Only the Truth Sets You Free

“From an early age, Juanita’s mother would express disappointment when Juanita did something her mother disapproved of. Juanita’s fear of this disapproval kept her from sharing parts of herself that would disappoint her mother. As a result, her mother never really knew her.”

Phil Stutz & Barry Michels, The Tools

What do you hide from others, the world and yourself? A great many of us learned the same childhood lesson that Juanita did. We learned that if we said certain things, or acted in certain ways, it made our parents uncomfortable. And so we learned to hide parts of our true selves.

Picture a five year old boy who innocently and sincerely says to his mother “When I grow up I’m going to marry a boy.” A deafening silence fills the room. Then Mom laughs nervously and exclaims “Boys don’t marry boys! Where did you get an idea like that?” After another sharp pause, Mom continues in a stern voice as she wags her finger in her son’s face: “Boys only marry girls! When you grow up you are going to marry a girl! You got that?”

The boy is forever changed inside, knowing that he now has to deny an innocent part of his natural self. And Mom is forever on guard. She’s worried now that her son is gay and she believes that being gay is an abomination, because her Church told her that homosexuals are all doomed to hell. Mom develops her own form of “gaydar” and is careful thereafter to monitor everything her son says or does for gay tendencies. Then she is quick to pounce upon them with the vengeance of hellfire. She thinks she is “saving” her son, but in reality she is condemning him to a life of misery or even premature death.

The misery begins with the boy understanding that he can never be himself; that he can never be true to himself. The message that he receives from his mother is that he is a “sick person” who is “unlovable” to her and to God if he is indeed gay. As the boy grows older, and sexually matures, the situation becomes worse. Now, he has sexual urges for other men; urges he can’t control or deny. No matter how much he fights them to please his mother, and supposedly God, he can’t overcome them. If they, or others find out, they’ll abandon him—and life will be over, he thinks.

Time passes and the news is more often filled with stories about gay rights issues and every time Mom hears or sees something involving gay people, she is vocally condemning of them in the presence of her son. Sadly, she doesn’t know her son anymore. In fact, she hasn’t known him since he was five years old. Even sadder is the fact that he doesn’t truly know himself. He’s done everything he can to deny that he is a gay person, from participating in sports he hates to dating girls who repulse him sexually. 

Eventually the boy, who is now a young man, moves out of his family home and finds himself sitting on a fence. He doesn’t feel like a part of the gay world and he certainly doesn’t feel like part of the straight world. He doesn’t feel loved or accepted by anyone; certainly not by his mother or God; and he’s never been able to make any real friends because he has been too afraid that they might discover his secret—the dark one Mom can’t accept. Surely, any possible friend would reject him too if they knew he was gay so he can’t risk having any real friends.

He’s graduated from college and he has a good job, but the pressure of keeping his secret, the fact that he is “inherently disordered” and thus irrevocably evil in the eyes of God and his mother, is too much for him to bear any longer. He knows it’s not his fault. He didn’t ask to be this way. But he can’t take the pain of being so unlovable any longer. And so he goes into his bedroom and hangs himself.

This is a sad story that happens way too often in our society. What makes it so lamentable is that love is never an option. Religion and society condemn people for being born the way that they are, and they refuse to see beyond their blinders. They then brainwash parents to self-righteously condemn their own children for being gay when their children never chose to be gay. Where is the love in this sort of self-righteousness? There is none. There is only self-righteous pride masquerading as a love that’s falsely “for your own good.”

Sadder yet, is the fact that this disenfranchisement between parent and child happens in all sorts of situations, aside from sexual identity. In The Tools, we are not told what Juanita’s fear stemmed from, and so we don’t know what she felt forced to hide from her mother. But we do know that she and her mother never really knew the true Juanita inside, simply because she felt so forced to negate part of herself in order to please her mother—and win her mother’s approval and acceptance.

My hope is that parents everywhere will stop trying to “edit” their children. A child needs to be loved and accepted for who he/she is, not for who parents thinks their child should be. No one can change who they inherently are and God does not create anyone to be inherently evil in any way.

If we are like Juanita or the boy/young man I described, we need to work at reclaiming our true selves. It may take counseling, support groups and a Higher Power, but work hard at it. Then we need to work at revealing all of our true selves to parents and others we love. Hopefully, this will invite them to accept us as we are—from a place of true God-given love deep inside of them.

In The Tools, Stutz and Michel go on to say that if Juanita had chosen to push “through the pain of revealing herself, she would have stopped hiding parts of herself. This, in turn, would have given her mother the opportunity to accept her, and freed her mother to express her real love for every part of her daughter.” There is no guarantee that if Juanita had opened up to her mother that her mother would have accepted her, but at least she would have had a 50-50 chance. And her chances may have increased as Mom had time to allow love to dispel her fears.

The same can be true for all of us. Intimacy is worth the risk.