Coming out to your family as an adult: when you tell them who you are

Sunday lunch, the soup already on the table. Your aunt leans across her plate and asks what she asks every year: “So, what about you? Seeing anyone?” The answer has been ready for a long time: “Oh, nothing special, work keeps me busy.” Everyone nods, and the conversation moves on to the weather and the price of things. At home, twenty minutes’ drive away, the person you have been with for six years is waiting. They know where you are. They also know why they are not there.

There can be a great many lunches like that. Someone is thirty, forty, fifty years old, with a job, a flat, a life of their own — and in front of their parents they still live a version of themselves with the most important part missing. From the outside everything looks fine. From the inside, every family gathering is a small exercise in caution: what do I say, what do I leave out, which photo do I show, who do I refer to as my “flatmate”.

This post is about coming out to your family as an adult: what research tells us about it, why it is so hard even when you no longer depend on your parents, how to prepare, and what to do if the response is not what you hoped for. I am writing about the family of origin — parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents. I am not writing about whether you should tell them. Only you can make that decision.

Why it is different in adulthood than for a teenager

Most of what is said about coming out concerns young people. A teenager lives at home, depends on their parents, and is hit directly by the family’s response; I wrote about what a parent can do at that point in When your teenager tells you who they love: sexual orientation and support at home. An adult has more power: their own home, their own money, their own circle of people. It seems it ought to be easier.

Often it is not. An adult has years, sometimes decades, of a story they have told their family differently. Coming out is therefore not only new information but also a correction of the old: “That friend who used to come to the seaside with me was not just a friend.” Parents hear not only who you are, but also that they did not know for a long time — and sometimes that hurts them more than the news itself.

The road to the decision is different too. Some people have known since childhood and waited years for the right moment. Others only truly asked themselves the question as adults, perhaps after a long relationship or a marriage; I wrote about that in Questioning your sexual orientation in adulthood: when the question comes later. And then there are circumstances a teenager does not have: a partner who is tired of being absent at every holiday, children, a wedding, a parent’s illness that suddenly makes it feel as though there is not much time left.

What research shows about the family’s response

The best-known studies in this field were carried out by the American social worker Caitlin Ryan and her colleagues. In 2009 they published, in the journal Pediatrics, data from 224 lesbian, gay and bisexual young adults aged 21 to 25. Those who had experienced high levels of family rejection in their teens were 8.4 times more likely to report having attempted suicide, and 5.9 times more likely to report high levels of depression, than peers who had experienced little or no rejection.

The figure needs to be read with care. The study involved young people in the United States, asked them to look back, and does not prove cause. But it points very clearly in one direction — and a second study by the same group in 2010 confirmed that direction from the other side: young adults who had experienced more acceptance at home had higher self-esteem, more social support and better general health, and less depression, substance abuse and suicidal thinking.

For adults who are thinking about coming out, two findings from this work seem important to me. First: rejection and acceptance are not a family’s character but behaviours — specific things parents say and do. Second: the same family is capable of both. The mother who cries at the news and asks what she did wrong may, six months later, be the one who first invites your partner to lunch.

These studies were done with young people, not forty-year-olds, so we cannot simply transfer them to adults. They do say something that holds at any age: the response of the people you grew up with is not a detail that enough independence lets you set aside.

What concealment costs

Someone who does not come out has not chosen peace. They have chosen a different kind of work. In 2007 the psychologist John Pachankis described what goes on inside a person who conceals a part of themselves that others might reject: they constantly track what they have told to whom, watch their pronouns, prepare answers in advance, read faces. That vigilance is tiring, and over time it narrows contact — it becomes easier to visit less often and leave earlier.

Concealment also feeds shame. Each time you leave something unsaid, you repeat to yourself the message that this part of you cannot be shown. It is one of the mechanisms described by the minority stress model; there is more about it in Minority stress: the load those around you do not see.

In Slovenia, Alenka Švab and Roman Kuhar, in their study of the everyday life of gay men and lesbians, described something many families will recognise: the parents know, or at least suspect, but it is never spoken about. They called it the transparent closet. Everyone can see through the wall, yet nobody opens the door. Their study also showed that people generally tell friends first, and at home tell their mother more often than their father.

The transparent closet is treacherous because it looks like acceptance. Nobody shouts, nobody rejects. But your partner remains a “friend”, you arrive alone at holidays, and an important part of your life has no place in the family story. I wrote about what the unspoken does to a family in Family secrets and unfinished stories: where a genogram finds them.

Why the family responds the way it does

When you tell them, it is not only what your parents know about you that changes. The whole web of relationships shifts. A family is a system that tries to stay in balance, and any big piece of news unsettles that balance; more on this in The family as a system: why one member’s change moves the whole family.

That is why parents’ first response is often not about you at all. It is about them: the picture they had of your future, what the neighbours and relatives will say, their faith, their fear that your life will be harder. Some of them grieve — not for you, but for the image they had built. That does not excuse hurtful sentences. It does help to understand where they come from.

The difference in time matters too. You have had years to come to terms with yourself. Your parents have one afternoon. You are expecting them to cover, in a few minutes, a road you walked for a long time and not without difficulty.

In family therapy, the ability to remain who you are while staying in contact with people who disagree with you is called differentiation. Coming out is one of the hardest tests of that ability: to tell the truth about yourself without demanding that others accept it at once — and also without letting their unease persuade you that you have done something wrong.

Exercise: a coming-out map

Before you tell anyone anything, take twenty minutes, a sheet of paper and a pen. The exercise is not meant to make you decide today. It is meant to make sure the decision is yours and not the result of pressure, a guilty conscience or a third glass of wine.

1. Draw circles. Put yourself in the middle and the people from your family of origin around you: parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Beside each one, mark whether they know, suspect or do not know.
2. Beside each name, write why. Why do you want this person to know? “So I can stop lying.” “So they come to the wedding.” “Because I have to.” Where the only answer is “I have to”, stop and consider whose demand that is.
3. Choose the first person. Not the hardest one, but the one with whom you expect the most safety. Often it is a brother, a sister or a cousin. One ally in the family changes every conversation that follows.
4. Write three sentences. What you are telling them, what you would like from them, and what you are not expecting. For example: “Marko and I have been a couple for six years. I’d like you to meet him. I’m not expecting you to know what to say straight away.”
5. Plan the hour after the conversation. Who is waiting for you, who you will call, where you will go. The map of your support network tool can help. This is the step people most often forget, and almost everyone needs it.

The conversation itself: less is more

Long introductions raise the tension. A parent listening to “there’s something I need to tell you, I don’t know how you’ll take it, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time” spends those seconds imagining illness, debt or a move to the other side of the world. A short, clear sentence is kinder to both of you.

It helps to choose a time without an audience and without a clock ticking: not Christmas dinner, and not five minutes before you leave. It also helps to give up defending yourself. You do not owe an explanation of since when, why, or whether you are sure. You can answer questions if you wish, and you can also say: “I’d rather not go into that today.”

A short example (constructed; this is not a real person):

“Mum, there’s something I’d like to tell you. Marko and I aren’t flatmates. We’ve been together for six years.”
“… What? Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because I don’t want to keep turning up alone and pretending.”
“I don’t know what to say. Your father won’t understand this.”
“You don’t need to say anything today. I just wanted you to hear it from me. I’ll ring you in a week.”

Nothing was resolved in that conversation. The mother did not say she was glad, and the son did not try to persuade her. But two things happened that count: the truth has been spoken, and the contact stays open. “I’ll ring you in a week” may be the most important sentence in it.

The first response is not the last

After the conversation there is often a strange emptiness. You prepared for this moment for years, now it is over, and nothing is final — neither relief nor catastrophe. That is usual. Coming out rarely unfolds as a single event; it is more like a process in which the family rearranges itself over weeks or months.

In the weeks after the conversation, some of the following often happens: your parents mention nothing, as if the conversation never took place; questions come that hurt even though they are not meant badly; one parent tells the other, or asks you to keep it between the two of you. This is where triangulation often appears: your mother becomes the go-between for you and your father, your brother carries messages. As far as you can, speak to each person yourself.

It also helps to tell clumsiness from rejection. “Does that mean I won’t have grandchildren?” is a clumsy, frightened sentence. “As long as you’re like this, don’t come home” is rejection. You can answer the first with patience. With the second, patience is not enough.

And one more thing happens almost every time: your parents have to come out in turn. To neighbours, to relatives, to acquaintances at church or at their club. What you did for years, they are doing now — and some of them feel, for the first time, what it was like for you.

When the family does not accept

Sometimes the relationship does not settle. Parents hold on to silence, to conditions, or to open rejection. Then you face a question with no pleasant answer: how much contact can you manage with someone who does not accept who you are?

Between “all or nothing” there is a great deal of room. You can visit less often. You can come only with your partner, or not at all. You can say: “I’m glad to come, but I won’t listen to talk of this being a phase. If the conversation turns that way, I’ll leave.” Boundaries are not a punishment for your parents. They are the condition under which you can stay in the relationship at all. I wrote about when a relationship with parents can still be repaired, and when distance is the only honest solution, in Adult children and parents: can the relationship still be repaired?

Rejection by your family is a loss and deserves to be grieved, even if everyone is still alive. Alongside that loss, the people some call a chosen family mean a great deal: friends, a partner, a partner’s parents, a community. They do not replace a mother and father. But they hold you. If you are looking for a place where you do not have to explain things from the beginning, there is the organisation Legebitra in Ljubljana, which offers counselling and support.

If, after a conversation with your family, you are overwhelmed by hopelessness or by thoughts that you cannot go on, do not stay alone with it. In Slovenia you can call the Samarijan confidential helpline on 116 123 (24 hours a day) or the mental distress line Klic v duševni stiski on 01 520 99 00 (7 pm to 7 am), and in an emergency 112.

When coming out is not the right step

This whole post could be read as an appeal: tell them, and it will be easier. That is not what I am claiming, and neither does the research. In 2012 Nicole Legate, Richard Ryan and Netta Weinstein showed that being open about one’s orientation is linked to greater wellbeing mainly in settings that support a person in being who they are. In settings that pressure and control, they did not find that link. Coming out does not heal in itself; being accepted does.

So there are circumstances in which waiting, or not telling your family at all, is an entirely reasonable decision:

• When you are not safe. If there is violence in the family, or a serious threat of it, safety comes before openness. Always.
• When you depend on your family. Housing, a job in the family business, childcare — dependence narrows your options if things go wrong.
• When the reason is someone else’s. A partner’s ultimatum, an anniversary, or the feeling that you “should have by now” are not your reasons. Your partner’s distress is real and deserves a conversation; I describe how a couple can approach differences like this in Same-sex couples in therapy: what is the same and what is different.
• When a parent can no longer take it in. With serious illness or dementia, some people decide to tell others but not that parent. That is not cowardice.

The reverse holds too: for some people the family of origin is simply not important enough to be owed a view into their private life. Silence can be hiding, but it can also be a boundary. Only you know the difference — by whether the silence costs you or gives you peace. And one more limit: I am writing mainly about sexual orientation. Coming out about gender identity has further layers that this post does not do justice to.

How therapy can help

In coming out, therapy does not decide for you and does not push you anywhere. It can be a place where you try out loud the sentences you have never said to anyone, and where you look at what happens inside you when you picture your father’s face. It often turns out that the fear is tied not only to orientation but to an older question: was I allowed to be different about anything in this family?

That is exactly what relational family therapy looks at — how the relationships you grew up in shaped what you now expect from closeness. Where it is possible and you want it, someone from the family can also come to a session. Sometimes, with a third person present, parents hear for the first time what they could not hear at home.

One thing should be said unambiguously: sexual orientation is not a problem that needs treating. In 2009 a task force of the American Psychological Association concluded, after reviewing the research, that there is insufficient evidence that efforts to change orientation work, and that they can cause harm. A therapist who offers you anything of the kind is not acting professionally.

I am a marriage and family therapist in training under supervision; sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients. If you would first like to look at the family story as a whole — who was allowed to speak in it, what was kept silent, and who stepped outside what was expected before you did — a longer session with a genogram, A Look into the Past, is a good fit.

What to remember

• Coming out to your family in adulthood is not only news but also a correction of a story that lasted years — which is why it often hits parents twice.
• Caitlin Ryan’s research shows that the family’s response is strongly linked to mental health; acceptance and rejection are specific behaviours, and they can change.
• Concealment is not peace: it demands constant vigilance and feeds shame. But coming out, too, helps mainly where you are accepted.
• The first response is not the last. You have had years, your family one afternoon — keep the contact open and line up support in advance.
• The decision about who, when and whether at all is yours. Safety always comes before openness.