loss can keep the nervous system in a state of heightened vigilance, as if the threat is still present. The brain maintains physiological patterns, such as increased amygdala activity and reduced hippocampal integration, that signal continued danger until the loss is emotionally processed.
“This terrible thing happened in the past” remains as “this terrible thing is still happening, and I need to stay alert.” The anxiety isn’t just about future danger. It’s your nervous system trying to solve a problem it never got permission to finish processing.
When you finally acknowledge the loss, name it, feel it fully, something shifts. The nervous system can recode the experience from “ongoing danger requiring constant vigilance” to “completed past event that hurt but is over.” This isn’t metaphorical. This is how trauma memory gets integrated. How the body moves information from the alarm system to the archive.
What does this shift actually look like?
The client from the dinner table story came back three weeks later. We’d spent the previous session with him sobbing, furious at his ten-year-old self for learning to lie, furious at his father for not noticing, furious at the world that made lying necessary.
This session was quieter.
“Something’s different,” he said, touching his chest. “That tightness. It’s still there but it’s not... coiled anymore. It’s just sadness. Like my body finally believes me that the danger’s over.”
His shoulders were different, too. Not braced. He was sitting back in the chair instead of perched on the edge of it.
“I told my partner the truth about something small yesterday,” he continued. “About not wanting to go to his friend’s party. And when he said ‘okay, no problem,’ I didn’t immediately start planning how to make it up to him. I just... let it be okay.”
That’s what recoding looks like. Not the absence of grief. The presence of something softer underneath the vigilance. The nervous system finally getting the message: You’re not at that dinner table anymore. The people who love you now want the truth. You can put down the calculation.
Grief work isn’t about making the pain go away. It’s about letting your body recognize that the abandonment you feared already happened. You survived it. And you’re not still sitting in that room waiting for someone to notice you’re gone.
What This Requires From You
The hardest part isn’t the grief itself. It’s stopping the performance.
The one where you’re fine. Where coming out solved everything. Where you’re thriving and well-adjusted and definitely not still carrying the weight of a thousand small rejections that taught you love is conditional on erasure.
Grief work requires you to sit with the reality that you were harmed in ways that don’t qualify for trauma diagnosis but accumulated into something that fundamentally changed you. To feel the rage that you had to develop these adaptations at all. To mourn the relationships you couldn’t build because your nervous system was too busy scanning for threats to actually connect.
And it requires finding people who can witness this without trying to fix it. Who understand that your anxiety isn’t irrational, it’s exquisitely rational, it’s just responding to a world that no longer exists because your body hasn’t caught up to the fact that you’re not that kid at the dinner table anymore.
The thing is, you can’t think your way out of what your body learned in its bones. You can only feel your way through.
Your anxiety doesn’t need fixing. It needs acknowledgment. Your nervous system doesn’t need medication as much as it needs someone to finally say: Of course you’re exhausted. Of course you’re still braced. Of course you don’t know how to relax. Nobody taught you it was safe to.
That’s not pathology. That’s proof you survived something that required constant vigilance. And the only way forward is letting yourself grieve what that vigilance cost.
The man who cried in my office about grieving someone who never existed? Six months later, he came back for a check-in session.
“I’m still sad sometimes,” he said. “About the childhood I didn’t get. About the years I spent hiding. But it’s different now. It’s grief, not panic. My body knows the difference.”
He paused, looking out the window.
“I took my nephew to the park last week. He’s seven. And I watched him just... be. Run around, be loud, take up space. Nobody was monitoring him. And I realized: I’m not angry at seven-year-old me anymore. I’m angry at the world that made him learn to disappear.”
That’s what grief work gives you. Not the life you would have had. But permission to stop punishing yourself for the life you didn’t get.
💭 Where in your body do you still carry the weight of proving you deserve to exist? What would it mean to finally set that weight down?
Side note: Therapy isn’t about eliminating your anxiety. It’s about understanding its origin, honoring what it protected you from, and slowly teaching your body that survival mode is no longer required. Not because the world is safe. But because you’ve finally built spaces where you are.
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All client examples in this piece are composites drawn from years of clinical work with gay men. Details have been altered to protect confidentiality. No single story represents an individual person.
This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only. It does not replace therapy, diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition.
This post speaks to me in so many ways. I recognized myself from the first lines. I often think about "what would a "normal" childhood look like? one where I didn't fear my parents. where I got support and encouragement from my father. Nurturing from my mother. It's odd but sometimes I'll be doing life, at work, out shopping, and I'll have this vague notion like, "I have to go home soon." meaning to my childhood home. Someplace where things will be taken care of for me. I'll have a room, food, and comfort. But it's a place that doesn't exist, it's hypothetical. There is nothing about my real childhood home that I miss. The verbal and physical abuse. The sarcasm, mockery, constant denigration. I was constantly hiding, if not physically, then certainly emotionally and mentally. "That hypervigilence that kept you safe as a teenager is n ow the thing keeping you isolated as an adult." That could not ring more true. And I have NEVER thought about how my medication isn't really addressing all of my issues. I've been on prozac for years, and when I tried to do myself in yet again, they simply increased the dosage. "The water shouldn't be there in the first place." That's the key. But psychiatrists and therapists simply turn to the drugs to make me not be suicidal. "Your nervous system doesn't need medication as much as it needs someone to finally say: Of course you're exhausted." That's it. I am exhausted of reliving in my mind the humiliation and shame, and yes, no one told taught me it was safe to relax. I love the idea of being able to embrace the grief about the childhood I never got to experience, and stop punishing myself at the idea that it was my fault. Thank you Gino. This is yet another post that gives me so much to think about and ideas on how to quit beating myself up over things that were never my fault in the first place.
It's so weird that when you're young and closeted, all you would want is to be out without shame. But when you cross over to the other side, that's when you have the worst of times.