The Man with the Back Problem

A man walks into the doctor’s office complaining about a pain in his lower back, and worries that he may have to live with the pain for the rest of his life. The doctor says: “Let me see you walk.” The man gets up and walks back and forth in front of the doctor. The doctor say: “Stop. You are slumping over a bit. Bring your shoulders a little further back and lift your chin slightly. Try walking like that.” The man begins walking as the doctor tells him, and suddenly he feels no pain in his lower back. “See,” the doctor says, “you don’t have a back problem, you have a posture problem. If you focus your attention on how you stand and face the world, your back pain won’t give you trouble. ”

The man is amazed and very grateful, and he goes home. A few hours later he feels the back pain again, and his first thought is that the doctor is a fraud. But then notices that he is not walking with his shoulders back and his chin up, and when he does so, suddenly, the nagging pain disappears. Eventually, the man comes to know his body so well that when he feels the pain, he knows that it’s a signal to him that he is out of posture.

Similarly, I often tell my clients: “You don’t have a homosexual problem, you have a ‘posture’ problem. When you stand up and face the world from a different posture, your same-sex attraction will disappear.”