I am a therapist couch hopper (sorry to any of my cuckolded shrinks now reading this). I’ve sampled mental health services like a toddler at a pick-n-mix stall, all in the hope of remedying the severe psychological issues that developed during my childhood.

Here’s a taster. I’ve had cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to manage my once debilitating OCD, a condition that began when I was very young. In accordance with Islamic practice, I was taught to count my sins on my left shoulder (wanking over Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic = infinity sin points), and to ensure they didn’t exceed the good deeds I had to count on my right. And I became obsessed with counting.

I’ve been in psychodynamic psychotherapy to help overcome my pathological struggle to form intimate relationships, which have all been shadowed by my childhood fears that the very nature of who I am would lead to rejection (from Allah, my parents and society). I’ve even attempted bioacoustic therapy, where sound frequencies are used to interfere with neural pathways conditioned by traumatic memories, in a bid to circumvent them and encourage positive thought-processes. And while each has had significant merits, none has been as therapeutic as the reparative art of drag. Of all things, the unadulterated joy of being a drag queen has healed me in ways I could have never envisioned.

Drag fulfils many of the aims of CBT. The therapy involves weakening entrenched negative thought patterns and replacing them with more self-reparative ones. For instance, my compulsive behaviours germinate from a core belief that I am worthless. I carry this feeling everywhere I go. It generated when I was very young and petrified about the prospect of going to hell (not in a metaphorical sense – I believed quite literally that an eternity in blazing flames and torture awaited me in the afterlife). And being raised in a family where any kind of sexual or gender transgression was fiercely prohibited led to the unshakable belief that I was wrong inside.

And so I became a perfectionist, punishing myself whenever I failed to receive 100% in a school test, rereading a piece of homework 32 times before submitting it (I was once on the brink of suicide when I discovered a grammatical error on a piece of coursework I had submitted). These compulsions for perfection became the only tool for convincing myself I was worth something. CBT has certainly helped with the mechanics of managing these behaviours, in mapping the structure of the thoughts when they play out. But it is only the gift of drag that has been able to change the very nature of my core beliefs.

In drag, you live out a fantasy that directly contradicts the reality of your core beliefs. I was 20 when I created my drag alter-ego Glamrou, and an undergraduate when my OCD was at its worst. I couldn’t sleep without wedging open my laptop with a book that was pressing down on the letter Z of the keyboard. I re-lived every conversation I had straight after it was over, convinced I’d offended the other person. Whenever a friend took more than five minutes to respond to a text, I interpreted it as a sure sign they were rejecting me. A simple walk down the street sparked paranoia that even the traffic cones were disapproving of me.

And so, what a surprise it was to experience pure majesty when in drag and on stage for the first time. For all my life being effeminate had led to bullying, shame, embarrassment and even violence, but in drag my femininity became a weapon. Drag empties out any notion of a queer person as “weak”. In drag, you create the rules. Deeply held feelings that I was a sinner became silenced by the power of standing proudly under a spotlight, my sequin dress producing a heavenly aura. Instead of punishment, who I was elicited validation and support from the audience.

Drag mirrors the key philosophy of CBT therapy here: the repeated act of manifesting positive beliefs starts to unshackle the negative ones that tied me down. A decade of performing to audiences in the guise of a Middle Eastern goddess has taken me from fears of burning to rejoicing in the knowledge that I’m a girl on fire.

With psychodynamic therapy, the relationship you build with your psychotherapist is critical. It is used as a map with which to investigate how you relate to everyone else in your life. I saw my psychotherapist almost every week for four years, during which I learned just how much my fear of rejection was interrupting the way I related to others. As a child, I held the sincere belief that hiding who I was inside would be the only way in which to keep people around.

My parents, in an attempt to police my queer identity, employed strategies such as throwing away any camp clothes I purchased, telling me that I “was the source of their life’s unhappiness” and, after asking my mother whether she’d ever meet a hypothetical boyfriend, saying “it would be unfair of me to inflict myself on anyone” because I was “impossible to love”.

Every relationship since has thus felt like an exhausting juggling act in which I work ferociously to stop others learning the truth of who I am. Like the Wizard of Oz, I hid behind a curtain while projecting something entirely different to the outside world.

While psychodynamic psychotherapy has helped me understand and move past these behaviours, drag has been like a revolt against them. For an art form so artificial, drag is one of the most honest of performance mediums. You have to mine your depths and expel your guts on stage. Unapologetically, you take up space and demand that the room takes in all of who you are, and bows down to your every stitch and sequin. You re-fashion your face, body and clothes to force the world to accept you in the way you want to be seen. You combat the room with your darkest experiences, which you sublimate into humour and power.

People responded to my drag the more honest I became on stage; the act of expunging my transgressive thoughts and experiences in front of an audience led to more acceptance than I could have anticipated. Drag is like being out of the closet for a living – and when an audience celebrates you for this, it teaches you that you are worthy of love because of who you are, not in spite of it. It’s unsurprising, then, that my most special relationships are with other drag performers, who have offered me the kind of family I yearned for growing up.

Bioacoustic therapy has certainly calmed my badly wired neurological pathways. For most of my life, my fight or flight response was initiated every 10 minutes, with every instance of possible rejection or failure, including traffic lights going red, acting as a trigger for my anxiety.

Early in my 20s, anything to do with the Middle East catalysed these defence mechanisms. The parental response to my sexual and gender identity, as well as my childhood fear of Allah’s fiery wrath, meant that it was hard for me to be around Arabic speakers, or to engage with my cultural heritage. A few lines in Arabic could leave me sweating and unnerved.

Drag was the unlikely route to me embracing my heritage. Five years ago I met an extraordinary Arab woman and fashion stylist who, as well as becoming a dear friend, also styled me for my drag troupe’s first music video. She encouraged me to look back to the costumes and styles of Middle Eastern female pop stars, and I’ve since learned to weave together my queer gender expression with the fabrics, textures and colours from my past.

And in a weird twist of fate, drag has returned me to the person I thought it was helping me run away from – my beautiful Iraqi-Egyptian mother. I now regularly paint pictures of her on to my face – and instead of clamming up with dread at the sound of Arabic, I feel a sense of hope, and a strange wonder that drag has been the glue to tie all the fractured pieces of my identity together.

Queer people from conservative backgrounds are working harder than you know to stay afloat every day. We’re trying to convince both ourselves and everybody else that we’re worth something, while constantly being told that we’re not. We try to stay positive and hopeful while facing perpetual violence. And we try to find acceptance and love when our experience has taught us only rejection. So it’s no wonder that many of us suffer a plethora of mental health issues. I’m grateful to all the therapists who have helped me work through mine; and to drag, for teaching me something I should have learned a long time ago: there’s nothing wrong with me.

Follow Amrou @glamrou. Unicorn: the Memoir of a Muslim Drag Queen is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). Buy it for £14.99 at guardianbookshop.com