(April, 2014)  My name is Paul, and I am 27 years old. I started therapy three years ago and terminated about two months ago. I found out about Dr. Nicolosi’s work through the web after a few months of feeling more and more despair about where my life was going.

At the time, I was in grad school getting my Ph.D. and living in the city in an apartment with two roommates. The two of them were already good friends, but since I was the latecomer to the group and we didn’t know each other very well, during the first few months I felt really left out. They already had their groups of friends, their plans, and their lives, and I was always tagging along, feeling out of place. Also, as the cliché goes, the city can be a very lonely and alienating place. After a few months, I was feeling very lonely and sorry for myself, spending more and more time alone and, obviously, not having a lot of success making new friends or meeting new people. I didn’t like the people at grad school very much, either. Perhaps it was my prejudices, but I felt everyone was just too weird, too self-involved, too eccentric. In a sense, I think I feared that I was already too much of that myself, so making friends with people like that would only seal my fate as a weirdo and an outcast.

I had felt strong attractions toward guys at least since middle school, and it was always something I rejected, without not really facing up to it. I barely acknowledged it to myself and didn’t really give it much thought—delving into what it meant was simply too full of despair and darkness and confusion. Although I never got to the point of having sex with a guy—my religious inhibitions, my own fear, and my raw disgust for the whole idea kept me away, thankfully—but I lived my SSA practically every single day by generously indulging in pornography. I practically lived in a fantasy world. I remember I started with porn by watching straight stuff during late-night shows on TV when I was a teenager. Slowly, I overcame my disgust and rejection of same-sex stuff when I found it on the internet, until I developed a pretty solid addiction and basically lived my life around it, always being torn inside by my religious commitments against it.

I did have some attractions to girls along the way. In college, I even went so far as asking one particular girl I was infatuated with to go out with me. She turned me down twice, which was tough as hell but now that I look back on it I think it was one of the most constructive things that ever happened to me. In any case, the strength of the attraction for girls was nothing compared to my attractions to guys. My sexual feelings for guys were much more intense, in a completely different order of things.

As I explained, when I went to the city I felt more and more alone, and in that loneliness I slowly started to think seriously for the first time about SSA and its implications. I guess I had to face myself finally since I barely had anyone to talk to. When I thought about it, it started as all despair and darkness—I had no idea what to do, what to expect, where I would end up, and I was full of fear about where I was taking my life with all the porn and loneliness. So I started looking, hoping to find something. At first, I began reading psychology books, particularly the work of Conrad Baars. It resonated with me incredibly, and I devoured the books one after another. Baars talks about homosexuality in his books, but what struck me was that he suggests that it can be healed. I guess I always suspected (or blindly hoped) this was true, but it was more a dream or a hope than anything else. Now I had some scientific backing for my dream, so I searched on Amazon for more books, this time dealing specifically with SSA and how to heal it. I read many, until I came upon Dr. Nicolosi’s work and found his website. At first I wasn’t sure about it. I’ve always been a pretty “brainy” guy, so I like to study something before I jump into it. I got Dr. Nicolosi’s book, “Healing Homosexuality,” which contains stories of men who went through the therapy more or less successfully, with transcripts of what actual therapy is like, and it was very gripping for me. The most important thing was that it gave me a lot of perspective, helping me to see and understand the depth and range of problems guys with SSA have faced and which I had never even suspected. Also, I saw myself in them a lot. Wanting to understand more of how it works, I bought Dr. Nicolosi’s “Reparative Therapy and Male Homosexuality” which spells out the theory behind the whole process and explains the origins of SSA. Everything I read resonated with me more and more.

After reading and reading (and slowly overcoming my initial delusion that I could somehow heal myself), I went online to contact Nicolosi. I thought he was a particularly good fit for me because he’s Catholic like me and takes his faith seriously. Since I understood now that healing SSA would involve a lot of deep and difficult work in very sensitive areas, I did not want to work with someone who would ask me to back away from my beliefs or would not acknowledge how important it was for me that the whole process respect and prioritize the integrity of my faith. Nicolosi was my guy.

Once I started therapy, the first thing I think I learned was that I had to refocus my whole perspective on SSA. Until therapy I had only seen it as something that happened to me, a temptation that I had to control with all my strength. Through the work I came to see that beneath that temptation was a yearning and a need that was deep and, more importantly, very good and healthy: a desire for deep connection and friendship with guys. This was really important for me to see because I stopped fighting against it and started to try to bring it to the surface, since until then it had been drowning under the layers and layers of porn and fantasy that I had built in my mind around it. I learned that connecting with guys is very good (not, in fact, some “gay” desire) and, indeed, that it is grounded in a fundamental part of what being a man is.

Thankfully, I’ve always had good friends, but one of the problems with SSA was that I was very self-conscious around them and I really didn’t let myself go deep into the friendship or let myself be seen as I really was. In a sense, I only had the illusion of friendship, though it was with guys who were thankfully very good and wholesome and who didn’t hurt me. When I realized that SSA was masking my yearning for deep friendship and connection with guys, I realized that I needed to let go of those insecurities little by little if I ever wanted real friendship. I think this was one of the most transformative parts of therapy for me. It was incredible. In fact, I think one of the things I value most about therapy is how it made me appreciate the importance of friendship and the need to be vulnerable in order to attain it. During therapy, I forged the strongest friendships I have ever had.

The first part of therapy focused on the past and understanding the existence of this yearning and how several emotional wounds had transformed it into SSA. A lot of healing came from understanding that my relationship with my parents was simply not good. My family life was never like a horror story or anything like that, always apparently “normal,” but therapy opened up a whole new dimension of it that I had buried in my memory and only started to acknowledge little by little. There were a lot of painful events in the past that I didn’t really decipher until the therapy. For example, I began to understand how my father was completely absent from my growing up (although he was always “there”) and how my mother was insecure and domineering and wouldn’t let me be who I was born to be as a man. The other women in my family, my grandmother and my aunts, also contributed to this with their equally domineering personalities. Just understanding and coming face to face with this reality, although painful, was very important in my healing. I was beginning to see how these events had effectively scarred me, leaving me almost incapable of forming new and mature relationships, so that I was repeating those past traumas in the present when I met other people. It may have been new people and characters the next time around, but it traced back to the same story: fear and yearning for a distant Dad, and submissive and idolizing feelings for the omnipresent Mom.

Another huge part of therapy involved working on my addiction to porn. The therapy didn’t address the addiction per se, but rather it helped me understand why I was attracted to the images I was seeing, what triggered the attraction, and what emotional states the porn addiction produced, nourished, and benefited from, etc. I became very aware of these different states, and through a lot of hard work (I’m still working on it!) I learned to control them, to not make such a big deal out of them, to see that they are nothing more than feelings that will pass and that come from some lie or “story” in my mind that triggers them. Slowly, I learned to dissect them, to find the lie underneath and liberate myself from them. It’s tough work, very exhausting, but incredibly liberating.

Today my life is totally different. I feel myself grounded in my own self and happy with who I am. I have struggles like everybody, but now I’m not drowning in them, incapable of seeing what’s going on as I used to. I see myself as moving forward, although my progress is much more modest, much more realistic, much more based on who I am and what I can and cannot do, than it was at the beginning, where unrealistic dreams of absolute transformation kept me depressed and stuck. Another great thing about the therapy as a Christian was that I came to see that part of my yearning and my need for connection was in fact a need for God as my Father, which gave me a vision of life that changed completely how I function. I ground my hope in Him and not only in my own abilities, and I know that the only true and deep healing (although I can do a lot to help) comes from Him. This liberated me from all the pressure to do everything perfectly myself.

I have been married three months now and my wife is pregnant with our first child, but the road to where I am was long and hard. I always thought that I would get married, as a kind of passing thought or simple assumption (I simply “knew” that it would happen at some point, almost as if magically), but I never got started down the path that would take me there. I was paralyzed by fear; I had thought about becoming a priest, but realized that I was only thinking about it out of fear, as an escape rather than a truly fulfilling life in itself. In fact, I never had a girlfriend until I met my wife, which was about two years ago, when I had just finished my first year-and-a-half of therapy.

Our relationship started off slow, since she was in another country and we had to do it long-distance, which is very tough. She was (and is) a veritable godsend because she was very different from my mother (which was the idea of womanhood I had). She’s mature and strong, a whole new femininity that I didn’t know. When we first met I noticed and loved the fact that she respected me as a man and wanted me to achieve things as a man. Little details made the difference, like she wanted me to drive her home after our first date, not because she couldn’t drive the car but she wanted to give me that space. Or that she expected me to take care of certain things, instead of doing everything for me like my mother, etc.

I’ve come to realize that my mother is a good woman, but she is a micromanager and it is very hard for her to lose control of things. It is hard for her not to want to take care of everyone and instead to give other people their space and opportunity to do what they need to do. With my wife I don’t have that problem because she encourages me and understands me. I can confide my frustrations with her without thinking that she’ll try to smother me by trying to solve all my problems for me instead of giving me the strength to do it myself.

One major sign that she was the right woman was that I told her about my SSA and my therapy before we got engaged and she was incredibly supportive. She understood me and saw the man that I wanted to be, even if I barely knew who that man was or how to become him. She saw him somewhere inside me already. It was simply unbelievable. She just saw it. She would say: “You are going to be a great father, husband, and professional because I see it already in you, even if you don’t.” We have our issues as a couple like everybody, but we’re happy, we’re connected, we struggle together, we start over together, and both emotionally and sexually I think we are where we want to be. It’s more than I ever dreamed of.

I think the most important realization I’ve had about therapy (and indeed about life) is that there is no such thing as a magical pill that one can take and life does a “180.” Therapy is decidedly not that—it’s tough, it’s messy, it’s not something I looked forward to. But it saved my life because it taught me to love myself as a broken being; it taught me to accept that there are no perfect solutions, only the daily struggle. Indeed, I’ve learned that to be happy one must abandon all utopian delusions of a future life where everything will be “perfect” and learn to love that daily struggle with oneself and with the world. The struggle is where boys become men, where one stops to play and fantasize and dream. Therapy is tough, it’s messy, it’s not something I looked forward to. But it saved my life because it taught me to love myself as a broken being; it taught me to accept that there are no perfect solutions, only the daily struggle.

Indeed, I’ve learned that to be happy one must abandon all utopian delusions of a future life where everything will be “perfect” and learn to love that daily struggle with oneself and with the world. The struggle is where boys become men, where one stops to play and fantasize and dream, and starts to work and imagine and build. That’s the key: don’t only acknowledge that there is the struggle, love it. Now, I can fulfill those deep needs for male connection by challenging myself in healthy ways to make new friends and assert my own self, be my own self so that they will accept and (some of them) love me as friends. I still have some temptations and “gay” thoughts sometimes, but I’m OK with that because it doesn’t define who I am; it’s just another obstacle on the course to becoming the man I want to be: husband, father, caregiver, builder. I can continue to live my life the way I want it because the struggle makes me stronger and more myself. That’s why I have always objected to the self-label of “gay,” as if one’s weaknesses or tendencies defined what one is. I identify as a man, and that’s it.

by Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D.

The scientific prestige of the American Psychological Association (APA) was evidenced recently during the legal debate over treatment for unwanted homosexuality.

Over and over in the courtroom, one piece of evidence trumped all other information — the APA’s’ Task Force Report, “Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation” (2009).

With unbroken success, that gay-activist trump card was used as the decisive factor in all recent court decisions. For this reason, it is necessary to reexamine the Report’s origins.

While numerous methodological critiques have been made against the Report (1), this paper will focus exclusively on the inherent bias of the seven members who made up this panel of experts.

When “The Foxes Are Guarding The Henhouse”

If the APA wanted to do an objective investigation of the therapeutic effectiveness of sexual-orientation change therapy using a representational demographic, and if 1-2%, of the U.S. population is gay, then we would expect that of the seven Task Force members, perhaps one would be gay. But of the seven members of the Task Force Committee, six have publicly documented themselves as gay-or bisexual-identified.

Not only were these members gay, but all – including the one non-gay-identified member, and the one bisexual member- engaged in gay activism before their selection for the Task Force.

In my previous paper, “Why Gay Cannot Speak for Ex-Gays,” I offered a psychological explanation as to why the identity process of “coming out” which results in a gay identity will bias the individual from accepting the possibility of change for others. Abandoning the hope of ever overcoming their unwanted homosexuality (which is a necessary prerequisite for accepting a gay identity) creates a resistance in the mind of the gay-identified person that change could be possible for someone else: “If it was impossible for me, then no one else can do it.”

Has Homosexuality Been Scientifically Proven To Be “Positive”?

Beside this bias, another overlooked fact is that, prior to the start of their investigation, the Task Force members admitted to being opposed to the very existence of reorientation therapy, based on their view that homosexuality must be viewed by others as “positive.” In the introduction of their report, they state:

“The task force…[accepts]… the following scientific facts:

Same-sex sexual attractions, behavior, and orientations per se are normal and positive variants of human sexuality—in other words, they do not indicate either mental or developmental disorders.” (2).

Here the Task Force members are “a priori” acknowledging that they would not consider any non-normative causes of homosexuality, nor any reasonable motivation for a person to change. But this view is not a “scientific fact” — it has not been scientifically demonstrated; and, furthermore, it is as much a question of philosophy as of science.

The Task Force’s assumption that a homosexual orientation is a good and desirable orientation (and by logical extension, that any attempt at change is bad for the individual), was not unique to the Task Force members, but reflects the official policy of the APA. The Report was from the start, not intended to open an investigation into the matter, but to reaffirm APA policy.

In addition, before approval, every applicant for admission to the Task Force had to be first “recommended” by the APA Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Concerns (3).

Who, then, were the seven APA Task Force members?

Chair: Judith M. Glassgold, Psy. D. is a lesbian psychologist. She sits on the board of the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy and is past president of APA’s Gay and Lesbian Division 44.

Jack Drescher, M.D. is a well-known gay-activist psychiatrist, and serves on the Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy and is one of the most vocal opponents of Reparative Therapy®.

A. Lee Beckstead, Ph. D. is a gay counseling psychologist who counsels LBGT-oriented clients from traditional religious backgrounds. He is a staff associate at the University of Utah’s Counseling Center. Before joining the Task Force he expressed strong skepticism that reorientation therapy could be helpful. As a Mormon he urged the Mormon Church to revise its non-gay-affirming policy on homosexuality and instead, to affirm church members in a gay identity.

Beverly Greene, Ph.D., ABPP, is a lesbian psychologist and was the founding co-editor of the APA Division 44 (Gay and Lesbian division) and serves on the Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Issues.

Robin Lin Miller, Ph.D. is a bisexual community psychologist and associate professor at Michigan State University. From 1990-1995, she worked for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City and has written for gay publications.

Roger L. Worthington, Ph.D. is not homosexual, but in 2001 was awarded the “2001 Catalyst Award,” from the LGBT Resource Center, University of Missouri, Columbia, for “speaking up and out and often regarding LGBT issues.” He co-authored “Becoming an LGBT-Affirmative Career Advisor: Guidelines for Faculty, Staff, and Administrators” for the National Consortium of Directors of Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Resources in Higher Education.

Clinton Anderson, Ph.D. is a gay psychologist, officer of the APA’s Office for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Concerns and served as Task Force Committee Liaison.

Remarkably, the APA rejected, for membership on this committee, every practitioner of sexual-reorientation therapy who applied for inclusion.

The rejected applicants included–

• NARTH Past-President A. Dean Byrd, Ph.D., M.P.H., M.B.A., (now deceased), a distinguished professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine, longtime practitioner of reorientation therapy, and co-author of several peer-reviewed journals and articles studying change of sexual orientation. Dr. Byrd is considered one of the foremost experts on same-sex attraction and reorientation therapy. He has published numerous articles on sexual reorientation, as well as gender and parenting issues.

• George Rekers, Ph.D., Professor of Neuropsychiatry and Behavioral Science at the University of South Carolina, editor of the Handbook of Child and Adolescent Sexual Problems, a National Institute of Mental Health grant recipient, author of the book Growing Up Straight, as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles on gender-identity issues;

• Stanton Jones, Ph.D., Provost and Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of Psychology at Wheaton College, Illinois, the co-author of Homosexuality: The Use Of Scientific Research In The Church’s Moral Debate, and a second book, titled, Ex-Gays? A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation.

• Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D. (author of this article), a founding officer of NARTH, practitioner of Reparative Therapy® for over 30 years, and author of Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality and the 2009 book, Shame and Attachment Loss.

• Mark A. Yarhouse, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology, Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Dr. Yarhouse is co-author of Homosexuality: The Use Of Scientific Research In The Church’s Moral Debate and Ex-Gays? and A Longitudinal Study of Religiously Mediated Change in Sexual Orientation and has published many peer-reviewed articles on homosexuality.

When Clinton Anderson, Chairperson of the Task Force, was confronted at an APA Town Hall Meeting as to why the above names were rejected, Dr. Anderson evaded the question with a bit of sleight of hand: “They were not rejected, they just were not accepted.”

If the APA truly wished to study sexual orientation–a values-laden issue with a strong (but unacknowledged) worldview component, they would have followed established scientific practice by choosing a balanced committee that included individuals with differing worldviews. They would have included clinicians who respect their traditionalist clients’ views on sexual expression. Instead, they chose only psychologists who are these clients’ philosophical opponents.

The scientific bias of the Task Force is further evidenced by four facts:

• The Task Force failed to reveal the well-documented, far-higher level of pathology associated with a homosexual lifestyle. If they had truly been interested in science, they would have believed it their duty to warn the public about the psychological and medical health risks associated with homosexual and bisexual behavior. Their failure to advise the public about the risks not only betrays their lack of commitment to science, but prevents sexually confused young people from accurately assessing the choices available to them.

• Why do some people become homosexual? The reader of the Report might justifiably expect some discussion of the varying factors associated with the development of same-sex attractions. This whole field of study was ignored.

• The Task Force did not study individuals who reported treatment success. Even if (for the sake of argument) therapeutic change had been reported to be successful in only ONE case, then the committee should have asked, “What therapeutic methods brought about this change?” But since the Task Force considered change undesirable, they showed no interest in pursuing this avenue of investigation.

• The Task Force’s standard for successful treatment for unwanted homosexuality was far higher than that for any other psychological condition. What if they had studied treatment success for narcissism, borderline personality disorder, or alcohol/food/drug abuse? All of these conditions, like unwanted homosexuality, cannot be expected to resolve totally, and usually necessitate some degree of lifelong struggle. Many of these conditions are, in fact, quite notoriously resistant to treatment. Yet there is no debate about the usefulness of treatment for these conditions: and psychologists continue to treat them, despite their uncertain outcomes.

A Gay Critique of Traditional Religion

The Task Force Report speculated about two types of response to homosexuality– first, as seen in the person who claims his homosexuality as a source of his deepest self-identity: and second, in the person who believes he was not designed for homosexuality and chooses to reject it as a source of identity.  They are defined by:

Organismic Congruence (claiming a gay identity), defined as “affirmative … models of LGB psychology” and “living with a sense of wholeness in one’s experiential self” (p. 18).

Telic Congruence. This applies to people of faith who do not wish to identify with their homosexuality; they instead choose to live consistently within their values.  Therefore, to live out one’s traditionalist religious values, according to the Task Force,  is to make oneself incomplete and inconsistent within one’s experiential self.

In creating this distinction between organismic congruence and telic congruence, the members of the Task Force offer us a misleading dichotomy. Seen through the perspective of their own gay identities, the Task Force therefore claims that persons striving to live a life consistent with their religious values are denying their true, embodied selves.  Religious believers who choose not to gay-identify therefore must constrict their true selves through unnatural behavioral control and cannot experience organismic wholeness, self-awareness and a mature development of their identity. These attributes are only possible for individuals who, like the Task Force members, identify with their same-sex attractions.

The Task Force members evidently cannot understand that the person of traditional faith finds his biblically based values to be guides and sources of inspiration that lead him on an authentic journey.  The person of traditional faith holds the conviction that his religions teachings direct him toward a rightly-gendered wholeness which allows him to live his life in a manner congruent with his creator’s embodied design.

This wholeness is satisfying, experiential, and deeply integrated into the person’s being. It is achieved not by suppression, repression or denial–but by understanding homosexuality within the greater context of a mature wisdom that is integrated into a scientifically accurate psychology.

References

(1) NARTH Committee Response to APA report, September 11, 2009, narth.com.

(2) The Task Force Report of the American Psychological Association, 2009, “Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation,” page 2.

(3) APA Press Release, Public Affairs, May/21/2007.