Can you tell us what comprises this therapy (what happens?), and what damage it caused you?
Reparative therapy first provides you an explanation of why and how you developed “same sex attractions,” which results from a distant, absent or abusive father and an overbearing mother. Because of these improper relationships with your parents, you fail to properly bond with your father, which causes you to be unable to form healthy and appropriate bonds with other men, and your ssa results out of a longing for this healthy type of same sex bonding that was denied to you and manifests itself in these inappropriate desires, or so the theory goes. It also suggests that gay men are far more likely to have been the victims of sexual abuse. Reparative therapy attempts to heal these bonds by creating “healthy” bonding relationships with other men and correcting your inappropriate relationship with women that represent your mother’s overbearing influence. As you correct these relationships and form these more “natural” bonds, your ssa is supposed to dissipate and you naturally start to develop attraction toward women. In a nutshell, that’s what it’s all about.
Reparative therapy hurt not only me, but my family as well. They will say it’s about providing an explanation rather than assigning blame, but it assigns blame and created tremendous guilt for both of my parents. It encouraged me to rethink the appropriateness of interactions with adult men as a child, and caused me to eventually develop what I now believe to be false memories of abuse.
In order to develop healthy relationships with other men, they told me I needed to embrace a more traditionally masculine role by learning to mimic other heterosexual men. I needed to play and develop an interest in sports and give up my interest in art and anything else not considered to be traditionally masculine. I not only needed to change my interests, but to act against every instinct I had in my interactions with other people. What question or comment I might make to someone, needed to be replaced with a more gender appropriate comment or question. What felt natural to me needed to be changed to what ought to feel natural to me. I had to give up my friendships with women whom I was much more easily able to form friendships, friendships that were very comforting to me.
And I did all of this. I changed my voice, my walk, my mannerisms, my interests, my interactions with other people. I developed “healthy” relationships with men. I cut off my friendships with women. I spoke in front of audiences about the changes God was making in my life. I even started dating women. I thought of myself as a success, but what I wasn’t able to acknowledge is that nothing had really changed as far as my sexual attractions. But that was something I wouldn’t even consider at the time. To even entertain that thought was unthinkable. Any doubt I acknowledge was just inviting the devil into my life to sabotage my efforts to turn away from ssa and embrace a holy life that was pleasing to God. It wasn’t just that I felt pressured to report success because everyone else did too, it was that believing you had changed and that God could heal you was the key to achieving that change.
I felt like an actor who was coached and trained to play a role, a role that I would just keep playing forever. And the ex-gay community rewarded me for that. I could fake it really well, but there was nothing about me that felt authentic. There was nothing left of the person who began reparative therapy 5 years previously. The one therapist I tried to talk to about it told me that over time it would feel more natural and it would become for me, as I would see, the man I was truly meant to be. I wasn’t successful in romantic relationships with women, but they still considered me a success and may still because I’ve never had a relationships with a man either. But how could I have a relationship with anyone? I was left a hollow shell of a person who didn’t feel authentic in this new life, and yet who couldn’t remember or embrace anything about who I was in the past. Even my relationship with God didn’t feel authentic anymore.
The only thing I really felt was shame. Reparative therapy had worked for other people, what was wrong with me? Was I just evil? Did God hate me? All of my friendships that used to make me feel grounded I had ended. There was turmoil in my family because once you suggest that a relative might have abused you, you can never take that back. My parents were so invested in my success to alleviate the guilt that had been instilled in them for what they had been told was their role in making me gay. Being a failure would have destroyed them so I couldn’t talk to them. The ex-gay community doesn’t want to hear that you didn’t succeed and they tend to cut ties with those who express doubt, because inviting doubt into your life is allowing the devil to sneak in and sabotage you.
So for years I just kept it to myself, pretended that I had no doubts, tried to convince myself that I had been healed like everyone else, and at the same time feeling such shame because even among all of these other men like me I knew, there was something horribly wrong and evil about me that made me fail where they succeeded (which of course I learned later was exactly what they were thinking)
I ended up attempting suicide and came very close to dying. I ran into one of my therapists after this incident and he was disappointed in my suicide attempt but elated by the fact it wasn’t as a result of having given in to my “homosexual inclinations,” because that is all they truly care about. My life was in shambles, but to him I was still a success because the only way I count, the only value I have in the ex-gay community is that I’m not in a gay relationship. That’s in the end all they truly care about.
Give me a break.