My name is Dan and I’m 16 years old. I was in therapy with Dr. Nicolosi for about 6-7 months.

Before therapy I was kind of an outcast, really not social with anybody except one person who was very shy like me. Then my parents found out I was looking at gay porn and thought I should speak to someone. At first I was kind of skeptical about it, but after the first session I was really captivated and I really was looking forward to it.

When I started to talk to Dr. Nicolosi I realized that there was a lot of information that hadn’t crossed my mind that I started thinking about. Maybe that was just another side of my brain opening up and thinking about these new things that I hadn’t thought of before.

For one thing, I never thought about the long-term effects of looking at gay porn. Would this mean I am gay? And what would that life mean for me long term?

My friends thought my being gay was fine, so in my head, I thought it was fine too. But I once I started realizing what’s going to happen when I grow up, it kind of changed my mind. From there it got me thinking about other things and more realistic things and that’s just the point to where I knew that I had to stay in therapy.

I was Skyping with my friend — this is before I told my parents. I always had my door closed, I was always locked up in my room, and this time they came in and they looked at my computer screen. I tried to hide the Skype chat, and it was basically about me asking my friend if I should come out to my parents, to tell them that I’m gay.

So at that point ironically I told my parents everything and from there they just thought of as many things as they could to respond to this. Then they contacted Nicolosi, thankfully. We were all stressed out and my dad was like on a research rampage, just trying to look for everything possible, and he was having some trouble finding what he could do to help, because he knows nothing about this, and it’s not like it’s something we can talk to other people about.

At first we tried this other therapist, but he really didn’t help. He tried to help, but it did not work for me. So my dad kept looking, and he found Nicolosi online. My dad said he had talked to Nicolosi and that basically the assumptions he could make about what had happened in my life, from hearing what my dad told him, were true. So I was like, OK, this guy is definitely something different than my last therapist, and it’s worth a try.

In therapy, we got into shame moments when I was young, moments with my friends that were traumatic. Those were the events that I hadn’t really thought would have a big effect on my life until they were brought up and given more thought.

I kind of dug deep into the meaning of those events and once you kind of analyze them you realize that all the emotions that were hidden because of those events kind of just spilled out and I kind of came clean. It really is a relief to do that because you just feel like you found the source of everything that has been going wrong in your life. It wasn’t just gay porn that was the problem, but it was how I saw myself with other guys.

When I was about 12 years old my best friend, Marco, made fun of me in front of some girls. It was a big shock and shut me down. I did EMDR with Nicolosi and got over it.

Once I started thinking about it I realized I shouldn’t have let little things like that bring me down because that’s something that Marco didn’t think about probably a minute after he did it, while that memory stuck with me for so long.

Another was the basketball memory of where I kind of messed up and I put a lot of blame on myself for one little mistake. We were doing like a practice drill and I cut a cone that I was supposed to go around and the coach called me out on it in front of everyone and because of that, the whole team had to run. That put a lot of guilt on me and made me think that this was my fault and all the other guys were going to hate me.

As much as the EMDR helped with the past shame memories with guys, what really helped me was growing in self-confidence and internal feelings. Going to social activities and stuff has definitely helped a lot too because I remember before therapy it would be a struggle for me to like, even order food at a restaurant, because of how nervous I would be.

When I started therapy I was at the point where I could look at a random guy on the street and get a really strong feeling inside like a heart drop and also kind of get that sudden shock of fear. So as time went on there were ups and downs but eventually I got to this point I can look at a picture for as long as I want and not even get any feeling.

Change isn’t something that just happens. There was a lot of self-focus and hard work but as time goes on and the truth comes out you realize that it’s not what you really want.

I see all this gay stuff on T.V. and if people want to find gay role models they can do what they want, but after what I’ve been through, I can see that it’s not really the thing for me.

My OSA (opposite-sex attraction) is a lot stronger, definitely. It’s to the point where my SSA was when I started therapy; that’s where my OSA is now. It, like, switched. The more l got myself thinking about what the SSA was all about, and what it was based on, the stronger the OSA got. I don’t have a girlfriend yet but female images can get me aroused, like the gay guys used to. I know I can get married some day, which was out of my mind before.

I was at a party last night actually and it was really fun and it made me realize all the things that I have been missing out on because of fear– Nicolosi calls it “anticipatory shame.”

I feel like my parents are still a little bit suspicious but they have a right to be. They have been going through this for a long time. Before I was just locked up in my room with the door closed and the only time I would come out was to eat. Now I’m giving them just the truth. Our bond has grown a lot more.

Yesterday me and my Dad ran over to swimming and later my uncle and grandma came over and we all had a BBQ. I used to avoid family and feel uncomfortable because I thought I was different.

One of the things I worried about was that I had already told my friends that I was gay, and they were all supportive, like I was a celeb. When I started to change, I worried they would be disappointed. The best advice I would give a guy like me would be not to worry if they’ve told friends. Don’t think about the effect it’s going to have on them, think about the effect its going to have on you. Your friends can say someone else is OK being gay all they want, but they are the ones who are going to get married to someone of the opposite sex and have a family.

Motivation is what is needed, because if someone doesn’t have the motivation they are not going to think about any of the realistic stuff, about what’s going to happen in the long run. Don’t give up as hard as it might seem; if you just keep pushing through it you’re going to get there eventually.

By the end of therapy, when I looked at gay porn I thought that it was nothing to get aroused over. Nicolosi made me see porn realistically. Now If I think about this guy and what he’s doing with his life and the pictures he’s taking to please other guys, the porn loses its excitement– in fact, it’s just ridiculous.

Last week was Prom Night and we were all just dancing in the bus, it was a party bus and it was pretty small and there were a lot of people and it was crowded and we were all just dancing and then that’s when I was dancing with Janet. We were dancing and she was getting really close and so was I, and I just felt myself getting aroused in a real physical way, and it was just like a really good feeling. It was one of those things where you don’t want it to stop. It was really good. I definitely think she noticed but she didn’t say anything. But she smiled.

My name is Mohammed and I am 28 years old. I am a graduate student living in Cairo. I found Dr. Nicolosi on the Internet at a time when my life was really dark, really painful. I could not stand my same-sex attractions. My life was not going well, and I needed to stop all my bad habits and end these bad feelings about myself. During a period of two-and-a-half years I flew to the Thomas Aquinas Clinic in California, alternating with sessions in between, that I did from home in Cairo. During those visits to the U.S., I would spend two or three weeks in California, and each week when I was there, I would have a number of sessions.

The therapy got me to look at things that happened in my life that created my unwanted attractions to guys.

When I was eight years old my family spent our vacations at a beach in Alexandria and there was a bully who was at the time 14 or 15 years old. He used to bully me in the morning and then would come to the beach house at night and sexually abuse me. That happened for years, and I couldn’t talk to my father because basically I had no relationship with him so I didn’t trust him. My father was never around to validate my masculinity or allay my fears.

One day, after years of harassment, he did anal intercourse on me really hard and I felt really bad afterward. I felt shamed. I was really shy and didn’t know what was happening. Was I the one who was at fault? Was he at fault? I wasn’t sure. I felt numb and my head was down, all the time down. As we say in my country, I had no face. I could not face the community; I couldn’t raise my face to look at people.

After that, I used to have attraction to guys I saw on the street and would watch a lot of gay porn for hours. The porn gave me some distraction and some numbing of my pain. It felt good and exciting but after an hour I would feel bad again. When I looked at porn, I would look for fat or chubby guys, but I did not understand why. When I started therapy, Dr. Nicolosi helped me see that this was because my molester was chubby, the same body type. This was a repeating of my past sex-abuse trauma.

Before therapy I used to have a little attraction to women, but to only one type of woman who were a little big, I would say, a little fat. I did not understand why. Later, I learned that they were similar to my molester’s body type. It really made me uncomfortable to tell other people that I like only chubby girls. I had a lot of shame about this and I could not go out and say: “I’m looking for a chubby woman.” Even though it’s not wrong to look for such a woman, I did not want to say it because it sounded weird.

I used to be three persons in one. Sometimes I would say to myself: “I must be gay. This is who I am.” Then the other part of me that did not want this same-sex attraction would say: “This is wrong, it cannot be. It doesn’t fit me.” The third part was my Muslim religion that said to me: “This is a big sin, you must stop!”

MY EXPERIENCE OF REPARATIVE THERAPY®

I had this very strong fear of finding out whether there is a solution or not. Each time when an idea would come to my mind to ask or search about the possibility of changing, I would try to distract myself with anything, because I had this fear of disappointment that I will continue this way! I have always wanted to have a wife, kids, and a successful family.

I kept delaying therapy for years because I was afraid that they would say there is no hope for change or I would not be able to change. I was afraid that any answer other than that I could be healed would easily devastate me for my entire life. If I would be told that I could not change I would be SHUT DOWN, facing the worst possible outcome in my life. For me “shut down” meant a severe depression for a long time and only God knows when it would end! For me, homosexuality could not remain a part of me. We have a saying, ”What has been built upon a void, then, it is a void.”

I reached the point where my motivation to start changing was stronger than my fear of disappointment. I contacted a therapist in Cairo but she had no clue about how to help me. But she informed me that change is possible and there is such a thing going on in the States and I was like WOW, I felt so good that during that year of school, I got straight A’s in that semester.

But my biggest problem in my life was my attractions, especially to big teenage guys on the streets. I would see those guys and get sexually aroused, do sexual things in my mind, and then I’d feel really bad and disconnected… I could not work or concentrate. And I would also look for big guys on the gay porn sites. They were the most exciting. I was really discouraged and had no confidence in myself. It was really bad. In therapy I realized that finding someone like my bully abuser was a repeating of my past sex-abuse trauma.

The whole time during therapy, no one knew about my problem and what I was trying to do. It is really not common talking about these things in my country! My family and friends do not know anything about me. I told my family and friends that I was going to California for business investments. When I came home they asked me, “So, what did you do there?” I did not know what to say. I still cannot tell anyone what I have achieved. That’s why I feel a pride for my accomplishments. I’m proud because with limited tools I did a good job.

I used to masturbate a lot, especially when I could not sleep. I’d go for gay porn and fantasizing while masturbating right before sleeping. I knew it would help me sleep but I realized it made me sleep because it made me depressed, and feeling depressed makes me want to sleep. When I started to shift to fantasize about girls it was like an energetic drink as I feel happy and excited right after it, which makes it more difficult to sleep. So now I stopped using both of them.

When I was like, 17 or 18, I remember figuring out the idea of “association,” connecting one idea to another to make a behavior stronger or weaker. I tried to help myself by not switching on the light when I masturbated, as an attempt to save this visual reinforcement for my wife one day. I also almost never took off my t-shirt while doing the activity, thinking I would save that pleasure of being totally naked to share with my future wife.

At the beginning in therapy I was really afraid but I submitted my whole power to Dr. Nicolosi and I said to myself, “Let’s try to open up and see what’s going on, there may be a solution.” So I tried.

I have always known that my SSA had to do with my past and at the same time I was afraid to make the connections.

In the beginning I did not understand what was going on inside of me but then with the therapy, I started to notice my feelings. I understood when and why I feel these different feelings that made me want gay sex.

Dr. Nicolosi and I worked and worked and worked, tackling the details of events of painful memories and frightening feelings. After a few sessions, going home from California, I started to feel less attraction for guys. I also noticed that I felt something toward slim girls. They look sexier and I felt like I wanted to be connected to them.

I started understanding myself today by going back to my history. I had no clue in the beginning but then I understood everything and I knew the main reasons for my problems and we worked on them through many techniques such as EMDR and Body Work. We basically focused on my feelings and my body, how I felt inside. I needed a lot of coaxing but now the bad memories do not affect me anymore. When I think of them now they do not depress me anymore. Over time, I felt a change. Each time I walked out of the therapy office I was very tired, but happier.

The first significant change happened after 4 months. I understood what was going on inside me and gaining some control of the shame and depressing feelings that were controlling my life. For the first time I felt more in control of my emotions. I felt more mature.

TODAY

Therapy was a huge change in my life. Today I feel like I am more united inside, I feel clear in my mind about what I am feeling, why I am feeling it, and I actually know what I want to do with my life.

The most important thing that I learned from Reparative Therapy® is that these same-sex feelings have to do with my history, some humiliating memories when I was young and vulnerable. I had bad things happen to me as a kid. When I walk in the street and see some guys I was attracted to I ask myself: “What I am feeling?” When I go back to my real feelings underneath the sexual attractions I know that they go back to two problems– I had a bad relationship with my father, and I was sexually abused.

After a lot of work on my problems, I can say: “Thank God I’ve changed and thank you to Dr. Nicolosi.” I no longer have those bad feelings about those guys. In fact, I just see them as regular guys. I see those guys on the street and I ask myself: ”What am I feeling?” and I say: ”No, nothing.” I feel nothing, only that they are brothers of mine. I used to also feel like I want to hug them but I don’t feel I have the need anymore.

I have become much better with my brothers and my mother but I still have a problem with my father. In fact, I do not talk to him. I did all of this therapy without talking with him. He doesn’t know anything about me. My relationships with my brothers are stronger and also with my mother. I still have a problem with my father; he has a lot of his own problems.

I feel like I got what I dreamed for. I wanted to have a normal life, I wanted my body to function normally. I feel like I’m stronger, I feel like I’m more comfortable and I feel like more attracted to girls and I see myself with a girl and I never stopped feeling attracted to girls. After the therapy I feel like, who doesn’t like a woman?

A few months ago I dated a woman older than me. I really focused on the emotions and sexual aspects, of course. Emotionally I felt really comfortable and I felt like I was the one who controlled the whole situation. It made me feel strong, like a father and like a leader. I had sex with her and it was really nice. I enjoyed it and felt confident that I could do it, but this is against my religion, of course, and I did feel guilty, to be honest. I felt like I succeeded therapy-wise but religiously I felt like I needed to stop it. I know that I need to get to know one woman and get married. I’ll make it the right way. I feel like I’m ready for it.

One of the most important things, I stopped playing the role of the victim. I used to nag, yell, complain and basically act like a little boy. I was afraid to take charge of my life, to be in control of the situation. I let the situation control me. This negative attitude is totally changed. My mentality has changed to the idea, “Everything is possible.”

One of the most important parts of my success is journaling, I’d journal every important detail going on in my life whether remembering something in the past or during the therapy. It’s like opening a file…tackling it, solving it, then again another new file, and so on.

I started feeling the changes in many aspects of my life, such as my feeling about myself and how I see and value other people: kids, teenagers, men, women, friends, family. I see them differently in a positive way. I feel a natural attraction toward girls and I feel normal when I meet the type of guy I used to fantasize about.

I thank God for what I’ve achieved. I’m really happy. I should have done this therapy years ago, when I was 18 or 19. My life would have been easier.

Also one of the big successes in my life is to see those guys who I used to feel attracted to, yet at the same time, feel humiliated by. Now I feel nothing toward them. Now I just see them as brothers. I’m over it and I’m all set. I even smile to myself each time I see one of them, thinking they once had a powerful effect on me! It’s a huge difference and a huge success. Thank God!

My name is Bill and I was in therapy with Dr. Nicolosi for about three years. I’m now in my fifties and I’m an orthopedic surgeon.  [Note, a pseudonym is being used for this testimonial, and the photograph above is not of the actual client.]

I knew from the time of puberty that I was different from most people. I always felt that I was missing something, that there was something that wasn’t quite right with me, and that maybe it was even genetic. I was drawn to physically attractive men but I was also attracted to women, and I managed to date in college.

I didn’t feel that I was attractive to the men I admired, and I kind of assumed that that was to be expected; looking back, I think that was due to my low sense of self-worth.

After college, I married, but very soon, I became a homosexual sex addict, a pornography addict and a drug addict. I was looking at gay pornography as a daily ritual, and sometimes I would stay up all night. My wife discovered what I was doing and she started going to a women’s support group for wives of sex-addicted men at church. One night a woman gave her one of Nicolosi’s books, “Healing Homosexuality,” – stories of different men struggling with homosexuality, and for some reason I looked at the cover and started reading and just couldn’t put it down. I would cry almost every night thinking that I could identify so much with these guys and their stories. I told my wife, “I need help” and I got into therapy with Nicolosi.

I’ve come to understand some of the things that happened to me when I was younger, and I realize now that did the best I could as a young boy and as a young man. I didn’t understand the world or have any reason to suspect that there could ever be anything but good intentions from other people, especially family members in position of authority over me. I’ve also come to realize that sometimes adults unwittingly hurt their children. And I learned to forgive the mistakes that I myself made as a young boy and young adult.

When I was about 10 or 11 my family had a hardware store and there was a back office with this ugly leather couch that I remember all too well. My uncle was in business with my father; the whole family worked there. I was young so I would be in the back office resting, and my uncle would come in and undress and basically show me his genitals and come walking close up to me. I really had just blocked it out and forgotten about it, and I really had no conscious feelings about it; I was completely numb to it until we started talking about it, years later in therapy. But I think I just went into total denial mode at the time. I didn’t tell my parents or my grandparents or my brother so I thought I must have been an accomplice to it and have brought it on for some reason. There must have been a reason that I allowed it to happen.

I was a chubby, unathletic kid who was made fun of and as time went by, I basically began to believe that I must be gay. Kids were calling me a “fat fag” or uncoordinated, and were picking me last for a team, and so I basically took on the role. Also, my uncle coming on to me, putting his genitals near my face, made me question myself, thinking, “Maybe I am gay, and this is why he is doing this to me?”

My father was a great guy and everybody used to say what a gentleman he was, but he was totally dominated by my mother. She was the driving force in the family and she totally dominated his life and also our lives. My father became a workaholic and he would work from 5:30 in the morning until 7:30 at night, seven days a week. I really don’t have very many memories of him. I have an older brother, but I was always my mother’s boy. I was dressed by her sometimes in feminine clothes, and she used to always tell me how bad my father was and how he didn’t do this right or he didn’t do that right, and didn’t make enough money– all the complaints she had were lobbed at me. I took them on and assumed it as my role that I was my mother’s “husband.”

In therapy I learned that I am 100% man and my body is only subtly different from that of any other man. I have all the same parts and they work. I am able to please women just like any other man and I even have the same problems that straight guys have, the same worries and the same fears. The reality that I’ll never be a great athlete– it’s just a fact. Perhaps if my father had spent more time with me or other people had spent more time with me I would have been athletic, but I’m not, and I’m never going to be, and I’m OK with that. I have other ways to exercise and make myself fit.

Since my SSA has diminished, I see more clearly my responsibility to my family. In my preoccupation with my problems I’ve long neglected them. I have a son who is now 12 and I had found myself falling into the same patterns I was in during my addiction of ignoring him and my wife. She was very forceful in a lot of ways and I had to really step in and take over and mentor my son and save him from the same fate that I had faced. I pride myself on the fact that I’ve been involved in a youth organization. I now spend weekends with my son– I spend a lot of time with him. I help with his homework, and I just talk to him. It’s really helped me a lot to be able to see the pattern that I was caught in as a child, and avoid inflicting it on another person, in this case my son, and turn it around. I also learned and it was really important for me, that it’s OK to look at others and admire them because there are men and women who are absolutely physically very beautiful and genetically gifted and they may have bigger genitalia than me or be slim and have great muscles or be very handsome or beautiful but I have other things of value they don’t have and probably won’t have. It’s OK to admire them for what they have and I don’t need to sexualize them. That’s a key understanding for me that it’s OK to just admire, not sexualize, what they have.

Today my SSA is really minimal unless I am stressed. It takes a lot of things for me to get stressed and destabilized, and that’s usually a combination of work, home, and financial problems and then I become a little insecure about myself. But I have no interest in acting out sexually with men anymore. I have slipped maybe 2 or 3 times in the past few years looking at pornography and that’s been my slip but I’ve not gone back into drugs. I really don’t want to masturbate; I don’t want to look at gay porn. Each time I’ve actually acted out, I’ve been able to discuss it with my wife and work through it and I was very blessed because although she’s uncomfortable about it, she’s there for me.

When I started therapy my homosexual activity was almost a daily thing. I lied to my wife all the time, I was always out screwing around with many different people… I looked at pornography every night, masturbating every night. I was web-caming with other men on the web every day.

I thought I was managing the responsibility of a physician fine, although toward the end I really was out of control and I knew I was addicted to pornography, masturbation and drugs and I really wanted help but I didn’t know how to ask for help so I wanted my wife to catch me, and ultimately it did happen that way. It was embarrassing, it was humiliating but I’m very thankful that it happened. My wife is doing her work on the relationship right along with me and we’ve come a long way.

Today I have zero interest in gay stuff. But I realize that after years of a habit pattern, I still have to be vigilant. I’m learning to recognize the things that could still lead me back down into the graveyard of that thought process, and I try to prevent that from happening and I have learned how to minimize that.

One of the things that stresses me out is being used by people without even realizing it, and trying to meet people’s expectations, trying to please other people and knocking myself out, and when that happens, the stress just builds up. I have to check that and that’s a reality check from time to time. That is the way I’ve been taught. Basically, I was conditioned by my mother to always be giving to others and denying myself, with the message I seemed to have learned: “Today is for you, tomorrow for me.”

I started reading Nicolosi’s book “Shame and Attachment Loss.” And I got to tell you that I’m not stupid but that’s the hardest, most dense book I’ve every really read. I really felt a need to practice every word and understand every concept and I would be lying if I said I understand it all, but I have the basics and it helped a lot.

When I started seeing Nicolosi I was still doing drugs and I was still acting out. I was in therapy thinking that would help for my wife but for awhile, I really wasn’t changed, it really wasn’t working.

The turning point was on a Sunday night. I wanted to go to the bathhouses and act out and do some drugs. I was driving back from a weekend conference and I kept trying to decide if I should go by the bathhouse. If I drove by I knew I would go in. If I saw where it was I knew that it was inevitable that I would go and I told myself, you have a chance to make things better for your life and you’re at a crossroads here you can have a fresh start and what are you going to do about it? I decided instead to go to a hotel. I checked in and called my wife and told her all about it. I cried on the phone, then ordered a steak, ice cream and apple pie, and my life has just been so blessed and beautiful since then. I have learned that I can make the choice not to get involved in that.

I have also been able to tell my 25-year-old daughter about every living, breathing detail as well as my wife. I never want anyone to come up to her and say, “Do you know what your father did?” I wanted her to know the truth from me.

When I told my 25-year-old her response was, “I thought something was wrong with me. I thought you were ignoring me and not spending any time with me because something was wrong with me.” So it was not a pleasant discussion for me; it made me feel terrible. It was very difficult, but I’m just grateful that I did it, so maybe she can have some perspective and know that my ignoring her had nothing to do with her at all.

I’m not a religious person, I’m not Christian, in fact I’m Jewish but I don’t practice any religion. I could almost say that I was agnostic or almost atheist but I honestly have had a spiritual enlightenment or awakening. It embarrasses me and I hate to say it. It’s hard to believe that I would ever say it, but something changed. I think it was the surrender part and I surrendered my shame, my shame that I had been carrying around, the shame about things I was doing and the way I felt as a child. I had been carrying this burden on my shoulders for so long.

A recipient of the Joseph Nicolosi Student Scholarship Award, William Stanus, has completed a master’s thesis at Trinity Western University studying the experiences of men who have undergone Reparative Therapy®.

Five men were recruited from the Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic while in Reparative Therapy® for issues related to unwanted same-sex Attraction (SSA). Open-ended interviews were conducted and analyzed via a phenomenological research methodology. Analysis yielded eleven themes which described the impact of therapy on their lives as a whole, including in domains such as work, relationships, and sense of self.

Reparative Therapy® for these men centered around their perception of a struggle to heal masculine identity. During sessions they worked on identifying bodily-based experiences of shame; understanding past family dynamics; and healing past incidents of abuse and rejection. They used Body Work and the Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) trauma protocol. All five men reported a positive experience of psychotherapy. Benefits included being able to build better non-sexual relationships with men, becoming more open to intimate relating to a woman, and improving their sense of themselves as men. While there was some reported decrease in their SSA, this did not involve a complete absence of any attractions to the same sex. Rather, the men reported lessening of SSA as well as a reduction in preoccupation with same-sex fantasies and unwanted same-sex behaviors. The men expressed gratitude at the opportunity to tell their stories, as well as the desire that their therapeutic choices be respected.

This research has added to the literature documenting client voices in psychotherapy as well as factors that clients find helpful in the change process.

My name is Father Bob and I am a 41-year-old Catholic priest who is in residence in a diocese.

It was about a month after the passing of my dad when I decided to contact Dr. Joe.

A few years previous, I had found myself viewing gay porn that I had discovered on the internet, and acting out  the feelings from the images every two to three months. That was pretty typical.  The interval became every two to three months, and finally, every two months…. then once a month. That just told me to pick up the phone and give Dr. Joe a call.

It was an embarrassment, the shame of knowing that a priest shouldn’t be living this way, and that I did not live up to my moral and Catholic values.

A priest-friend of mine who is a professor, had introduced me to Dr. Joe in the 1990’s and so I always knew in the back of my mind that he was out there.  I had a lot of pain around my relationship with my Dad. I knew that pain was much the cause of my SSA.  So when Dad died, that was the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back” and that’s why I gave Dr. Joe a call.

During the last few years of his life, I had tried to bond with my father.  I remember once pouring out my heart and soul, crying on the phone, wanting and begging and pleading with him to please go and do something with me or have a relationship with me.  But of course nothing came of it.  His idea of bonding was us going to Wal-Mart together when I would visit home.  I guess when he died, I had nowhere else to turn.

When I began therapy, Dr. Joe stunned me the first therapy session when he told me that my problem is not homosexuality per se, but shame. I have to admit I didn’t understand what that meant, but I was at the end of my rope.  I had nowhere else to go.  I had hit rock-bottom.  I believed him, and that message became clear, and then he said I could benefit from “Body Work.”  I didn’t know what that meant but we did it anyway.

It took me at least a year to really grasp shame and the grieving process, so that was what first happened. Because my problem came up around homoerotic pictures, we agreed to have me face the issue, and so I pulled up a homoerotic image. It was a picture I pulled up on my computer, of a muscular guy with exaggerated genitalia. After the first sexual charge left, I was stunned when I felt a flashback from my childhood,  being beat up by a bully.  I remember feeling very scared. That took me to grief, which was so intense that it surprised me.

This all took me back to when I was a kid, walking home from school. Every once in a while I would get picked on, and I’ve always remembered that sense of dread and fear; I felt like a caged animal with nowhere else to go, and I basically had to sit there and let them beat me up and be totally terrified.  It was that same feeling–the exact same feeling I was getting– when I looked at that picture I pulled up on my computer of that naked guy. When the truth of that connection hit me, the sexual feeling quickly left.  In that moment, I had another accepting male role model there with me, which made the arousal vanish.  But then, the awareness of the real grief came, full-force. Boy, it was powerful and unexpected.

Then– it was just like a camera flash– another memory popped up and the fear became even more intense. I was walking home from school on a sunny afternoon, and I remember getting beat up by another kid.  He said: “Go ahead, take your best shot.” I couldn’t do it; I just stood there in front of him and thought “Oh shit, now what?”  And he kicked me again– he gave me a roundhouse kick to the stomach, and then my little sister came to my defense.  How many sisters do that for their big brothers?  But that’s what happened, and that’s what I went back to. I suddenly saw the connection between these sexy guys and these bullies. Something about the fear of them made the experience feel sexual to me. Sounds weird, but true.

What made a difference for me in the therapy was learning to stay in my assertion, practicing what Dr. Joe taught me.  I remember once, when I was whining, he “kicked my butt” verbally:  “Bob, you know these things – you know the steps, you know the shame and fear and tightness and the Gray Zone and the resolution… so get with it.” I needed that.

What also helped me was finding other safe, salient males that I could turn to and tell them of my inner struggles with SSA.  Relating to other men who were heterosexual really was the key.  You know, you can’t just try to “get it out of your head.” You have to do the work,  you have to connect with straight men.

When I first came to the therapy I didn’t realize that my relationship with my mother was a part of the problem.  I had no idea.  She was my confidante, and my world revolved around her.  I would call her every single week without fail.   She was my best friend, but when we got into an argument, she was always right and I was always wrong.  I can’t remember a time when she ever admitted she was wrong.  I confronted her about how she made me feel, and she kept saying: “  “I would never want to hurt you,” which I believe is true, but now it’s abundantly clear that she will never understand me. She is very kind and very nice and gracious, but she doesn’t understand how she comes across, how she affects other people, and how she disempowers me and shuts me down.

I remember how I saw the correlation between conversations or visits with my mom and my acting out sexually.  One particular case in point; I had been in therapy for only a few months and I tried to discuss with her how I felt about Dad and how he abandoned me, and that was a mistake. She did not want to hear that. She protested how much he really loved me. Then I tried to tell her how she makes me feel, how I feel this or that, or how I get shut down or fearful when she talks about herself. Instead she kept on protesting how much she loved me and wouldn’t want to hurt me and then, rather than her trying to hear and understand me, it just became about her.

That following week I had an episode. I acted-out seven times in one night, over a 24-hour period, with the gay porn. I have to take ownership of my own actions and as a priest, I feel guilty about this. But I see how I get triggered when I’m around my mother.  It took me a few years to see the connection but it is abundantly clear today. So, sadly, I must keep her at a distance.

My life right now is nothing like it used to be before. I no longer live in fear.  Most importantly, when I feel any sort of shame moment, 90% of the time I catch the shame moment right in the moment.  Sometimes it takes me a day to pick up on it.  I know how to “check in” with myself. I can even do the EMDR if necessary, but I don’t live in fear.  I now feel much more comfortable around men.  I really feel more like a man amongst men.  It wasn’t always like that. Today I could rattle off many names of guys who I am buddies with.

Now, I don’t allow myself to be enmeshed with women.  There is a boundary which was not there before, which is there now. Especially as a priest, there are these women who want to make you their son or something. This is especially true for the older women, the matronly type. They are sweet but controlling, like my mother. I would let myself be “the good little priest” for them and feel responsible to talk to them after Mass. I’d stand there for a half hour as they went on and on about God knows what. Then I wondered why I felt like acting out.

There was one particular parishioner who is a matriarchal type of woman who fussed over me and drove me crazy. Now I always keep her at arm’s length and she gets the message. I feel so much better about myself.

I have always tended to be drawn toward larger, muscular men, football player types or certain body builders.  I may feel an attraction still, but nowhere near as intense as it used to be.   And most importantly, It does not cause me to act out.  I know immediately to go to my body and feel the pain, and often times, I do feel the pain.  The pain is not as intense as it used to be, like a year ago, but the pain is still like… yuk.  I feel it in my chest and I stay with it for a minute, but I realize and remember an example Dr. Joe gave me in therapy; seeing a bigger man is like looking at a bigger horse,  a big horse as opposed to a small horse…he’s just bigger, not better, and I see it more in that light today.

I realize now that big men can “set me off” because they remind me of bullies, and particularly of my father. From a boy’s perspective, his father is a hero, and in my case my father was this very large, overpowering and intimidating man.  These large men represent my father, which represents overall masculinity in the world of men– unapproachable, untouchable, exotic, foreign, very different from me. So when I see a big man, I still get a whiff of that same feeling but I know it comes from the feeling of inadequacy, the shame-based self-statement that I am smaller and in a gender sense, inferior.   I can accept the fact that I may be physically smaller– it is a truthful statement– that I can be physically smaller overall and in body parts too, but I’m OK with that.  I know it doesn’t make me less of a man.

I was often intimidated around stronger men; my bishop, for example, used to intimidate me. He is an aggressive, alpha-male kind of guy. He is a very strong personality, interested in outdoor kinds of activities.  Today, I am not intimidated by him. That doesn’t mean that sometimes I don’t still feel the old feeling of fear when he’s in that dominant mode.  But now I know I can sit with those feelings of fear and that they will take me to the sadness and grief.  I now know that they are about the bullies of my past including my father, and I can process those emotions that I could never process before.

I have never really felt attracted to women as far as I remember. As a little boy, maybe before the trauma, I would notice certain women. But as I grew older my attractions definitely vanished to no attraction at all. Now I definitely catch myself looking -not gazing- but drawn to and noticing attractive women.  I definitely am more keenly aware of that. The more I’m in my assertion, the stronger my feelings are toward women.  But if I am going through a shame moment or trying to deal with something difficult in my life, I notice that my attractions to women will diminish. I see the connection.

The urge to look at porn is nowhere as strong as it used to be. I’ve learned to avoid the shame that I imposed on myself..  I did it to myself!  If I see a guy, I’m also seeing myself. This is what I learned: “He’s a man, I’m a man.” He may be more muscular or more good looking but I’m of the same gender.  I remind myself that I’m like him in my essence, so that attraction is nowhere near as strong. I am living proof that this program works.

My name is Tom and I am in my fifties.  [Note, a pseudonym is being used for this testimonial, and the photograph above is not of the actual client.]  For a long time I had this uncertainty about my sexuality. This came from a combination of things: comments from other people, and questions I had about myself.

I had been looking at gay porn off and on since college days.  As my self-doubt grew and confidence diminished, the more I got addicted to it. This made me really question myself, thinking, “Is it true that am I gay?” The gay porn thing got me to say to myself: “Perhaps this is who I am.” It was kind of like, the more you do it, the more you feel you are actually going in that direction.  I was conditioning my mind to accept that this was the way it was going to be, so I resigned myself to the idea that I had to direct my sexuality accordingly.

I heard Dr. Nicolosi on the radio many years ago.  He described men who sexualized fear.  What he described was what I had been experiencing for years.  Many years later I finally decided to talk to him, wanting to resolve my issues once and for all. Soon after I started therapy I realized that many factors created my self-doubts. Most important was that my mother undermined my sense of masculinity.  It also didn’t help that I was not an aggressive young child and was very thin.  As I grew I was never big and strong.  After many months in therapy I started to understand what created my current mental state.  What really helped me turn the corner with understanding myself was the book, “Shame and Attachment Loss,” which described exactly how I grew up: I had a very aggressive and intrusive mother and a very passive and withdrawn father.  My childhood was just that description in Nicolosi’s book, exactly that. This started to get me to understand the source of my doubts.

Living with my mother was hell on earth.  She is a classic narcissist: extremely intrusive, the “her way or the highway” type. No rules applied to her, and yet, I was forced to follow all the rules of common human respect. On top of that, I had a father who would never put his foot down. He accepted my mother’s disrespect and conduct that he wouldn’t dare accept from other people.

I never saw my father as a strong male figure that could help me stand up to my mother, and that really created a pattern of self-doubt within me. My father was an example of a passive man and I followed that model in every relationship with a woman and needless to say, I got destroyed by these women because of it. In my first marriage I tried to be a strong man but I gradually assumed a passive role. I married a woman with the same narcissistic characteristics as my mother and I started to assume my father’s character. That just seemed normal to me.

When I was growing up, my father was my mother’s enforcer in regard to punishment. With him, there was never really any regard for compassion and trying to feel things out with me, and to really “get into my head” that way.  In turn I saw him as the guy who beat me instead of the guy who is supposed to set an example for me, guide me, and encourage me, and so on.

Getting beatings was “normal” in the Black Culture. It goes back to the slave mentality that got carried forward with us to how we deal with our own children. My father admitted to me that he received beatings from his father, so he was repeating the same behavior with me.

My mother was also physically abusive.  We got into a couple of physical battles but to a much to a lesser degree; the physical abuse was mostly from my father. She was more emotionally and verbally abusive, which I thinkwas worse than the physical abuse because it caused me to be very confused and too trusting of other people, just to be let down later, as if I expected it..  She was never a person of her word…she would play mind games with me and she was never accountable to anybody. She made up the rules and changed them to fit her needs.

I was married once before and, as I’ve said, that was a disaster. I let my wife horribly disrespect me, the same way my father was disregarded by my mother. Today I am in a relationship with a woman and our sexual relationship is really good.  I take care of her and she takes care of me, but I don’t think I’m going to get married.  I think we’re going to keep it the way it is, because as far as marriage, I really got beat up pretty bad financially in my first marriage, and I don’t think I’ll be signing any documents soon.

The EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing) helped me get to the root of the problem by bringing memories back to me.  There was an incident when I was around 10 or 11 and I and another boy were playing make-believe and we would take turns being the female, and during that play my mother burst into the room and caught us doing that, and it was completely devastating for me. To me it was just playing, but I carried that shame forward. Her overreaction reinforced the idea that maybe there was something wrong with me. Instead of saying to me, OK it’s just child’s play, let it go, but don’t do it again, her punishment to me was as if she found something bad that I had inside of me. That sort of started the doubt: “There must be something gay about me” – even though I didn’t know the word “gay” at the time. Later, there were other incidents with other boys, I don’t know why.

Therapy changed everything. I would not have made the progress I have made without therapy because it helped me understand the root of what caused my self-doubt and the addiction to gay porn. After a year of therapy with Dr. Nicolosi, plus lots of researching and hard work on my own,  I can now draw upon the breadth of understanding of who I am, and I am not that shamed, helpless person.   It has helped me in so many ways.  I am so much more confident in myself.  I know who I am and know what I want.  I feel like I have put those doubts and questions behind me and I feel like nothing can stop me now.

I have a teenage son from my previous marriage and I’m aware of how I was treated by my Dad and so I try to be different with my son. I sit and talk to him. I explain things to him and try to answer his questions.

Today my SSA is zero.  I don’t think about it.  I stumbled upon some gay porn at one time and I looked at it and I was almost like, “Wow, I can’t even believe I was there, and I’m so far from there.”

The therapy with Dr. Nicolosi was for about a year and I really appreciate his help. Some of the things he said are still in my head, and when certain things happen to me I can still hear his voice. I wouldn’t have reached this point without his help.

My name is John; I pursued therapy with Dr. Nicolosi because my sexual life needed special attention and I wanted the best I could find. I am now 40 years old and was in reparative therapy for just over two years.

There was shame around my homosexual behaviors and I wanted a place to go where I felt safe to confide with some expert who could help me. I am Catholic and I wanted to pursue a healthy sexuality that I believe God wants me to have.

In the course of therapy I discovered how my sexual issues traced back to growing up in a dysfunctional household and especially, to problems I had with my father. I had never seen or discovered the connection before in therapy. I just couldn’t connect with my father. I experienced traumatic intimidation from my father including physical abuse, bullying and abandonment.

Nicolosi and I spent much time on one traumatic memory of my father threatening and pursuing me with a belt. I ran into my room, and he aggressively shook the door like he was going to break it down and I was so scared, I was crying and looking for a way to escape. I wanted to jump out the window. My life felt like it was crumbling. I didn’t know who this man was, but in the back of my mind I knew he had the belt and he had used it before so I was sure he would use it again. I was also traumatized that my mother didn’t protect me from him more. I don’t even remember if he actually came in the room. All I remember is the absolute terror of him threatening to break down the door and come in.

We used a method called EMDR and that sort of cut through quickly to a lot of these deep problems that I couldn’t get a hold of consciously and I really have grown to trust that method. I have a peaceful feeling with that method and it got me places that I needed to go to and to face.

Today I’m more hopeful and more independent. I have more of the skills that I need to help myself grow and address any kinds of feelings that come up that need to be addressed. I have a better perspective on my sexual attractions to other men. I have a greater perspective of what’s going on in me, especially the shame moments that go back to my childhood experience. I know those traumatic moments are opportunities for healing, and that’s very hopeful.

As a result, I think that my same-sex attraction have diminished to where they are probably 80%. better. I’m just more of a whole person. Facing this SSA part of my life has really helped me with a missing piece of what I want to be my whole and complete life. Today I feel like I’ve fallen in love with a wonderful young woman. My heart is drawn to this woman and I see a future and I feel confident that it will be a successful relationship and marriage. We are really lovers, we are affectionate toward each other, we communicate well, and we’re honest with each other. We have a lot of interests and activities in common. We hike, swim, we practice yoga together, we enjoy cooking and dining out. I couldn’t be happier. IT’S NOT TO SAY THAT THERE WILL NOT BE CHALLENGES ALONG THE WAY, BUT I AM LEARNING TO EMBRACE THEM MORE NOW. I HAVE A NEW CONFIDENCE, AND THIS APPLIES TO ALL AREAS OF MY LIFE.

She’s artistic, she does sculpture and I go there to her studio while she works and I do my studying. We’re planning a trip next fall to Russia. She inspired me to start taking scuba lessons with her!

A big challenge was to disclose my SSA issues to her. But I had support from Nicolosi and a network of guy friends I had developed AND AM CONTINUING TO DEVELOP THOSE RELATIONSHIPS IN A HEALTHY WAY. I was afraid that she would probably think I was too weird and reject me. But it went surprisingly well. She was receptive, compassionate and thoughtful, and processed what I was saying very attentively.

Nicolosi was very direct with me, very down-to-earth. He will challenge you when you need challenging but also be very empathetic. But he has a wealth of experience, he’s trustworthy. He has been a good mentor.

There were times when there were things I didn’t want to reveal or disclose in therapy, like body-image issues and sexual activities. Occasionally there were issues between us where I thought he did not understand me. These misunderstandings were blessings in disguise because it was an opportunity for me to assert myself, tell him that I thought I had been misunderstood, and experience his acceptance of my disagreement with him. Those were “double-loop” situations where we clarified our misunderstandings. This was something I could never do with my dad. In addition, I did a lot of grief work about my past, especially about my mother and my father.

I would advise anyone struggling with SSA to give therapy a try. It doesn’t hurt to try out three sessions and at the beginning, don’t really worry too much about focusing on SSA, BUT FOCUS ON THE HURT AND THE SSA WILL TAKE CARE OF ITSELF IN SOME WAY. You will be more healthy. Focus on improving your overall health. Again, just work on places where you need healing and the rest with take care of itself. I was NOT attached to results, and improvement happened in regard to SSA in an awesome way I could not have imagined. Things are not perfect but I have confidence for the future and a groundedness. . I am continuing to heal and learn at a more deep level. I’m more in touch with my true authentic self and deepest desires. I have come a long way and am excited about the future.

Therapy takes time, just be patient and give yourself time to process all the information. I am spiritual and so I needed to take all that we were doing in therapy to God and bring spirituality and psychology together to arrive at a more healthy place in my life.

The therapy helped me feel more confident around men, to connect more and deal with my tendency to be intimidated, and there is a lot of hope in that. I’m back to playing more sports now and I’m moving more outward to people in general. I’ll greet people more readily and I just have a more generous heart.

I think I’m more compassionate as a result of this therapy. There is a lot of struggle but there are a lot of blessings that come from therapy. You can be more connected to yourself and you’re a better person because of it.

My name is Elliott and I am seventeen. I was in therapy with Dr. Nicolosi for a little over one year.

When I was fifteen, I came out to my parents; I guess you could say I “came out of the closet.” But even though I felt like I might be gay, I didn’t want to feel that way and my parents were happy that I didn’t want to feel that way either, so they were more than willing to find the best therapist possible and to give it all and everything.

I thought that guys were very attractive and everything, and I felt that I was different from them. But after therapy and just everything that I’ve learned and gone through, now I can look at a guy and think “Oh, he’s handsome” but I don’t find that sexual attraction. Sometimes an erotic image comes briefly through my head and I just try to get rid of it as soon as possible because it’s not something that I want, and it’s just distracting.

The therapy changed my whole mentality for the better. When I started therapy I saw myself as lower than other people, especially when it came to guys. I learned how to get rid of many fears through EMDR and other different forms of psychology. These things helped me practice new ways of relating with other guys. I learned to get the affirmation from them that I needed to feel that I am not less than other men.

But even thought I told my parents that I wanted to change, when I started out I really wasn’t so sure I wanted to change; my feelings were too mixed up to know where I wanted to go with them. Then about six months after I started therapy I decided I actually wanted to change. Back then, I still wasn’t too strong in my faith but that changed, too. Recently I would say I’ve become very strong in my faith. I’m Evangelical Christian.

I really don’t know why I changed my mind. I just decided that I don’t want to be gay for the rest of my life. I want to make this change for myself because I know that it’s not scientifically proven that people are born gay. People might say it is, or suggest that it is, but no homosexual gene has been found in the human body. I don’t believe that people are born that way. I believe that everyone is born asexual in a way and that just through occurrences that happen throughout life, depending on the situations that occur, things can happen which can make people go one way or the other. That’s what happened to me.

When I was four years old, I was molested by my neighbor and then the same year I was molested by my cousin. I don’t remember the first time so much, but the second time I do remember the specifics. I was spending the night at my aunt’s house and my cousin woke me up and I just remember the next thing I knew he was performing oral sex on me. I always remembered it. It made a huge impression on me, and on how I thought of myself.

Before I started therapy I thought molestation was the cause of my SSA, but then I realized it was also because I would always hide myself from guys. I wouldn’t want to reach out to them or become friends with them or participate in activities with them because I was afraid that they would think less of me. That made me feel a lot lower than them. There was anticipatory shame, and I would just think that as I would approach these people, they were going to judge me and they probably were going to reject me. So guys seemed very exciting to me, very different and it was hard to see myself as one of them, and easy to see them in a sexual way instead. But I haven’t thought like that in a long time.

At this point I don’t really feel attracted to girls yet. I learned in therapy not to force it on myself, just to let it occur naturally by gaining the male affirmation and doing well with the guys. At first I wanted to jump-start that attraction through sexual stimulation, like looking at pictures. But then I realized, no, that’s going to develop an unhealthy attraction. Now I don’t feel any pressures. I haven’t even thought much about attractions with girls. When I see guys now I don’t imagine sexual things. I just see them as my friends and people who are the same as me and that takes away the sexual attraction.

We did a lot of EMDR. It was confusing but it somehow worked in getting rid of the fears like the molestations. I haven’t talked to those people who hurt me in a long time but I’ve forgiven them for everything that they’ve done. I don’t want to carry the pain of holding a grudge about that for the rest of my life, but the molestations definitely started a lot of confusion for me about how to connect in a healthy way with guys.

I definitely think what really helped me was the relationship with Dr. Nicolosi. He helped a lot because he was a guy that I could talk to and trust with these things that I couldn’t talk to anybody else about, and because he is educated in the field and he could give me the advice I needed. That was probably what most changed me through the therapy.

There is now this law in California regarding minors that is about to start, that would have made it illegal for me, as someone under 18, to get help. I think it’s ridiculous. It’s just like saying Alcohol Anonymous should be cancelled, all the rehabilitation programs in the United States should be stopped. In this new law, they say that getting help to understand the SSA feelings I had, which started through bad experiences in my childhood, does harm to me. But through therapy, I was healed from those memories and the harm they caused.

I grew up in a good family with loving parents who were dedicated to me. Both my parents were very hyper-focused on me, and unfortunately, not exactly in the right way for what I needed. This story is not a rejection of them, because they did the best they knew how; it is an attempt to explain my understanding of them from an adult perspective.

My mom is a great person. She is a high-energy salesperson at a real estate office, and she is super-ambitious, but she kind of projected her insecurities onto me and drew me into a lot of her own activities and ventures without checking in to see if they really suited me or if I wanted to do them. She just decided for me, putting me in all types of crazy things– gymnastics, soccer, swimming; this, that and moving around from one thing to another. She would get me really excited about things she wanted me to do; it was so hyper-stimulating and confusing and disorienting. It was easy to deal with my mom if you just went along with her.

My dad is an accountant and he is less emotional. He let it all happen, however, and didn’t intervene. He thought he was being empowering to my mother but really he was just enabling her. It was always hard to connect with him. When I’d try to talk to him, try to have a conversation with him, I’d feel a little unnerved; it just wouldn’t feel natural. There was never any emotional connection; I don’t know how to describe it better than that. It was not until I started talking to my therapist (Nicolosi) that I found out what it is supposed to feel like when men connect and you can actually feel understood. I never had that with my dad.

Assertion was always a huge issue for me. We did the the whole Body Work thing that taught me to go to my body, understand what it was telling me, and to trust my emotions and to be in touch with them. Before then I don’t know how much I was actually in touch with my emotions.

What Nicolosi said about assertion and shame, I guess deep down I knew intuitively. It made sense. I’ve learned to know when you’re feeling good and confident and to recognize those feelings bestowed upon you by other male figures in your life. I’ve grown to trust that I can feel that, and to pursue that.

I also learned that my older brother, who is bipolar, played an important part in the creation of my SSA. In some ways he was emotionally abusive to me because he wouldn’t want me to have a girlfriend or go out and play team sports. It was his way of self-preservation because he couldn’t do those things himself. Unfortunately, my parents just let it happen.

Body Work, EMDR, all that stuff worked for me, but mostly, just talking in a way that I never could do with my father. Nicolosi was what they call “an attuned therapist.” He understood what I about to say before I said it and that just reaffirmed everything that I felt.

Before therapy my same-sex attractions were a significant problem in my life, because I never wanted to act on them or identify myself as gay. I was never sexually active in the lifestyle but there were always these lingering thoughts and fantasies and some exposure to pornography.

I was cautions about therapy at first but I soon felt like Nicolosi “got” me, he understood me and so I trusted him with my baggage. He had a plan and I just needed a plan. I trusted him to give it to me and he did that.

Today, I would say it’s actually hard work to get back into that mental state of homosexuality. I see the checkpoints that I have to deal with, such as shame moments and those “I’m not good enough” statements, but I can’t get into the SSA feelings now because I’ve identified what puts me there.

I always had heterosexual fantasies, too, but this gay thing got in the way and I couldn’t come to grips with it. Today, I feel more secure in my opposite-sex attractions. My heterosexuality has definitely increased. As a kid I was attracted to girls, but also to guys, and that was just so confusing to me. But the therapy has helped me understand what I really want from both genders. I need acceptance from my male peers, but I do want females in my life in a different way, and I think girls are beautiful.

One time I made a move on a male friend because I was thinking that he might have some latent homosexuality but he didn’t. I felt terrible but I learned about self-forgiveness and unloading my shame. It was difficult, but we spoke about it later and eventually he was O.K. with what I had done. The second incident was when I was just in a hard place, in between jobs, frustrated, and there’s a guy here drinking and we didn’t have sex but we kind of just rolled around in bed a little bit. But through that I learned that I didn’t even want that, and that that it didn’t work for me. I couldn’t even get aroused after a certain point. Well, I’m done with that now. So now, if I even think of a gay fantasy, I remember that it won’t give me what I deep-down want from men.

Because of the enmeshment with my mom, I was closed off to females– self-protective–and I wouldn’t let myself be vulnerable to them. I learned that first I have to be open and vulnerable to them before I can feel sexual toward them. What built up my OSA was work on photos of girls, none of them were pornographic, in fact, most of them were fully-clothed women. But that was good enough to get the good feeling going. From doing EMDR and Body Work on these girl images I learned that I am subconsciously hard-wired the right way and if I’m able to be emotionally open, then I’ll be vulnerable, and that will eventually lead to sexual feelings.

I learned that those OSA feelings come from a completely different place in my body and my psyche than the sexual feelings that I had for guys. It is a totally different place physiologically. When I was attracted to guys, it was a booming box rather than a natural pleasure. The attraction was first generated by a tightness in the chest, a constriction, a feeling of restlessness and emptiness rather than an openness, a joy and a true attraction such as one feels toward women.

I have a lot of hope for my future because I feel now I have the tools to succeed. I probably won’t be perfect in having all the feelings I want to have just in the way I want to have them, but it doesn’t matter, and I certainly don’t have to live my life as gay. I’ve learned to trust in other people in a deeper way – men and women. I’ve begun to open up and be vulnerable with people, and you just have to do it and move on and trust that other people will help you repair yourself.

I have the confidence that I will someday get married. There’s this girl that works with me and I enjoy her presence and she makes me feel good about myself, not just as a person, but as a guy. When I think of her I feel uplifted like I can spread my shoulders wider, but I only feel that when she “gets” me, if we’re on the same page emotionally, and then I can really do things and say things to her because then I trust her. At times like that I can feel sexual feelings for her, and that is exciting.

To anyone who is thinking about therapy, I would just say “do it.” I would say at least with me, I ignored the media message that if you have gay feelings, you must claim them and act on them, and instead I really deep-down trusted my true intuition and I think if you do that, then it will help guide you in the right way.