Former ex-gay Christine Bakke recalls some un-Christian and unprofessional advice from ex-gay “therapists”:
I knew one woman whose therapist gave her assignments to flirt with men.
- An ex-gay guy who went on several dates to try to learn how to be with a woman (without disclosing that he identified as ex-gay), on the recommendation of his therapist.
- A woman who was counseled by the leader of the ex-gay group that women should wear makeup (“need to put some paint on the side of the barn”).
- A man who changed his last name because his ex-gay therapy led him to believe that his parents were to blame for him being gay.
- A woman who insinuated that she had been abused because she felt like her story didn’t “fit” the ex-gay model without some kind of a root cause.
- A young man who said that after he got out of the ex-gay movement and was finished with reparative therapy, that’s when the real repairing began. He had to repair the relationships with his family after buying into the belief that they were distant from him and made him gay.
Ex-gay “therapy” is founded not upon Christian values or the Bible, but upon long-discredited conjecture of a 19th-century secular psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud.
Neither good intentions nor vague godtalk can excuse the destruction that is caused to individuals and families when ex-gay activists and “counselors” use fear, blame, and hopelessness to promote so-called “freedom” — freedom from sexuality, freedom from accountability, freedom from honesty within the family unit.
