You're at a work lunch and someone asks what you did at the weekend. You calculate in milliseconds: do I say "with my partner" or "with a friend"? Is it safe here? What consequences could it have?
That split second — that calculation heterosexual cisgender people never have to make — is minority stress. And it repeats hundreds of times a day.
What is minority stress?
The concept of minority stress, developed by psychologist Ilan Meyer, describes the additional, chronic stress experienced by people belonging to socially stigmatised groups. It's not the "normal" stress of life: it's an extra layer added to everything else simply because you belong to a minority.
For LGBTI+ people, this stress operates on several levels at once.
External level: what is done to you
Direct discrimination, microaggressions, verbal or physical violence, institutional exclusion. From the insult in the street to the law that doesn't recognise you as a family.
Anticipation level: what you fear will be done to you
Constant hypervigilance: scanning the environment to assess whether it's safe to be yourself. This level is especially exhausting because it's always on, even in apparently safe environments.
Internal level: what you do to yourself
Internalised homophobia, shame, concealment. The internalisation of negative messages that generates self-criticism, avoidance and disconnection.
The impact on the nervous system
Minority stress isn't just psychological — it's physiological. Constant hypervigilance keeps the sympathetic nervous system on permanent alert. The body lives as if danger were constant, because in a sense it is: you never know when the comment, the look, the rejection will come.
The consequences are measurable: higher incidence of anxiety, depression, insomnia, cardiovascular and digestive problems in LGBTI+ populations compared with the general population. Not because of being LGBTI+, but because of the cost of being so in a society that doesn't always make it easy.
Minority stress isn't fragility or victimhood. It's the logical response of an organism living in an environment that isn't always safe.
"But Spain is accepting now"
Spain has some of the world's most advanced LGBTI+ rights legislation. But legal equality isn't the same as lived equality. Microaggressions, "joking" comments, heteronormativity as an invisible framework, family pressure, bisexual erasure, trans pathologisation — all of that continues to operate, often under a veneer of tolerance.
And for migrant or racialised LGBTI+ people, the intersection of identities multiplies the stress. Being gay in Salamanca is not the same as being gay, Colombian and Black in Salamanca.
How is it worked on in session?
The first step is naming what's happening. Many people arrive at therapy with anxiety or exhaustion without connecting those symptoms to minority stress. They attribute them to their personality ("I'm just anxious"), their job or their relationships — without seeing the extra layer that belonging to a minority adds.
The work includes recognising and validating the impact of minority stress (not minimising it), learning to regulate the nervous activation it generates, dismantling the internalised homophobia that amplifies the stress from within, and strengthening personal resources and support networks.
The goal isn't to "stop feeling" the stress — it's for it to stop consuming you.