There are two really interesting articles in this past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine dealing with the intersection of religion and sexuality, and both merit a careful look. In another piece, I’ll examine the one about gay activist turned “ex-gay” activist Michael Glatze, but that’s going to take some time, so I’m tackling this one first. It’s about the idea of therapists — not complete wingnuts, mind you – helping clients either stay in the closet or live lives which are completely counter to who they really are, based on the clients’ religious desires to remain “pure.” Or something. Let me say on the front end that this article makes me want to throw things, because it elucidates so clearly the harmful effects that fundamentalist religious indoctrination has on people. Having experienced such indoctrination myself, it makes me furious, but simultaneously grateful that I was able to, over a period of years, to abandon that indoctrination entirely.*
The article presents us with a conundrum: what to do when a client comes in and can’t balance their religious indoctrination/beliefs with their sexuality? Which wins out? How do good, well-meaning therapists treat these clients for whom tweaking the specific doctrines of their religious beliefs isn’t an option? As it turns out, some mental health specialists have some ideas, but I don’t think they’ve found the answers yet:
“I’m a very strong believer in people’s rights,” [therapist Denis Flanigan] said one gray morning at a Starbucks in Houston. But during his early training, he encountered a few clients who either would not come out of the closet or suffered mightily when they did. Christians of the kind who earnestly believed that the Bible deplored homosexuality were particularly troubled as they tried to reconcile their faith with their sexual orientation. The more Flanigan studied this conundrum, the more he came to see it as intractable. Some gay evangelicals truly believe that to follow their sexual orientation means abandonment by a church that provides them with emotional and social sustenance — not to mention eternal damnation. Keeping their sexual orientation a secret, however, means giving up any opportunity to have fulfilling relationships as gay men and women.
“When these clash, what do you do?” Flanigan recalled thinking, and when he began to research the topic about a decade ago, he found few answers beyond the obvious. Antigay religious groups would not condone homosexuality; they thought gays should just give up their orientation, and the most extreme among them offered frightening “conversion” practices. Nonreligious gays thought the conflicted should just walk away from churches that won’t accept homosexuals as they are. “Which trumps which?” Flanigan asked himself. “Religion or sexual orientation?”
So basically, the approach they’ve taken is to focus on the client’s needs and desires first and foremost. Is the religious angle so important to them that they want to find a way to be authentic within that framework? Are they looking to keep a job in that religious framework while remaining husbands and fathers in public?
“Psychological ethics say that we’re supposed to support religious beliefs and support sexual orientation,” Flanigan told me. “But there was nothing I knew of that says what to do when they conflict.” As far as he could tell, the only choice those people had was to give up one or the other.
Here is the tragedy in all of this. They’re working with these clients, trying to meet them where they are, but they’re addressing none of the root causes of people’s anguish, which is caused by religious indoctrination. It’s sad that there are so many people brought up in those sorts of environments, where the idea of “Christian love” has a lot more to do with judgment and guilt than it does with any human definition of “love.” It should be taken as a given that this article is dealing with grown-up, reality-based mental health professionals, so the crock of shit known as “ex-gay” or reparative therapy is not even on the table. No, that has been successfully laughed out of intelligent, educated company in this country, and for good reason.
So these mental health professionals are essentially helping people stay in the closet. That might be a band-aid, but it’s not a solution. The difference here is that we’re dealing with therapists who actually do mean well and have their clients’ best interests at heart, unlike the Joseph Nicolosis of the world, who go about their work with the empathy of common sociopaths. Another therapist, Douglas Haldeman, discusses the approach he came up with to deal with these sorts of cases:
Haldeman found in his research that the vast majority of people seeking to change their orientation held strong religious beliefs; often, these were married men with families who grew up in a church and who felt that they had far too much to lose by coming out.
[...]
In other words, Haldeman was certain that conversion therapy didn’t work, but he wasn’t sure that gay-affirmative therapy — helping gay clients to see that their discomfort with their orientation might come from internalizing a prejudice — would help them find peace of mind, either. In these circumstances, Haldeman tried a different approach.
[...]
The approach Haldeman used was, in the therapeutic parlance, client-centered; that is, the client’s desires took precedence over any values or opinions held by the therapist. So if John wanted to be a gay man who lived as a straight man, Haldeman would help him become that person.
I said before that this article makes me want to throw things. It still does. I was raised in a marginally conservative home, but ended up being exposed to seriously hateful religious indoctrination in high school in two churches I was involved with. Perhaps it was because I’ve always been strong-willed that I was able to at least put the self-hatred I had learned, along with the religious spew, in order to at least start on the journey out of the closet. It makes me seethe knowing that there are others who truly believe what they have been taught, that who they really are is unworthy of God.
Again, these therapists are certainly well-meaning, as they try to find answers for how to treat those who have been spiritually bullied and abused into believing that self-hating religious beliefs are truly what is best for them, or worse, that those beliefs are actually true in any sense. But the mental health community doesn’t have the real answers yet, possibly because we still haven’t wrapped our heads around the notion, in this nation at least, that spiritual abuse is itself a sickness inflicted on unwitting individuals. And as you read this piece, you’ll see that this sort of “client-centered” therapy leads to some serious double-lives, some grade-A hypocrisy, in the pursuit of giving these poor souls a little inner peace.
Warren Throckmorton is discussed in the piece as well. Most of you are familiar with him, but if not, in a nutshell: Warren is a Christian psychologist who used to preach the “ex-gay” nonsense, but became disillusioned when he realized that the luminaries of the fundamentalist/”ex-gay” industries are common liars, and started to question everything he thought he knew about human sexuality and its intersection with religious faith. In the section about Throckmorton and Mark Yarhouse, our own Wayne Besen is quoted:
Yarhouse and Throckmorton came up with what they called sexual-identity therapy (SIT). At first, Yarhouse told me, many left-leaning therapists saw SIT as a trick — conversion therapy by another name, and many remain skeptical: Wayne Besen, the founder of Truth Wins Out, an organization devoted to debunking the ex-gay ministry, told me that though he respects Throckmorton, he still believes that SIT is just another way of encouraging repression. “I think Throckmorton means well and really wants to help people reconcile their faith and sexuality,” Besen said. “However, the more appropriate way is for people to find a more moderate religion that doesn’t force them to live at cross purposes with their sexual health.”
Therein lies the rub. Some people of faith are raised to view it as a source of comfort, support, love and fellowship. The fundamentalist world is lacking in those departments, though, if you don’t easily conform to their definition of “normal.” The sad thing, though, is that while Wayne is completely right about the best way to handle these things — find a more moderate religion, do some research and go through the long, arduous process of abandoning religion altogether, etc. — some people are just far too tortured by their religious faith to do so. Abusers like to break their victims down until they feel that they are powerless and weak without the abuser around. You see this with abusive husbands, child rapists and anyone else who gets off on controlling people. These are also the hallmarks of fundamentalist religious indoctrination. Find comfort from the pain at the source of the pain, etc.
I wish I had the answers. Instead I just encourage the mental health community to keep working on their side of it, keep trying new things that, above all, respect people’s integrity and their true selves. The good news is that more and more people are abandoning religious fundamentalism every day, so future generations of Americans, perhaps, won’t need such therapy as much. Moreover, more and more people are getting the counter message of love and acceptance and equality — the It Gets Better project comes to mind — far earlier, even while they’re still being drowned in the baptismal font. The bad news is that as they lose power, religious abusers are digging in their heels and will certainly be around to hurt a few more generations of their own gay offspring.
I quoted liberally from the article, because it’s long and hits a lot of topics, but you all should take the time to read it if you haven’t already. We all have a lot of work left to do.
*I also abandoned religious faith in general, but that’s not the point, as there are several valid ways to unshackle oneself from religious indoctrination. My atheism has very little, if anything, to do with my sexuality, as I didn’t actually become an atheist until age 28, nine years after I came out of the closet.
Therapy
Part of a therapist being client centred is unconditional positive regard and one can see the ethical dilemma in this kind of scenario very clearly – how can a therapist, knowing that an evangelical client will strongly reject ‘gay affirmation’, deal with the distress that client otherwise presents?
It feels that to be ethical, they must try to balance regard for the client’s religious beliefs with the knowledge that their distress is caused by those beliefs themselves.
Taking cues from Haldeman, the APA 2009 statement on reparative tried to synthesise a new position on this. I think they made a mistake and Nicolosi etc tried to exploit that of course.
Unconditional positive regard does not mean just holding someone’s hand and yes, ‘I understand, it’s so difficult for you, you want to get married, to have a family. Well you’re a good person’
It means walking with the client in their distress but also, appropriately and with great sensitivity, challenging their erroneous world view that is the cause of their distress.
At root, counselling and psychotherapies must be rooted in a rational framework that provides a minimum of facts that are a priori, ‘reality’. A therapist could never collude in a client’s belief that witches must be burned and that the client’s mother is a witch. That belief would be challenged even only to the extent of asking for clarification of witch-hood. An anorexic is supported in the huge challenge and distress they face regarding eating but a therapist would never collude indefinitely in ensuring they stayed on a diet except as a stepping stone to some further stage of challenge of the anorexic’s world view that they are fat.
I don’t see how some arbitrary belief, no matter how strongly held, can ultimately trump rational truth. The rational truth is that being gay is natural, you can’t change your attractions, happiness comes from living in congruence with your attractions and not from delusions about living a lie in heterosexual marriage.
In the end, a client can ask anyone for help whom they choose but they also have to want to get better for counselling or therapy to have any meaning other than simply asking to make someone feel better about the lies they are about to perpetrate on another human being. That is not an ethical form of therapy IMO.
This is a more complex issue in practice than it is in theory. The therapist has to start with the client where s/he is, which may be in a place that is not positive for the client’s health. But if the therapist works too quickly, the client may be threatened and may quit therapy. or if the therapist is too directive when the client is not ready for it, and the client begins to challenge the oppressive religious system before he/she is strong enough, the client is the one who suffers. The client needs to make his/her own decision about how to live her/his own life. The therapist may try to walk with the client and support the client in the road to health, giving the client the knowledge and tools the client needs, but the client makes the decisions. And ultimately the client’s internal truth of the goodness of her/his sexuality has to surface from within the client, not from an outside person.
It is like the therapist who works with a client physically and emotionally abused by a spouse. Sometimes it takes a number of tries for the client to break out of the relationship. And even when the client moves on, the internal forces that bound the client to the abusive spouse still have power. It takes years to be healed and be able to enter a positive relationship. And sometimes the abused spouse never does really move on.
When I look at the things that Tim Dolan and other religious leaders say about LGBT people and about same sex relationships, I cannot help but see the same destructive system that allowed so many children and youths to be abused sexually and that continues to cover up the abuse. Sexual abuse, whether physical or emotional, is all part of the same piece of cloth. And the emotional abuse of GLBT people by religious institutions that preach that same sex love is not love, that LGBT people are disordered and not worthy of civil rights including the right to marry, is sexual abuse, plain and simple. It may not be physical, but it is an abuse of the sexual nature of LGBT people and it is more insidious because it is respected as being a religious belief.
It would be instructive to somehow be able to tally the number of people who have been damaged as a result of turning away from their sexuality, versus the number damaged by turning away from their religion instead. In percentage terms, my guess would be a lopsided tally close to 100% vs. 0%. Shouldn’t that data help persuade therapists to nudge their patients away from their religion?
Religion, in our society, is still the great untouchable.
Maybe I’m wrong, but wouldn’t a therapist typically try to persuade an abused spouse to break free from the abuser? And if so, is sexuality vs. abusive religion really much different? And if it is different, isn’t it because religion, in our society, is still the great untouchable?
Wayne suggests the solution which is completely obvious to me. As a Christian gay man, I have no conflict between my sexual orientation and my faith. And in fact, there is no conflict. The solution is for gay people of faith to attend gay-positive churches. The problem is that these churches are too quiet and/or afraid to make themselves noticed.
If one goes to gaychurch.org, the directory lists more than 6,000 open and affirming churches in the US alone. Where are they in this debate? I had a personal experience with one during the Prop. 8 debacle. The church is led by a pro-gay clergyperson and it is considered “open and affirming.” When asked to stand up against Prop. 8, the church decided its response would be based on unanimous support by its members, not all of whom were pro-gay. You can guess what the response was–nothing. Such lukewarm faith is ever rejected by Jesus!
Pro-gay religious groups, individuals and churches are not doing their job. They need to get off their butts, stand up and show these conflicted people evidence that YES, you can be a person of faith and gay at the same time. Until they see the reality of strong, happy, religious gay people helping society in a loving way, they will remain in their personal hells.
But therein lies the problem Richard, not that religion is the great untouchable but that its satisfying a part of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but on the other hand another part is not being satisfied. So to satisfy one another must be given up. Now if the option was available I would, if I was a therapist, try to point them to other more liberal religious institutions but that may or may not work. The human psyche is a lesson in what can go wrong.
A couple of thoughts from the rabid ex-born-again…
My religious upbringing and spiritual context was such that it recognized no others as being true. I was trained to hear gay-friendly, affirming voices as deluded religions, cults, from the devil – so I appreciate the acknowlegment that finding a more moderate religion, while logical and rational, is not an easily accessible option for someone caught between faith and orientation. I think it also needs to be said that for many believers (as it was for me in my family) it can be just as risky to adopt the “wrong” version of Christianity as it is to come out, having many of the same consequences (abandonment by/estrangement from church, friends and family).
But here’s something that puzzles me, and I wonder why there isn’t more commentary on it – namely, the developmental aspects of faith. A book that was immensely helpful to me in my coming out process (and for me it was the dual transition of accepting my nature and walking away from my repressive belief system) was James Fowler’s Stages of Faith. Fowler is interested in how people view their faith (loosely defined as how they structure meaning for their lives)… and posits that such views evolve over a lifetime. His theory is based on models already established by landmark developmental psychologists, namely Piaget, Erikson and Kohlberg.
Further, he says that transition from one stage to the next is almost always an unsettling life experience, because the transitions only occur when one’s method of belief no longer accurately describes the way one experiences the world. Which is precisely what happened when I came out – the disconnect between what my church was telling me and my day to day reality was so great that eventually I had to make a choice: I consciously decided to believe the voice of my own experience over the voice(s) of believers who kept (mis)interpreting my experiences for me.
Fowler’s book came out in 1981, about the same year I did. Friends involved in religious studies had pointed him out to me. But I wonder, has there been any follow-up on his work? Shouldn’t therapists who take on clients conflicted by this kind of mental and spiritual abuse have some kind of working knowledge of how such transitions are mediated?
I also wonder, by extension from Richard’s comment, what the statistics are on people who leave religions and who do so because the religion was abusive? Ultimately, despite my extreme anger at Christianity for how it treated me, I don’t think it is religion itself that is destructive, so much as it is an inappropriate expectation that religious metaphors be construed as fact – that very expectation is one of the hallmarks of fundamentalism, which for an adult (if I can extrapolate from my understanding of Fowler) is an immature and adolescent form of spirituality.
I also remember saying, back in my 20s as I was going through that transition that I didn’t know who to ask for help, whether I should be talking to a psychologist, a physician or a pastor. This is an issue that blurs all kinds of lines, IMO.
Clients/patients also have the legal and ethical right to make an informed consent to participate in therapy. And this means giving them the facts about treatment, what it can and cannot do, what treatment is research based (and what treatment is not or is experimental, and the likely outcome. This means psychologist should, up front, tell patients that research states that living in the closet is psychologically harmful, that coming out imrpoves their psychological health, that change in sexual orientation is extremely unlikely (and is not supported by research), etc. This informed consent to treatment is mandated, not optional. Therapist/psychologist who do otherwise can lose their license. However, i suspect vulnerable patients who are struggling with their faith and sexuality rarely get this information. Ex-gay ministries that do not give this informed consent in writing should be sued for this as well.
Cotton, Exodus “ministries” now generally claim not to offer medical therapy, and thus evade requirements for informed consent and regulation. They instead claim to offer informal Christian counseling and prayer.
You are right that some of NARTH’s mental-health professionals may be at risk of losing their credentials, if they misinform clients or breach professional boundaries.
I am a student of Psycology and it is goverened by the state.I am a student of Psychology and it is governed by the state. The belief that you can be delivered from homosexuality is currently a religious belief that is currently spilling over into psychology! Nevertheless, there is a difference between church and state per law. This is why certain religious matters cannot be discussed during a session. It is NOT BECAUSE IT IS WRONG….but because of the principality in high places that govern it! However, no study on homosexuality is conclusive. For all research that advises that it is genetic, there is research that claims it is a choice.
Nevertheless, continuous testimonies seem to continue in arenas like YOUTUBE advising that you can be delivered from homosexuality. Even the bible speaks of the people that were once GAY and then DELIVERED from homosexuality. That is 1 Corinthians 6:9-11.
I don’t regularly attend church, nor am I interested in forming my social life and needs around one. However, like most people, I was brought to church since a baby and even children have ways of instinctively seeing contradictions in what is taught in church and their reality.
Certainly females can relate to this. I was raised Episcopalian, but no women were allowed to be ministers back then.
Indeed, women are excluded from leadership in just about every branch of the world’s most influential religions.
One could say there would be conflict regarding ANYTHING to do with gender and sexuality. Norms, individuals and their characters regarding gender are not respected in tradition based religious communities.
I had a problem with that from early on. And my father told me if I could stump Father Williams on the question of the influence of women in the church, I NEVER had to attend again.
Now that I think about it, it was around the time that women were being considered for positions of minister at the time.
How about this?
As far as anyone can tell, sexual orientation is based on gender attraction, or non attraction to sex at ALL, if not gender.
No one seems to suggest that asexual people force themselves to have sex in order to fulfill someone else’s sense of procreative destiny. We know of plenty of faith communities that disrespect especially a woman’s choice or decision about having children.
I see most of religious belief to be an extension of outmoded, unrealistic standards of gender. In which those who can’t or won’t conform, are punished for it.
Even though, especially, one’s religion is supposed to BE a choice where one’s orientation is not.
I agree that a faith community IS like being in an abusive relationship where the person in power constantly tells you you’re nothing without them, and no one else will like you either.
This is a powerful incentive for the closet, but no compassionate person of faith should be using blackmail against anyone.
Once that line of emotional blackmail is crossed, and it’s potent quality exploited by the church, I say abandoning a church that would do that is better.
Probably because essentially, one CAN choose one’s religion and there are no laws that require you to be of one.
But one’s orientation is off the table of having a choice in abandoning it. Especially since all around you, no one else is required to do so.THAT in itself would be an unfair position to be in. And yes, a religious community SHOULD concern itself with being fair, and also consistent in what it expects of all it’s members, not just the gay ones.
This is a really important article, and I’m going to share it widely. Not only is it important for any therapist working with lgbt clients who come from a fundamentalist background, much of the issues that it brings up could be applied to how therapists work with people who are struggling to accept kinky desires, whether that means being into bdsm or being nonmonogamous, or something else. We have to both affirm the client’s true and essential self, yet it is also unethical to collude with clients’ distorted beliefs that they can change their desire, when research shows again and again our desire is hardwired into us. But it’s a delicate balance.