Exercises & Research Designed to Support LGBTQ+ Folk

This is a hard time - both in the world and for our community.

We are LGBTQ+ and affirming clinicians and researchers at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

We have been working since 2010 to develop expressive writing exercises designed to help LGBTQ+ people create personalized strategies to cope with and respond to heterosexist, homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic experiences in their lives. We have conducted many studies, finding that these exercises tend to help people in making progress when processing troubling experiences, in reducing depression, and in reducing event related stress. We have conducted research that has documented the harms of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment and legislation for our community as well as other forms of transphobia and heterosexism. We remain committed to developing exercises and conducting research that will support LGBTQ+ people and to making them available.

You are welcome to click to learn more about us in these webpages, view LGBTQ+ resources, and participate in the research-based exercises that we have developed. In response to the great stress that our community is experiencing at this time, we are hoping to make our writing exercises widely available as support and as a way to document the lives of LGBTQ+ people at this time. You can use the exercises to process forms of transphobia and heterosexism broadly within a structure designed to help LGBTQ+ people and answer research questions about them to continue to support other LGBTQ+ people.

Feel free to explore the buttons below. Pull up a chair!