Adverse Communications in Queer Development

Recently, in my interpersonal communications class, I had to do a project that required researching a topic that has to do with family communications. This project was so hard and it took me forever to find a topic. However, I settled on adverse communication in families who have children who identify in the LGBTQ+ community. You probably don’t understand what that means and I also didn’t know what that meant at first either. The one thing that I did have a little understanding of was that growing up queer does have its communication complications within the family.

When beginning to look at research, it was clear that there isn’t much communication research in regard to the LGBTQ+ community. Which, of course, was interesting, yet not surprising. This made me want to dig into the research even more. Not just because it was a topic that I’ve experienced, but also because it was a topic that maybe could help someone else.

So, I started digging, and I learned about adverse communication and the way it developed children in familial relationships. Adverse communication just means bad communication. When looking at adverse communication in this project, it talks about ignoring the important topics in a family setting. These topics could be about same-sex attraction, religion, politics, mental health, and so many more. Families with adverse communication to these topics tend to ignore them, silence them, gaslight them, or even get violent about them.

Obviously, these types of reactions to such serious topics can have negative consequences on children. Children can take these as taboo topics or things that you don’t talk about. This can lead to self-oppression, negative mental health, negative relations/communication with others, and even negative relations/communication with self. This is why it is so important to build healthy conversations with your children and your family.

One of the things that struck me during this research was that adverse communications in familial settings is more common in families of African-American and Latinx families than those of any other families. I thought that this was really interesting.

There were a lot of reasons that interested me in the topic, but the biggest one was how it related to self. I think about my own relationships with my parents. Growing up, I had adverse communication in my household. There were definitely topics that we didn’t talk about. I don’t know if it was because my parents didn’t know about the topic, or if they didn’t want to talk about it, or maybe I just didn’t have the proper communication channels to discuss these topics with them.

However, I know that I struggled with some of these topics, and it caused me to have a lot of mixed emotions and feelings about difficult subjects. Especially that of being a member of the LGBTQ+ community. I thought that maybe since we didn’t talk about it, it was something to be ashamed of. This caused me to feel a lot of negative emotions in regard to myself.

Hopefully, with the more research and education we do about communication and child development in the family in regards to queer children, we will be able to have more open discussions. Families will be more understanding and open towards their children, and these children will be able to develop more closely with heterosexual children.

I anxiously look forward to the day that we can help eradicate adverse communications and improve the way that we talk with and to each other. If you have any insights into this or you want to discuss it further, send me a message! I would love to connect on this topic.