Question

5) What factors do you believe most significantly impact one's sexual orientation?

Answer 1

As a psychologist I have had the opportunity to listen to people with a changed sexual orientation. After several sessions with many clients, I have been instrumental in helping people to understand and relate to their own sexual orientation which they are born with. I understood that there are few but powerful sources that significantly impact one’s sexual orientation. I would like to list few of them below:

Childhood Upbringing:

Every parent must know that Child’s mind is like a blank slate, “Tabula Rasa” as John Locke quotes it. What we chose to fill inside of the mind is very crucial for the development of the child. I had one client who felt that he was a female locked in a male’s body. After several minutes of conversation, I understood the cause for him to feel that way. His parents never had a girl child, but they wished to have a girl child and so they started dressing him like a girl, treating him like a girl, and even calling him in a girl’s name, this induced a feeling in my client that he was a girl somewhere and hew as forced to like what his parents were doing to him. This impacted his development over the years which questioned his sexual orientation as he started moving out with other guys in his neighborhood. Because by this time he was treated so much like a girl at his home that when he was with his male friends everything seemed different for him, which made him feel that he had a different sexual orientation.

Psychological Suppression:

I had another client, who was a female. She also had a similar upbringing while she was a child. She was seen as a male child at her home. She was given responsibilities that were usually carried out by male often. However, as years passed away, and when she hit the menstruation, when everyone at home realized that she was a female and it was not right for her to take on the responsibility of a male, as she in some years have to be married, stopped treating her like a male. This actually began to make her feel that she was not accepted as a female anymore, and that people were trying to distance from her caused a great psychological distress for a lot of years. She had never spoken about her feelings to anyone, and slowly she tried to pick on more responsibilities as a male in order to bridge the gap between her and the family. By this, she felt she was no more a female but actually a male locked up in a female body.

Personality and Curiosity:

Curiousness kills the rat. Is a very old proverb. Sex is an ambiguous drive that can unleash itself with any object, people and sometimes even with animals. It works on the Id principle (Sigmund Freud) the immediate gratification. As a child begins to develop and grow, and as his/her sexual organs begins to grow, there is a lot of curiosity about his/her sexual interest. There are few kinds of people who would want to explore their sexual interest and wouldn’t mind being open to all sexual activities. Usually, most of the majority are scared using their sexuality in a more broader way and thus tend to limit their sexual drive to the norms of the religion. The norm of the religion usually describes sex to be expressed only between male and female. But, time and again, there have been people who have explored their sexual interest beyond the limitations and have found out that they were more sexually interested in men, female, sometimes even objects and the worse condition is even on animals.

So, once they explore that area, and when they feel that is more exciting (actually excitement is not alone in the sexual act, but it also is a feeling of newness, doing something different than the norm) they begin to practice that, and finally land up believing that they are actually different, and thus the LGBTQA movement arose.