Susan's Place Transgender Resources

Can Therapy Help Change Sexual Orientation?

by Alix Spiegel
Morning Edition
August 1, 2011

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/08/01/138820526/can-therapy-help-change-sexual-orientation-the-jurys-still-out (http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/08/01/138820526/can-therapy-help-change-sexual-orientation-the-jurys-still-out)

Conversion therapy — a controversial psychotherapy that tries to help gay men and women become straight — is in the news again. Marcus Bachmann, the husband of Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann, runs a counseling clinic that reportedly provides the therapy. His wife has had to face many questions about it lately, prompting her to say Thursday, "My husband is not running for the presidency ... neither is our business."

The debate about the value of conversion therapy, also known as reparative therapy, has been raging in psychological circles for more than a decade.

There's a debate about the legitimacy of conversion therapy? Could have fooled me. I was pretty sure this "debate" was settled decades ago. The only question is how these places stay in business. How much of it is fools and money being parted, and how much is outright insurance fraud? That's a news story I'd like to see!

Kia Ora,

::) I'm not in any way advocating this kind of therapy [from what I gather it has already been disproved=quackery],  however I can fully understand how the desperate would want to give it a go...Especially if they live in an environment where being homosexual is the ultimate sin and they have no real means of moving to a more liberal environment ...

Metta Zenda :) 

Going to a therapist and saying "Make me what I am not" and having that therapist say "Okey dokey" - both are doomed to painful failure. Failure for the client as a happy person, failure for the therapist as being worthy of that title.

I had served as a children and a youth pastor at a very large and popular conservative denomination before I came out of the closet and went a more progressive route.

With that said, I had seen horrible results that "Therapists" had done to children and teenagers at these gay camps. There are nothing short of Barbaric and often times utilize a Victorian Era style of Psychotherapy to pray the gay away.

However, as long as you have conservative parents or one who is gay feels it is a sin, these places will always exist.

The more effective approach (at least in Judaic -Christian countries) is to properly teach Biblical Interpretation because about 90% of all these Therapists who are under the "school of fixing gays" usually come from a conservative religious background where they interpreted scriptures based on what their pastors had told them without really looking into the exegetical approach for themselves.

You get me in a room with a Conservative believer and I can run laps around their "clobbering verses"

In a word- No.  >:( It can however change wallets from full to empty in a short space of time.

"Lose Pounds Fast!!" ::)

(not a weight off your mind - and other puns...)