And Why I Bring Playfulness Into Therapy

First, Let's Name What's Real: Survival Mode Is Not a Character Flaw

Many of my clients — trans people, queer people, racialized folks, immigrants, people moving between cultures the way I have — come to therapy running on fumes. They are surviving. And survival mode isn't weakness; it's intelligence. Your nervous system learned to stay alert because the world genuinely was not safe.

But one of the quieter harms of systemic invalidation is that it doesn't just hurt us — it teaches us a particular story about ourselves. When you are told, again and again, that your identity is wrong, your love is wrong, your body is wrong, something begins to organize around that message. You may find yourself anticipating rejection before it happens, bracing for dismissal even in safe spaces, editing yourself automatically. The system did something cruel: it made its own cruelty feel like your personal failing.

This is why so much queer literature, film, and media has centered trauma. It's not gratuitous — it's testimony. Bearing witness to systematic harm is a legitimate and necessary stage of healing. I believe that. I hold that with my clients. Your pain deserves to be witnessed.

But witnessing isn't the destination. It's a doorway.

What Heated Rivalry Did That Was Quietly Revolutionary

Most mainstream queer stories give us sex before they give us love. We've normalized seeing queer desire portrayed while queer tenderness — the awkward, vulnerable, fully human kind — remains rare. The intimacy that comes from rivalry turned into care, from competition softened into curiosity about another person. The kind where someone looks at you and chooses to stay.

Heated Rivalry gave people that. And the response was overwhelming. Viewers who thought they'd built good armor found themselves undone by a look, a gesture, the simple fact of two people being soft with each other on screen.

I think we underestimate how starved many queer people are — not for representation of our pain, which we have in abundance — but for representation of our capacity to love and be loved. To be seen as full humans, not just survivors.

We have become collectively more comfortable talking about queer sex than queer love. Love carries more risk. Love asks you to be seen, to need someone, to imagine a future. For many of my clients, that kind of vulnerability feels more dangerous than anything.

Heated Rivalry opened something up. It reminded people — in their bodies, not just their minds — that love, warmth, and joy are possible. And that matters enormously in a therapeutic context, because we can only heal toward things we can imagine.

The Body Remembers What the Mind Learns to Manage

Here's something I see constantly: a client intellectually understands their trauma. They can name the patterns, they know where they come from, they've read the books. But the body is still braced. Still small. Still holding the weight.

This is where somatic therapy and movement become essential for queer and trans healing work specifically. When you've spent years performing safety, shrinking yourself, or disassociating from a body that felt like the wrong one — or one that had been violated — intellectual insight can only take you so far.

Movement is how we work with the parts that words can't fully reach.

In sessions, I sometimes invite clients to notice where they're holding tension and to let that part of the body move — not to perform anything, not to express anything, just to let the sensation find its own release. We use breath. We use intentional movement to help protective parts of the nervous system understand: the threat has passed. The body needs to learn safety, not just the mind.

Pain doesn't only need to be processed — it needs to be moved through. Not bypassed, not suppressed, but metabolized. Somatic work creates space for that metabolization.

Why Playfulness Is Not Frivolous — It Is Evidence of Being Alive

Outside of therapy, I find joy in art, music, and dance. This isn't separate from my clinical work — it informs it. When I started integrating more playfulness into sessions, I noticed something: clients who were the most defended, the most hypervigilant, often lit up unexpectedly when given permission to be silly, spontaneous, or curious.

Playfulness is not the absence of seriousness. It is evidence of livelihood — of a nervous system that has enough safety to explore, to take risks, to try something without knowing how it will go.

For many queer and trans clients, access to play was interrupted early. When you're managing your presentation, guarding your reactions, calculating what's safe to show and with whom — the spontaneous, generative energy of play gets rationed. Or locked away entirely.

Reclaiming playfulness in therapy isn't a detour from healing. It's one of the clearest signs that healing is happening.

I think of Heated Rivalry here, too. Part of what moved people so deeply was the lightness — the teasing, the competitive spirit that became tenderness, the moments of genuine joy between two people who started as rivals. It was play that opened the door to love. That's not an accident. That's how the nervous system works.

What This Looks Like in My Practice

I'm a trauma-informed, queer-affirming therapist in Toronto and I work virtually across Ontario. My practice brings together somatic therapy, IFS (Internal Family Systems), EMDR, and relational approaches — and yes, sometimes that means a session includes a moment of movement, a breath exercise, or an invitation to notice what's happening in the body rather than just in the narrative.

I do this because I believe that queer and trans healing has to include the body. It has to include joy, not just as a destination but as medicine along the way. And it has to hold space for love — including the terrifying, wonderful, fully human possibility of it.

If you've been surviving for a long time, and part of you wonders what it would feel like to stop bracing — I'd love to talk.

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