Belonging is supposed to feel natural. It’s one of those words that carries warmth and ease — the promise of home. Yet for many LGBTQ+ and queer people, belonging has never been simple. It’s often something we’ve had to earn, negotiate, or hide parts of ourselves to keep.
When you grow up learning that who you are might be met with confusion, silence, or rejection, belonging becomes a kind of watchfulness. You learn to read the room — to notice who is safe and who is not. You learn that connection might come with conditions. Over time, this carefulness becomes part of how you live. It keeps you safe, but it can also keep you lonely.
I often think of belonging as both a need and a risk. It’s the longing to be seen and the fear of what will happen when we are. Many queer people arrive in adulthood with a complicated relationship to groups — to family, to workplaces, to communities that still carry echoes of danger. Even in spaces that call themselves inclusive, that quiet hesitation can linger: will I still belong when they know the full story of me?
The Early Lessons of Difference
From a young age, many LGBTQ+ people become attuned to what psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion might have called the atmosphere of a group — the unspoken signals that tell us whether we are safe or suspect. This awareness can be a survival skill. Yet it can also leave us exhausted, always anticipating exclusion, standing half-outside even when we’ve been invited in.
Some of us respond by becoming exceptionally adaptable — fluent in the art of fitting in. Others withdraw, mistrusting the very idea of community. Both responses make sense. Both are intelligent. But both can leave us wondering, later in life, why intimacy feels elusive or why groups, however kind, can still feel faintly perilous.
Shame and the Longing to Be Known
Shame sits at the centre of this struggle. It’s the private conviction that something about us disqualifies us from love. For many queer and LGBTQ+ clients, that belief has been reinforced by culture, family, religion, or silence. Even when we find acceptance, traces of that early shame can remain — a quiet voice asking whether our belonging is still conditional.
Shame isolates, but it also hides a wish. It’s a sign of how much we still want to belong and be seen. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once wrote that we are only as isolated as the stories we tell ourselves about others. Therapy — especially LGBTQ+-affirmative therapy — offers a space where those stories can be rewritten; where belonging can be risked again, in the presence of another.
The Group as Mirror
In group therapy, belonging stops being an abstract concept and becomes a lived experience. A therapy group is a small version of the wider world — with its tenderness, rivalry, and care. We begin to notice how our old patterns re-emerge: how quickly we fall silent, or how easily we take care of others at the cost of ourselves.
The group offers both the ache and the possibility of belonging. When we dare to speak the thing we thought only we felt — the shame, the envy, the longing — someone else nods. That recognition can be profoundly healing. It’s what Yalom called universality: the realisation that we are not alone in what we carry.
Yet group therapy also makes room for difference. It allows each person to hold their identity — queer, trans, questioning, or otherwise — without having to blend it into sameness. In this way, group counselling becomes a rehearsal for the kind of community many LGBTQ+ people dream of: one that embraces complexity, where individuality strengthens the whole.
Re-Learning Belonging
For some LGBTQ+ clients, therapy is the first place where belonging feels both possible and safe. There’s no need to manage impressions or second-guess what can be said. Over time, this safety can open a new kind of confidence — the sense that we can show up fully, and the world won’t fall apart.
Belonging here doesn’t mean agreement or perfection. It means being recognised in our full complexity. It means learning that relationships can hold difference and still remain intact. For those who learned early that love could vanish overnight, this kind of staying is radical.
Belonging must also be re-imagined within ourselves. Many of us have internalised rejection and turned it inward. We exile the parts that feel too needy, too angry, too queer, too much. Therapy invites those parts home, beginning a process of inner reunion — of making space for what was once pushed away.
The Courage to Stay
True belonging asks for courage. It means being open to change, to closeness, to being affected by others. It means allowing people to matter again. Belonging isn’t fixed — it ebbs and flows, just like we do.
Perhaps for queer people especially, belonging isn’t something we find — it’s something we practise. We practise it every time we choose honesty over performance, every time we step into a group that feels uncertain, every time we let someone in a little closer.
We practise it, too, in therapy — by noticing the small movements of connection and retreat, by understanding what keeps us safe and what keeps us apart. Each time we risk being known, we expand the edges of what belonging can mean.
A Gentler Kind of Homecoming
Belonging, in the end, is less about arrival and more about recognition. It’s the gradual discovery that we can live as ourselves, in the company of others. It’s finding that our difference can be part of the fabric — not the flaw.
For LGBTQ+ people, that can feel like a homecoming — not to a place we once had, but to one we are still creating. Therapy in Manchester, especially LGBTQ+ group therapy, can be one of the few spaces where that creation feels possible: where belonging is no longer conditional, but shared, imperfect, and alive.
If you’d like to explore how LGBTQ+ counselling in Manchester might help you find a more grounded sense of belonging — individually or in a group — you can book a free discovery call or learn more about inclusive psychotherapy in Manchester today.
