Pushing back against the judgement of others

Open Minds Birmingham Group - Feb 23

It’s a normal thing for parents to want to protect their children from the harm that they imagine exists out in the world, but when does this protection turn into restriction or control?

We took the topic of ‘dating’ to our February’s Open Minds group in Birmingham and we spent a good amount of time talking about our parents attitudes to romantic / intimate relationships and how this has influenced our behaviours as adults. Many of us grew up in families where there were very set ideas about what relationships should look like and how men and women were expected to perform in these relationships. When we were growing up, we knew that there was something different about how we felt about the opposite sex, and bit by bit, this feeling of being different started to make us feel like outsiders in our families.

We talked about the different gender pressures in South Asian families and how women are usually expected to live with more restrictions than men. This could include being limited when and who you go out with, and people feeling like they have a right to control who you date.

Those of us who looked religious or practiced their faith often had additional pressure put on them to act a certain way and some had received threats from other member of their community to ‘out’ them if they didn’t stop using LGBTQIA+ spaces. It was upsetting to hear that these kinds of things are still going on and there is a lot of work to be done to improve the attitudes of our communities and protect LGBTQIA+ people of faith from this kind of abuse.

It's important to remember that no-one has the automatic right to judge us for our LGBTQIA+ identities. Same-sex attraction and queer lives are a part of human cultures across the world, even if people try to pretend that we don’t exist or have a right to exist.

We recognise that it’s not always easy to feel positive about our identities, because of the negativity of others, and that’s why we do what we do at the Open Minds Project. It’s very important to be able to access LGBTQIA+ affirming spaces to remember that for a lot of people, being LGBTQIA+ isn’t a big deal – it’s just one part of what makes up your identities.

We ended our group with a much-needed self-compassion exercise, led by one of our group members which we hope will be a regular feature of our Birmingham groups. All in all it was a powerful discussion and we look forward to being back in Birmingham in 3 months time.

Our next group will be Online in March 2023. We’ll be using the same topic for one last time to see if different ideas come up!

With warm wishes,

The Open Minds Project ­

We meet on the last Wednesday of each month and if you want to join us at an Open Minds Meeting, please visit the Events page on our website.