Where The Two Voices Meet: The Shared Architecture Of A Fractured Room

authoured by Anton Josling, Student Psychologist

There is a version of my life that exists only on paper. In that version, I am protected, by a constitution, by ethical codes, by frameworks designed to ensure fairness. South Africa was amongst the first nations in the world to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in its Bill of

Rights. The mental health profession has developed extensive guidelines to ensure that helping relationships remain ethical, boundaries, and equitable. Both are genuine achievements. Both, I have learned, are also only the beginning. The lived experience is always more complicated than the document that tries to contain it. And it is in that gap, between the written protection and the embodied reality, that I have had to do the most honest work on myself.

The Loneliness of Two Halves

I am a gay man in South Africa, living outside Johannesburg's urban centres, and the most

immediate struggle in my life has not been legal or political. It has been relational.

For years, I lived in what I can only describe as a state of careful editing. With my oldest

friends, many from high school, rooted in the same Afrikaans cultural landscape I grew up in,

I shared my passions, my politics, my ambitions. But I would instinctively remove the parts

of my life that pertained to my sexuality. A mention of a date or an attraction would be met

with a subtle but unmistakable shift in conversation, and I learned to take the hint.

When I ventured into explicitly queer spaces, bars, clubs, organised social groups, I found

something different but equally constraining. Here, a shared sexuality was assumed to be

sufficient foundation for friendship. I found myself changing again, this time in a different

direction: flattening my personality to fit a template of what a gay man "should" be, discussing topics that felt prescribed rather than personally meaningful. I learned, in these spaces, that communities can have their own orthodoxies as rigid as any other.

The result was a loneliness of two halves. I was not fully myself with my oldest friends, and I

was a reduced version of myself in the community I was supposed to call home.

This experience is not merely personal; it is shaped by South Africa's deeper socio-economic

and geographic realities. Much of the visible gay community is concentrated in affluent,

predominantly white suburbs. Scholar and activist Zackie Achmat have argued that the struggle for queer liberation in this country cannot be separated from broader battles against

racial and economic inequality, that the "gay village"; is often a luxury most cannot afford

(McKinney, 2015). For someone whose identity is also rooted in a different cultural and

linguistic heritage, entering those spaces can feel like a form of cultural erasure. I have sat in

a room full of queer people and felt more alienated than I have in a room full of people from

my own background who might not understand my sexuality. The geographical and economic segregation that defines South African cities mirrors, I have found, an internal segregation. The most profound difficulty, however, has been the pressure to align my deeply personal worldview with a"community lens". When I voice disbelief about certain mainstream queer political agendas or express a desire for a more inclusive spiritual life, I have sometimes been accused of being "self-hating"; or insufficiently community minded. It is a strange echo, the demand to conform to a collective identity, even within a community defined by its refusal to conform.

Kimberlé Crenshaw's (1989) theory of intersectionality is useful here. It reminds us that

social identities, race, gender, class, sexuality, are not separate but overlapping, and that no

single axis can account for the fullness of a person's experience. My worldview is shaped by the intersection of everything I am: a South African, a man from an Afrikaans background, a son, a friend, and a gay man. It cannot be neatly packaged into a singular political or social platform. The pressure to reduce myself to one dimension of that identity feels, paradoxically, like an echo of the very conformity I sought to escape.

The Privilege I Carry Into the Room

I am also training to be a psychologist. And entering the mental health field as a white male is not a neutral act. It is an entry shaped by years of social stratification, by institutional power, by cultural norms that have historically centred white, male perspectives as the default standard of care. My positionality, the interplay of my intersecting identities and how they shape power, perception, and relational dynamics (Bergkamp et al., 2023) places me in a position of compounded social privilege. That does not mean I cannot provide compassionate care. But it does mean I must work harder to notice how my identity shapes the helping space.

Privilege, I have learned, does not always appear noticeably. It operates in assumptions about clients, in the language I reach for, in the frameworks I unconsciously prioritise. Research in this area, as Bergkamp et al. (2023) note, tends to study those without privilege rather than those who hold it, a tendency to look outward at clients rather than inward at oneself. That inward gaze is uncomfortable. It is also necessary.

In my training, informed consent has been a central topic. For a long time, I understood it

procedurally, a form to sign before engagement begins. Viewed through the lens of power,

however, it carries far greater weight. Consent is an ongoing, transparent conversation about

what engagement involves, what clients and community members can expect, and the rights

they hold throughout every interaction. As a white male student psychologist, I must be

especially alert to how power differences can quietly undermine a client's ability to give

genuinely free consent. For clients from communities historically harmed by white-

dominated institutions, agreeing to engage can feel more like compliance than choice. My

role is to disrupt that dynamic wherever possible. The helping relationship inherently involves a power differential. The client is vulnerable; the professional holds authority. Clients often idealise practitioners, projecting trust onto them (Bergkamp et al., 2023).

The added cultural weight of white male authority means I must stay vigilant about how my presence is experienced, even when my intentions are entirely benign. My socialisation, in which confidence, directness, and authority have often been rewarded, can manifest in the helping space in ways that subtly silence another person's voice. When this goes un-examined, it leads to harm dressed up as help.

The antidote, I have come to believe, is reflexivity. Not a single act of acknowledgement but

a sustained commitment: attending regular supervision, seeking personal therapy, consulting with diverse colleagues, pursuing ongoing education about race, gender, and power. This moves practice beyond cultural competence into something more embodied, a genuine humility. When a client challenges me, reflexivity means sitting with that discomfort rather than retreating into the protective authority my social position affords. It is not about

achieving perfect neutrality. It is about remaining in motion: always willing to question, to

learn, to adapt.

Oneself, Held Together

What strikes me, sitting with both experiences, is how similar the work feels.

In my personal life, I am learning to resist the pressure to flatten myself, to edit out the parts

of my identity that don't fit neatly into any single community's expectations. In my professional life, I am learning to scrutinise the invisible advantages I carry and to ensure

they do not harm the very people I am trying to help. In both cases, the work is the same:

honest, ongoing, sometimes uncomfortable self-examination.

Reflexivity, I now understand, is not only a clinical tool. It is a way of moving through the

world, a refusal to let inherited scripts go un-examined, whether those scripts are about what a gay man should be or what a white male psychologist should look like. Both demand the same courage: to look inward without flinching, and to remain open to what you find.

The version of Ubuntu I hold onto is not one of uniform conformity. It is a fellowship that

recognises and celebrates the unique lens through which each person sees the world, a

community spacious enough to hold complexity. In the same way, the ethics I am building as

a clinician are not a destination I will ever fully reach. They are a direction I must always be

moving toward. The freedom to exist, hard-won as it is, does not automatically become the freedom to belong. And the desire to help does not automatically translate into helping well. Both require the same thing: the willingness to keep examining, with honesty and without self-protection, the self that shows up in the room.

That is the work. It is slow. It is necessary. And it does not end.

References

Bergkamp, J., et al. (2023). Privilege, positionality, and the helping professions. Journal of

Multicultural Counseling and Development.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex. University of Chicago

Legal Forum, 139–167.

McKinney, J. (2015). Queer urban spaces and economic access in post-apartheid South

Africa. Wits University Press.