Joseph Nicolosi's Beliefs

For many years, Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, Sr. assisted over a thousand clients with their goal to reduce their same-sex attractions and explore their heterosexual potential.

A licensed clinical psychologist, he believed that our bodies tell us who we are, and that our bodies have made us for heterosexuality.

Homosexuality, he believed, is an adaptation to trauma; it is rooted in a same-sex attachment problem that leaves the boy alienated from his masculine nature.

Dr. Nicolosi did not label this condition a “psychological disorder.” However, in his view, homosexual development not only works against our biological design, but it leaves repercussions throughout the personality. In his work with hundreds of men over the years, he saw how homosexual development distorted his clients’ understanding of gender. It also interfered with their ability to develop non-erotic relationships with men.

Most of his therapeutic work with clients had very little to do with sex; it centered, in fact, on helping his clients develop comfortable, non-erotic male friendships characterized by mutuality and equality.

Dr. Nicolosi began this work in 1981 as the originator of reparative therapy®. Reparative therapy is not the same as “conversion therapy.” It has nothing to do with shaming the client, forcing any kind of change, alienating families, or giving clients “shock treatments and nausea-inducing drugs,” as activists claim. Also, reparative therapy was never intended for people who identify as gay and are content with their gay-self-identification. It was aimed at people who do not identify with their same-sex attractions.

Dr. Nicolosi’s clients would tell him the following: “I know, on some deep level, that I’m a heterosexual man. But I’m troubled by homosexual attractions that prevent me from being who I really am.” They see brotherly, non-sexualized masculine relationships as their birthright. They long to develop the masculine energy within themselves which they have been sexualizing and romanticizing in other men.

Many men were victims of homosexual sexual abuse. They didn’t believe that “gay” could ever describe them. But that childhood experience left them with attractions that they found compelling, although ultimately not satisfying. These feelings interfered with their values, their marriages, and deeply held beliefs.

There are many other factors of childhood that can lead a man down a homosexual path. Some men had a negative experience with women, such as a smothering or disempowering mother, that blocked them from feeling safe in a sexual relationship with females.

Others—particularly boys with a sensitive, emotional temperament— failed to make a strong connection with their fathers. While their fathers may have loved them in their own way, such boys craved an emotional closeness that these fathers could not provide. As these boys grew toward adulthood, other males began to seem mysterious, exciting and unknowable, and so they came to romanticize the maleness that they craved to know. (As the late psychologist Dr. A. Dean Byrd warned, “Fathers, hug your sons—or someday, another man will.”)

The legitimate therapist will not simply accept the client’s gay feelings at face value. He must always ask “why,” rather than locking the client into an unwanted gay self-identification.

Dr. Nicolosi Sr.’s work ended when he passed away in March of 2017. But his books are still available, and therapists who continue much of his pioneering work remain.

Visit reintegrativetherapy.com and discover Joseph’s Nicolosi Jr.’s pioneering work treating unwanted sexual attractions.