But in practice, I used the fact that I was in therapy as part of the whole deception, by making my wife believe I was dealing seriously with my sexual desires. In reality, I was coasting along in a double life, and taking some comfort in the fact that my therapist never directly challenged me to do otherwise.

This is an area where I personally would have been more confrontive or directive. When I had a married client, I would bring the marriage relationship into our discussions: “You know, I realize that you need time to sort out where you’re going but you have a partner who you are compromising by your activities. We need to explore some of the dynamics at work here.”

I did weekly therapy for about two years with one of Nicolosi’s associates, David Matheson. Matheson, who I believe was also a founder of Evergreen International, has since moved off on his own, but at that time he was part of Nicolosi’s Thomas Aquinas Psychological Clinic in Encino, CA. My sessions were mostly by phone since I lived in another state. I never met Nicolosi himself.

Mattheson told me at one point that he had another client who had decided to identify and live as gay, but was continuing therapy with him to deal with other issues. He told me this to emphasize that he did not demand, as a precondition for therapy, that I refuse to consider returning to a gay identity.

So yes, based on my own experience, I know that Nicolosi’s practice does offer “gay affirmative” therapy to some clients. (How truly affirmative that might be in practice, I won’t venture to guess. ) Wonder what Peter LaBarbera would make of that?

The actual quote Warren cites from Nicolosi also rings true with my experience:

In fact, to be honest with you we never tell our clients not to have homosexual activity. If they want to do it, let them do it. It’s up to them. Our job is to help them understand what they learned from it. When a client comes in to me and says, ‘I had gay sex last night.’ My only question to him is, ‘What was going on with you just before you decided to act out? What was your psychological state of mind that made you want…?’

During the period I was in therapy with Matheson, I was still married and was engaging in a LOT of sexual activity with men. For most of my 26-year marriage I was faithful to my wife. It was during the last five year that I was having sexual encounters and affairs with men, and the peak of that period was the two years I was talking weekly with Matheson.

I was completely open with Matheson about all my sexual activity, and found it a little odd that he never told confronted me about being honest with my wife. Let me be clear: he never encouraged me to conceal my activity, and my unfaithfulness and dishonesty was 100% my own responsibility. But in practice, I used the fact that I was in therapy as part of the whole deception, by making my wife believe I was dealing seriously with my sexual desires. In reality, I was coasting along in a double life, and taking some comfort in the fact that my therapist never directly challenged me to do otherwise.

I realize that therapists need to respect client self-determination, and cannot make decisions for the client. So I don’t necessarily fault Matheson’s approach, which seems to be Nicolosi’s approach as well. But in retrospect, I can say my therapy with Matheson was no more helpful in getting me to live in accordance with the values I then professed than it was in changing my actual orientation.

One client in particular stands out as a model of what I was speaking to above. He really wasn’t sure whether he believed homosexual behavior was sin but ‘he loved the night life; he loved to boogie’ and he’d find himself ‘going home’ with people ‘for the night’ not for a long-term relationship. This violated his conscience; this was against what he believed and conflicted with his goals. So that’s what we’d discuss

.

That makes a lot of sense to me. I can easily see a gay man who is religious but has an affirmative faith facing this in the same way that a straight man might. Wanting to live with a sexual ethic, seeking to keep sex meaningful and tied to commitment and relationship, but being driven by sexual need or impulse.

A larger goal, often unspoken, was simply to keep people like him from rejecting God entirely..

Again, good point. So very often gay people see the face of Christ only from people who are snarling at them and calling them degenerates. It should be no surprise that they aren’t so fond of Him. Having an interaction in which you don’t need to “call out sin” can go a long way towards giving a view of a different face of Christ.

About the only thing you know from the outset in a counseling setting is that the client has some form of confict…enough to motivate them to seek you out. Back in the day, I had a few who admitted from the outset that they only came to appease family or a spouse; I had some others who ‘just wanted to check us out’. Our ministry was clearly identified as Christian and our position that ‘homosexual behavior was just one of the many sins that people deal with’ was also clear in our brochure.

But we recognized that not everyone was at the same place nor did they have the same needs or goals. Why did they come to us when our metropolitan area had a number of ‘gay Christian’ groups? If they didn’t know about them, we gave them names and how to connect with them. If they did know about them, then we’d explore what brought them to us. One client in particular stands out as a model of what I was speaking to above. He really wasn’t sure whether he believed homosexual behavior was sin but ‘he loved the night life; he loved to boogie’ and he’d find himself ‘going home’ with people ‘for the night’ not for a long-term relationship. This violated his conscience; this was against what he believed and conflicted with his goals. So that’s what we’d discuss.

Another client also wasn’t sure what he believed about homosexual behavior per se but was aware that, for him, ‘horniness’ was tied to his emotions and sense of self-worth. He used sex with others to medicate his emotions and to bolster his ego…and then find, a very short time afterwards, that the medicating only dealt with the symptoms…his troubled emotions were waiting for him; he realized also that the ego-boost was also short-lived. My counseling goal with him was to examine both his ‘acting out’ and the times when he was tempted to ‘act out’…to weed out the wholesome motives (there were some) from the non-productive ones. I likened it in my mind to therapy re sex addiction, not judging sexuality in itself, but treating those areas that were compulsive. It may have been my wish that he’d come to the same conclusion about homosexuality that I did but my goal was to help him become free (or more aware) of the emotional responses so that he would be more able to actually choose how to handle his sexuality. A larger goal, often unspoken, was simply to keep people like him from rejecting God entirely…to keep them open-minded and open-hearted to God; that explains why I didn’t feel conflicted when I didn’t cram my own beliefs down their throats. I could trust the Holy Spirit to be the ‘convicter of sin’ rather than take that job upon myself.

That means trying to acheive the best personal wholeness within the contraints you find yourself within.