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A Cure For What Fails Ya: The Legacy of Sexual Orientation Change Therapies

A Cure For What Fails Ya: The Legacy of Sexual Orientation Change Therapies

Last updated on: April 5, 2017 at 7:20 pm by Melinda Selmys

A Cure For What Fails Ya: The Legacy of Sexual Orientation Change Therapies 2017-04-05T19:20:07-04:00 Melinda Selmys

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The Shifting Goal-Post

In his recent article at Crisis, Deacon Jim makes several very good points: chastity, not orientation change, should be the goal of any traditional Catholic ministry or therapy for people with same-sex attractions. Moreover, he is right to point out that treating heterosexual marriage as a goal for therapy is severely problematic: marriage is a vocation, not an achievement award.

If it were true that reparative therapy in either its Catholic or its Protestant form had sold itself primarily as a way to explore childhood wounds that some (but not all) gay men might have, and to help a person achieve the interior mastery required to successfully pursue chastity, there would be little problem with it – and probably a lot less controversy. The issue is that supporters of these therapies tend shift the goalpost when challenged.

The surface claim is always that sexual orientation change is possible, and that ex-gays are common. If you push back against that, pointing out that the evidence is flimsy to non-existent, then the claim changes. Suddenly, the purpose of the therapy is to address childhood wounds, and orientation change is only a secondary goal – if it’s a goal at all. In its most disingenuous form, this line of argumentation leads to the absurd claim that restricting access to reparative therapy for minors deprives adolescents of the ability to receive treatment for childhood trauma, especially sexual abuse – as if reparative therapy were the only (or the best) available treatment for abuse victims.

Nobody objects to the psychotherapeutic treatment of broken families, sex abuse survivors, or kids who have been bullied or rejected by their peers. In so far as reparative therapy is just a treatment for these problems, it is not controversial. The reason that it is, in fact, controversial is that it makes claims which are not borne out by evidence:

1. The claim that homosexuality is caused by childhood wounds, usually as a consequence of insecure masculinity or femininity caused by a poor relationship with the same-sex parent.

2. The claim that addressing these wounds will bring about a change in a person’s sexual orientation.

These issues are doubly problematic because much of the work done by reparative therapists involves treating youth who are placed in therapy by their parents. Nicolosi specifically enthused, on several occasions, about how great it was that he was so often able to work with adolescents – the clear implication being that with young people, you could nip it in the bud. (I should note, here, that there are therapists in this industry who will only work with adult clients: in my interview with Pruden, he described situations where a parent brings their child in to be cured as “a trainwreck.”)

The real-life effect of these claims is to create a demand for therapy by telling parents that they are probably to blame for their child’s homosexuality, but don’t worry, it’s not too late: it can be fixed. Shell out for expensive treatment that isn’t covered by most insurance plans and we’ll sort out your mistakes and set your kid straight again. The less scrupulous propagandists for the cause will add to a parent’s fears by reeling off lengthy, exaggerated portraits of the hideous, AIDS-ridden, suicidal fate that awaits their child if they aren’t successfully treated.

Over the years I’ve had a lot of parents write to me panicking because their child just came out of the closet, and it’s a pattern that I’ve seen way too many times. The guilt that these parents feel is abominable: I’ve had mothers who were obviously good and loving women tormented by the thought that they had inflicted a life of suffering on their kids. In some cases, these women wondered whether they were ever fit to be parents in the first place.

Today, most reparative therapists are careful to emphasize that the rift between a child and their parent may not be the parent’s fault – but that doesn’t provide much comfort to most of these people. Partly because the original “distant father, smothering mother” narrative continues to be cited, without nuance, in many of the more easily accessible popularizations of reparative therapy. Partly because if you tell a panicking parent “don’t worry, it might not be your fault,” their brain is likely to add “but probably it is.”

The thing is, there is no good evidence to support the fundamental assumption that homosexuality is caused by an eroticization of some kind of masculine or feminine deficiency. In his most recent writings, even Nicolosi notes a different pattern that sometimes arises in adolescent homosexual boys, “In this type of homosexual attraction, there are no hostile-dependent features, but rather, a romantic adolescent quality—an infatuation that has a sexual manifestation.”

There’s actually a pretty obvious reason why older gay men might have more hostile relationship patterns, and more distant relationships with their fathers than younger gay men: changing social mores. What if homosexuality is not caused by distant fathers or poor peer relationships, but rather childhood rejection (by both fathers and peers) are caused by negative perceptions of homosexuality? Well, then we would expect to find less anger, and better father-son dynamics, in gay men growing up in today’s more affirming culture than we would have found among older cohorts.

More to the point, even if homosexual behaviour is partly an adaptive response to childhood wounds, treating those wounds doesn’t seem to alter a person’s sexual orientation. I know a number of people who went through these therapies, and some of them are grateful because the therapy did help them to work through real problems in their lives. But none of them became straight as a result. Nor did they became any more “masculine,” and the therapy doesn’t seem to have had much effect on their ability to remain chaste. They just became gay men with fewer unresolved childhood issues.

Now, I don’t reject the possibility that psychological approaches could be effectively used to aid people in their growth towards chastity. Emotional problems, loneliness, affective immaturity, anxieties, etc. can all diminish a person’s interior freedom, and I do think that therapy can help with these issues – but this is not more true for gay men than it is for straight people who struggle to achieve control over their sexuality. Cognitive behavioural approaches in particularly, seem like they could be helpful, especially since they focus on cultivating greater self-mastery (which is kind of the entire point of chastity in the first place) rather than searching for dubious causal narratives.

Reparative therapy, however, is in my opinion a dead end. It’s the last gasp of a faulty psychological approach to understanding and treating homosexuality. Whatever good may have incidentally been done by its practitioners, it is time to gently put this theory to rest and move on in search of more fruitful approaches.

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