06/12/2025
St. Cloud Pride
Saint Cloud, MN
Seal loves the person that they have created themselves to be – “I am kind, compassionate, intelligent, and have integrity. I love the relationship I have developed with my body after years of being completely dissociated from it. I am proud of my therapy practice and the incredible humans who I get to work with and train. I am proud of the relationships I have built in this town and the friends and chosen family and the impact we all have. I am proud of my wife and the life we have built together, especially since we were not taught how to relationship from the beginning—we have learned and grown together.
I am 44, and I grew up in Saint Cloud MN. I am non-binary and q***r. I am autistic. I am the oldest of three. Our dad died when I was 12. We lived in the country south of Saint Cloud. My parents sent me to Catholic school until 4th grade. After that, I changed schools nearly every year until 10th grade, even though we did not move houses. I have experienced many different types of trauma and abuse. I have C-PTSD and Anxiety due to all of these experiences.
In my own therapy journey, finding therapists who “could handle” my stories without giving the “horror-pity” look was so important to me. So, when I embarked on my journey to become a therapist, having my past inform my practice has made me a more effective therapist and given me so much more empathy and capacity to hold the stories of my clients. I have made it a practice to continue to hire folks who also have their own trauma histories and disabilities and have made my practice a home for q***r and disabled providers.
I graduated from St. Cloud Tech in 1998. I was a band kid and worked on the student newspaper. Finding those communities saved me, because I have never really fit in to mainstream culture. I have always been a fat, loud, autistic human, and so there were folks who liked and appreciated me, and a lot who didn’t. After high school, I went to St. Cloud State. I really struggled to find community and also find a path forward. I was working for my family publishing company. It took finding Women’s Studies and the incredible professors there that helped me find my way. Even though it took me a total of 8 years, I got my bachelor’s degree in Women’s Studies; the first cohort to graduate with that Major. I worked for the publishing company until 2013, but when that failed, I needed a new career and became a therapist. I had a grad school professor who told me that if I focused my practice on q***r people, I would never have a full caseload. “Game on,” I thought. I now have a thriving and growing therapy practice serving many, many people.
I figured out I was q***r in eighth grade, but I didn’t have language for it at the time. The first word I used was le***an. I was out to friends in ninth grade. Like many who came of age in the 1990s, I was very visibly out online long before I was widely public about it. I had a GeoCities page that was all dancing rainbows. When I transferred to St. Cloud Tech, I was more publicly out. I was often told that I was the first “gay” person someone knew. As my exposure to the community increased, my language grew. I identified as bisexual for the rest of high school. In college, I learned the history of the word “q***r” and that fit, because I loved not having to define my attraction, and it’s slightly aggressive. I learned gender language and was able to find language like non-binary, gender fluid, gender f**kery, and agender, all identities that feel good to me. I feel a lot of support in my chosen family and friend group. My wife is on her own transition journey.
A lot of my own struggle to find my identity and to have my identity recognized have given me a passion to be a visibly q***r and an activist and advocate for our community.
It was the 1990s. There was so much stigma. And judgement and homophobia. I had a high school friend write in my senior yearbook that he wouldn’t have been friends with anyone else who was gay. My family wasn’t particularly supportive; they mostly ignored or forgot when I came out to them. I was very out online, but as a teenager on a very new internet, there were a lot of people predating on kids who had no protections (and parents who didn’t know they needed to apply protections); I was no different here. I was also a poor, fat, intelligent, autistic kid, and finding belonging has always been difficult for me.
One of the greatest gifts of my life is watching the people around me blossom into the people they are meant to be. Watching my interns graduate with their masters. Watching my partner wake up from top surgery. Watching my staff buy a house. Watching client after client heal and start to envision a future that they couldn’t imagine.
Trauma robs us of so many things, but the biggest thing it robs us of is the ability to dream of something different; we are so stuck in the moment-to-moment survival. So, as folks heal and start to see the world outside their trauma and start to dream of a future, that is the most exquisite moment to witness. I am honored to guide folks through this healing. I am honored to guide my staff and interns through their own personal growth as they guide their clients. I am honored to support my spouse as she becomes the woman she was always meant to be.
Advice: Heal the trauma. Face the hard things and put them truly behind you so that you can absorb the future’s gifts. Practice compassion because you never know what is going on in someone else’s life, so have grace for them. Do what you can to bring positive energy into your world and your community. What you bring is what you attract, so bring good.”
