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There Was A Void in Me

HOW ONE OVERCAME HOMOSEXUAL ATTRACTION

By Tracy Schmidt

Homosexuality is a difficult issue to grapple with. Even good Catholics turn the other way. Some say "it's a sin, end of discussion;" others say we should "embrace gay giftedness;" few are comfortable talking about it. Few understand it. Yet there is some practical, Catholic, down-to-earth fresh air on this topic that has already brought hope, peace and inner happiness to many struggling with unwanted homosexuality. Here's one of many such stories.

Raised a Catholic, Gary (whose name has been changed for this article) is now in his early 30s and a daily communicant. He's an active member of his parish within the diocese of Orange. But five years ago Gary was actively living the gay lifestyle, unhappy and not at all practicing his Catholic faith. According to Gary, "my story is pretty typical [of homosexuals] in that I didn't have a good relationship with my dad. He wasn't a big part of my life; I don't have a lot of memories as a kid of doing things with him. My mother was over-domineering. She was my protector and always encouraging me. I never was really active with my peers, never into sports, never with the guys. I was always with the girls."

Gary recalls that when he turned 13 he began having attractions towards older men, men about age 24, whom he admired and wanted to emulate. "Sometimes that would get twisted in my mind," he says. "I wanted to be like them, but I didn't know how to do it. I wanted to have their qualities inside me; to be like them. Instead of tapping into my own resources -- I didn't know how to do this -- there was a void in me."

It was in high school, in his sophomore year, that Gary first met someone who called himself "gay." This boy was a junior. "I'd been praying for three years for these feelings [of same-sex attraction] to go away," remembers Gary. "I knew inside these feelings weren't right. I knew these feelings were wrong, but after praying for so long and not seeing any changes, meeting this person opened up a whole new world for me. Finally, I felt that there was someone like me, someone who had my same difficulties and same struggles. I could invite him in and not feel like I'd be rejected."

Gary's new-found high school friend told him to accept himself as he was; that he was gay and he couldn't do anything about it. By the end of his high school years, Gary had met a handful of others with the same struggles.

In college, Gary frequented gay bars, engaging in the full gamut of the "gay lifestyle." But a few years into college he became involved with a Christian ex-gay ministry called Living Waters. There he learned that he didn't have to act on his attractions. "It changed my perspective," says Gary. "It curtailed my behavior, but not completely. So, I was living a double life -- on the surface a great Christian, but on the other side, not living it fully.

"Finally it got to the point where it was too much." That was five years ago, when Gary was having an affair with a married man. "I worked with him and knew his wife. It was so weird being with the two of them -- it struck me how sick the whole thing is. I didn't have a good image of myself. I did not have a high level of self-esteem and I didn't feel much like a man." That's when some of his close friends encouraged him to talk with Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, an Encino-based therapist who specializes in reparative therapy for homosexuals.

"I went to see Dr. Nicolosi out of respect for my friends," adds Gary candidly. "It wasn't a whole-hearted thing at the beginning. I was pretty ambivalent about it at the time. But when I started working at the therapy and doing what Joe [Dr. Nicolosi] wanted us to do, I started seeing changes in my life. I started seeing that the therapy really works: I started seeing myself being more assertive and the image I had of myself started to increase. The big clincher was that the more I made healthy male relationships, the less male attraction I had. The level of homosexuality went down."

Gary likened the therapy work to learning a new language -- the "language" of healthy male bonding. The work consists primarily of building three healthy, non-sexual male relationships where the client is confident that he could tell the other person anything and still be accepted by him. "My image of myself as a man is very high now. I feel like I'm a completely different person than when I first saw him [Dr. Nicolosi] two years ago. I can hang out with the guys and get what really satisfies, and not the ephemeral stuff." In addition, Gary's relationship with God has been a tremendous help in his recovery and growth. Every six months, he experienced a breakthrough, like a light turned on, and whatever he'd been struggling with became clear and was no longer a struggle.

"I feel freer," says Gary. "My spirit is much lighter. It's almost like being a kid again in a certain sense; having that freedom and not being so constricted." Gary adds that, after two years of therapy, he finds he is experiencing a significantly increased attraction to women and virtually no homosexual attractions.

Gary is convinced that homosexuality is a psychological issue. "Everybody [homosexual] has the same issues," says Gary. "It's like looking in a mirror -- the same insecurities, same fears, same issues in dealing with life. It's similar to drug or alcohol abuse, but meeting a different unfulfilled need in a wrong way. [The homosexual behavior] doesn't solve the problem.

"This whole issue [of homosexuality] is just a symptom of something deeper. A lot of people have a misconception. The surface stuff, the behavior, is what people see, but the behavior is a sign of a deeper need -- the need for male bonding with your dad, but you never got it or didn't get enough. So, you're looking for it in sinful and unhealthy ways. It has to do with how we see ourselves in the world; the sex issue is a little thing. Now I feel a part of the male community. You have to learn to be masculine. That's a big part of the men's movement now, like Promise Keepers."

Dr. Nicolosi agrees. "We [psychologists and counsellors who offer reparative therapy for homosexuals] believe that same-sex affection needs such as attention, affection and approval are what's missing in the homosexual. He desires to have male connectedness, to feel belonging and acceptance from another man, which is part of masculinity -- to be loved in a healthy way by a man. The word "reparative" implies reparation. It's a psycho-analytic term that means the behavior of homosexuality is an attempt to repair something that is missing within the person."

Dr. Nicolosi, founder of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) and founder and clinical director of the Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic which is devoted to the treatment of homosexuals, adds that "there's no such thing as a sexual preference gene."

"Anyone who knows anything about genetics knows that a specific gene is for a specific trait," Dr. Nicolosi explains. "For example, there's a gene for blue eyes or left-handedness. Homosexuality is too complex a set of behaviors [to come from a single gene]." He likens the concept of a single homosexual gene to the idea of a single good-basketball-playing gene. "You could say that someone has a height gene, or eye-hand coordination gene, or an aggressive gene," Dr. Nicolosi continues, "all of which make him a better basketball player. But there's not a good basketball-playing gene. There's no such thing as a sexual preference gene. So, what we can say at best is that there might be what we call a temperamental predisposition. We see repeatedly the classic triadic relationship: the distant, detached father, the over-involved mother and the temperamentally introverted, sensitive son. A boy with a more extroverted temperament would have some difficulties resulting from the family situation, but he wouldn't turn out to be homosexual."

Dr. Nicolosi's conclusions and exhaustive compilation of nationwide research and case studies on homosexual reparative therapy was referenced often in a seven-part series on homosexuality which was published in March 1997 in L'Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper. For more information, call NARTH at (818) 789-4440; or COURAGE, a Vatican-approved ministry to people of homosexual orientation who wish to follow Catholic teaching, at (714) 751-5335. The NARTH web page is at www.narth.com.

-- from the Los Angeles Lay Catholic Mission, November 1999

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