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Then & Now: How My Sexual Attractions Have Changed - 50 Brief Summaries of Successful Sexual Orientation Change Efforts
of: Rich Wyler
BookBaby, 2015
ISBN: 9781483553849 , 120 Pages
Format: ePUB
Copy protection: DRM
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Then & Now: How My Sexual Attractions Have Changed - 50 Brief Summaries of Successful Sexual Orientation Change Efforts
Introduction:
Why This Book?
Over the past decade or two, it has become “common knowledge” that homosexuality is inborn, innate, and unchangeable—that, in fact, any attempt to change one’s sexual orientation will inevitably cause great psychological harm and perhaps even lead to suicide.
Everybody knows that, right?
Wrong.
In fact, this “common knowledge” isn’t science; it’s ideology. These aren’t facts; they are talking points. But through relentless repetition, these ideas have entered the mainstream consciousness until it appears to be one of those things that simply “everyone knows” to be true. (There is a saying widely known among those who are professionally engaged in attempting to sway public opinion: “People will believe a big lie sooner than a little one, and if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it.”2)
Our own experience is quite different. We know change in sexual attractions is possible—at least to some degree, and at least for some people—because we’ve experienced it ourselves. No appeal to position papers, talking points, “expert” opinion or even research studies can disprove our own lived experience. We know it because we’ve lived it.
By telling you we’ve experienced change—and that we are better and happier for it—we are not saying that everyone can change, or anyone can change, or everyone should change (or try to). We are not saying that being gay is bad or wrong for everyone or a mental disorder or mental defect or even sinful. We are not saying that gays can’t find love, that they are unhappy or inevitably will be unhappy, or that they should have any fewer civil rights protections or be treated differently by the law than anyone else.
No, all we are saying is that homosexuality was wrong for us, so we pursued a path of sexual-orientation change. This path worked for us, and brought us greater peace, brotherhood, and self-esteem than we had ever known before. So we can only assume that similar efforts may work for some others as well, if they are dissatisfied with or conflicted about their same-sex attractions and want to explore the possibility of change.
That’s why we’ve compiled this book: to share our own experience with others who might benefit—others who are now where we ourselves were not that long ago.
This is the first edition of a growing collection of first-hand accounts of men who successfully engaged in sexual-orientation change efforts, collected and compiled (and lightly edited for space, clarity, punctuation and grammar) by People Can Change.
About the Questionnaire
How did People Can Change gather these stories into this publication?
In late 2013, we sent out a questionnaire to our online data base of past and potential participants in our programs. The email requested “personal accounts demonstrating that, yes, some people really have reduced or eliminated their same-sex attractions through deliberate interventions like counseling, experiential weekend programs, non-sexual same-gender bonding, etc.”
A total of 178 people responded to all or portions of the questionnaire. Almost all of them were men, since this is the significant majority of the population that People Can Change serves (along with wives of men who deal with unwanted same-sex attractions or sex addictions). From these 178 responses, People Can Change has culled a diverse sampling of 50 (well, 54, actually) personal accounts of sexual-orientation change efforts, which we share with you here. Future editions of this book will include even more.
Among all those who responded to the PCC questions:
• 83% reported a complete, major or moderate reduction in their same-sex attractions.
• 59% reported a complete, major or moderate transition to opposite-sex attractions.
Others reported a less dramatic shift (or none at all) in their sexual attractions, but still noted how much they had benefited from their sexual-orientation change efforts (abbreviated “SOCE”).
Anecdotal and Qualitative
Neither the original 178 questionnaire responses nor these 50-plus first-hand accounts constitute an unbiased or representative sampling of all those who have ever engaged in sexual-orientation change efforts. This is not quantitative research. There are no statistical projections that can be drawn from this sampling of first-hand accounts.
In developing this book, we were specifically looking for success stories. We sent the questionnaire to our own data base of participants and prospective participants—so we were far more likely to find success stories than to find people dissatisfied with their change efforts.
The value of these accounts is in what we can learn from the responses about what worked, which resources were most helpful—and most especially, the reality of change (however individuals may define “change” for themselves). The questionnaire and this book cannot tell you how often change occurs, or how likely change is to occur. But they do demonstrate that, yes, change does in fact occur. It’s real. It can even be life-saving.
These accounts also demonstrate what “change” means for different people. They show that someone doesn’t have to experience a 180-degree shift in sexual attractions to experience a profound increase in peace, love and growth. The goal of most sexual-orientation change efforts is not really heterosexuality, after all. It is peace.
“SSA” and “OSA”
Gay communities have embraced the term “gay” since at least the 1960s over the more clinically sounding or sexually charged word “homosexual,” and the world has largely respected their preference and followed suit. However, men and women who feel sexually attracted to others of the same sex but who resist or even seek to change those attractions typically don’t embrace the identity of “gay.” To us, the word is too politically loaded, too indicative of a “gay pride” that we don’t feel and refuse to embrace, and too aligned with gay liberal ideologies with which we often disagree.
Since at least the 1980s, psychologists have referred to this state of mind as “ego-dystonic homosexuality,” referring to those who experience cognitive and emotional dissonance over their homosexual attractions. Talk about sounding clinical! Then, in the 1991 book, Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexuality, author and psychologist Joseph Nicolosi introduced the term “non-gay homosexual.” It never caught on.
Among ourselves, the preferred term is usually “same-sex attracted,” or SSA. It suggests a present condition or state, not a permanent identity. It implies a feeling, not a sense of self. SSA is “what I feel, not who I am.” It doesn’t align us with what we find so off-putting about gay lifestyles and gay politics. Nor does it have the overly clinical or sexualized ring that the term “homosexual” has.
In fact, the phrase “same-sex attracted” and its acronym SSA have been widely embraced throughout the world by men and women who decline to let their sexual attractions define them or to identify with the politics and ideologies of gay cultures.
Also, as a simple matter of shorthand (and equivalency?), SSA men and women may in turn sometimes refer to heterosexuality as “opposite-sex attraction,” or OSA. This term hasn’t caught on nearly as widely, however.
And what about the term “ex-gay”? It’s convenient shorthand, perhaps, but that may be about the extent of its virtue. Most SSA men and women don’t use it, or don’t identify with it, although they usually aren’t offended by it either. Most SSA men and women had simply never embraced a gay identity to begin with, so how can they embrace an “ex-gay” identity now?
In truth, most of us don’t care much for labeling our sexuality. It’s often too complex, too nuanced for a convenient label, and we would simply rather not reduce ourselves to an abbreviation or to a politicized term. But the demands of human communication today often require the use of sound-bite terms that convey shared meaning succinctly. So in our communities, we typically choose to call ourselves “SSA” or someone “dealing with unwanted SSA” or similar phrasing, rather than “gay.” Or, if it fits better, we may refer to ourselves as “formerly SSA” or someone “from an SSA background.”
That’s our prerogative. We get to decide. Gay...
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