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This Page - Gay Christian, Gay Christians, Lesbian Christians healthy self-esteem, discussion on false coping skills, compartmentalizing, effects, and more.
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 s time has passed and as I have spent time assisting people in furthering their walk with Jesus it is my firm belief the majority of difficulties people experience regarding sexuality and sexual orientation really have nothing to do with these issues.
Rather, I believe they instead wrestle with self-love, self-image, self-acceptance, self-actualization and self-esteem. When these truer issues are addressed in Jesus Christ then the sexuality and sexual orientation will naturally and without effort fall into place and its proper holy expression.
If you are ashamed of yourself for being gay and lesbians, you may be tempted to suppress or repress yourself and your sexual orientation. This is not God's best for you. It is important to recognize the signs of suppression and repression, reject them and turn to Love instead.
You cannot continually deny or abuse a part of yourself without it affecting the rest of you. If you warp it, weaken it, pervert it, wound it, hide or deny it, then the rest of you will suffer in the process, too. If you want your sexuality to be channeled positively, integrated into the rest of you, balanced with the rest of yourself, and find its good and proper expression, then you've got to be willing to recognize unhealthy choices, and embrace God's best for you, take the risk to be all that God desires you to be.
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 | et’s continue... |
Compartmentalizing
 Or maybe you've done such a good job at pretending to be straight you've been able to compartmentalize yourself, split yourself into the outward "straight" person, and the inward "gay person." Living in secret, hiding your feelings and sense of difference, you've gotten really good at hiding. You hide your sexual orientation, and in so doing you fragment, placing your whole sexual self into a world of falsehood and fantasy. Impersonal relationships, unable to be intimate with someone, you're sexuality may become expressions of sexual behaviors which are shallow, empty, anonymous. You justify your thinking, your actions. "I am not cheating on my wife because I am not having sex with a woman but a man." "I am not gay, I am just bisexual, or maybe it's just a phase or I'm confused." "My work, my career is too important, I would lose it if anyone found out I was gay." "My family would reject me, I would lose my friends." I briefly tasted such a life once, but thankfully I saw through the smoke and mirrors, and determined to grasp reality, a healthy lifestyle.
Compartmentalization leads to the disintegration of self, dividing self into various parts, isolating feelings and emotions, views and values from the rest of self. Falsely believing part of self, your sexual orientation, is wrong, you isolate it, cut it off from the rest of you, or detach yourself from it. You tell yourself you are not this fully, you have it "under control," and as long as you have it under control it won't be a problem. But, cutting yourself off from yourself is not being yourself, fully, nor as completely as God desires for you.
Compartmentalization also includes those who try to rationalize it is acceptable to be attracted to someone of the same sex, but not if you act on it. This, again, is in direct conflict with Jesus, who said thought is equal to action. Matthew 5:27-28
Compartmentalization can lead to a complete break down of ethics, safety and responsibility. It can lead you to disassociate yourself from your feelings, or feeling connected to other people, or reducing people from being humans of inherent worth to mere things for selfish use. Sexual encounters may begin to need heightened excitement to achieve the same "thrill," you begin to engage in behaviors which put your health, your job or career, your family, etc. at risk. Or it may make you withdraw from all possibility of human contact and relationship.
Effects
Suppression, Repression, and Compartmentalizing makes you one person on the outside, but another person on the inside. Fueled by false shame, it feeds a never ending spiral downward into self-loathing, self-hatred, and the use and abuse of self and other people. Hating yourself, you may even begin to hate in others what you see in yourself; you lash out at others for the very thing you hate within yourself. Or hating yourself, you may become what you hate in its most exaggerated form, thereby confirming to yourself your lack of worth.
Which leads to confrontation and exaggeration. To look good, to look "acceptable," you prove to yourself and the world you are not gay by rejecting, hating, persecuting, or ridiculing gays and lesbians. Hating yourself, you hate anyone that is gay. If you are sexually active, you may use or abuse the other person, hating or resenting in the person what you see in yourself. If you identify with the "haters" then you falsely think you aren't one of the "hatees."
You may try to prove to the world you are not gay by trying to follow all of the "straight stereotypes," throwing yourself into pursuits or interests in which only "straight" people would be involved, fracturing and compartmentalizing yourself even more. Or, maybe you do the exact opposite, decide to throw being gay into people's faces, make them uncomfortable, get back at them or society, by becoming all that is stereotypical of gays, wearing your difference for all the world to see, thumbing your nose at everyone.
 If you see yourself negatively, you will act negatively. If you are shamed or feel guilty in your sexuality, you will most likely find your sexuality hollow and empty. You seek meaning through your sexuality, but instead you find shallowness. You desire feeling and intimacy, but you feel numb and detached. You want and desire to express yourself, desire and want relationship, but you don't know how to go about finding it, or channeling it positively. Ever trying to find it, searching, longing, desiring for meaning in your sexuality, you continually abuse self, other people, you risk more and more to hold on to anything, to feel something.
You cannot negatively deny an integral part of yourself without that part suffering in the process. You can't keep cutting off that which is a part of you without affecting it and the rest of you in the process. If you warp it, weaken it, pervert it, wound it, hide or deny it, then the rest of you will suffer in the process, too. If you want your sexuality to be channeled positively, integrated into the rest of you, balanced with the rest of yourself, and find its good and proper expression, then you've got to be willing to try and attempt risking thinking. This risky thinking is to dare to see your sexual orientation as not just normal, but natural and healthy, that it has a purpose in you, and a proper form of expression.
 | about how you've handled your sexual orientation. |
See Also: Books Gay and Lesbian Social Issues.
| et's continue and look at how to develop a good self-image... |
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