Author: Warren Throckmorton

Exgaywatch has posted a letter from Alan Chambers from earlier this year, describing Alan’s account of a presentation by Richard Cohen at the 2000 Exodus Conference. The letter was provided anonymously and was addressed to an Exodus parents’ group. Here is the entire letter which I have also verified.

Dear Parents Group,

Many of us within Exodus initially read Coming Out Straight, as we do most new books on the topic of overcoming homosexuality. Those of us who read the book began to talk amongst ourselves about the legitimacy of holding therapy, a practice Richard both uses and endorses.

At the time this discussion began (2000) I was not the President of Exodus nor was I even a board member. However, as the leader of an Exodus Member Ministry, I was deeply concerned about the implications this would have on Exodus as a whole if we endorsed such a controversial technique. Too, I worried about the possibility of leaders exposing themselves to temptation via the practice of “holding” a client.

That year (2000) at the Exodus Annual Freedom Conference Richard Cohen was invited by the Leadership at the time to teach a workshop on holding therapy. During that class, which I attended, he asked for a volunteer to demonstrate on.

****PLEASE NOTE THE FOLLOWING IS SOMEWHAT GRAPHIC****

His volunteer was a seasoned Exodus leader. This leader was instructed by Mr. Cohen to lay on the floor and spread his legs wide open. Dr. Cohen then laid down on top of this other man face to face and embraced him.

Mr. Cohen made the comment, “This might cause some stimulation. However, what goes up must come down, I always say.” He made other vulgar comments of this nature.

Mr. Cohen came out of homosexuality as did the leader that he violated. This leader was so taken back and embarrassed by the event that he wondered if his ministry status was at stake.

I joined the board of directors of Exodus that year and I made it very clear that I wanted to ensure that Dr. Cohen was taken to task for this breach of trust. A letter was sent to him and to my knowledge he had some  conversations with Bob Davies, my predecessor. The tapes of his workshop were pulled and he was told that he could not teach at any future conferences.

However, his book continued to be sold by the Exodus office until I was hired and I stopped that, as well.

It is because of all that I have shared and more that Exodus International does not and will not endorse or work with Mr. Cohen. His recent lack of judgment in the area of media interviews has only served to reinforce my belief that he is not someone Exodus should highlight as a valuable resource to the people that look to us.

As for the practice of holding therapy, under my leadership we decided to adopt the NARTH (www.narth.com) position banning our ministries from practicing this technique. Regardless of any benefits that this therapy is purported to have, I firmly believe that it is a stumbling block for all parties involved.

I appreciate each one of you and as someone who battled homosexuality myself, I believe it is my obligation to only promote the ministries and resources that will bring forth life long term and not simply every resource out there.

God bless each and every one of you,

Alan

Alan Chambers

President

Exodus International

The incident has become a part of ex-gay lore, although this may be the first mention of it in a public forum. I first heard about it at a Narth conference, when I asked an Exodus old-timer why Richard Cohen and Exodus did not seem to collaborate. My informant told this story as an eyewitness and indicated that the Exodus leadership had wrestled with how to handle it. And as the letter above notes, Exodus leaders determined that such methods were at odds with their views of how Christian ministry should operate and led to this Exodus statement on their website:

Statement on Richard Cohen

Exodus International does not endorse the work of Richard Cohen or the methods utilized in his practice. Some of the techniques Mr. Cohen employs could be detrimental to an individual’s understanding of healthy relational boundaries and disruptive to the psychological and emotional development of men and women seeking clinical counsel and aid.

For his part, Richard has said that he no longer does counseling but rather focuses on counselor training such as a recent one in Ireland and one to come in Mexico in early December.

A anonymous Mankind Project member mailed me what was labeled a handbook for leaders of Integration groups. Integration groups follow up the New Warriors Training Adventure. According to the manual, these exercises are

for the use of I-Groups that have reached a proficient level of self-facilitation. The value in many of them will be realized only by a deep commitment on behalf of the group to process the feelings evoked.

There are some which seem innocuous enough such as writing oneself a letter, volunteering for charities and staffing a NW training.

Others seem more provocative and sound a lot like Gestalt inspired group therapy techniques. Here is one that would likely be close to Richard Cohen’s heart.

I.2. Fathering

One of the powerful scenes we set up on the weekend is based on being held in the arms of the good father. Have men on their own write the things they wanted to hear from their fathers but never did. Have men bring the letters to the next meeting. If at all possible arrange to have elders or men from your community show up the next week to hold these men and read the letters to them. If men from outside the I-Group are not available use the men from the group. This basically is a re-play of the set up we use on the weekend. The difference is that men may have more difficulty dropping into a similar place not having just completed a piece of work. Try not to put weekend expectations on this process but simply see it for what is presented in the moment. Work with men to increase their awareness of body response. Resistance, grief or passive acceptance are all felt in the body. Another option is to have men choose the man they want to role-play from the community at large, then bring him along to the I-Group. This also has the potential to identify the men in the community most admired for their fathering abilities.

I suppose if I allowed myself to be held, I might experience a sense of dependency. However, I submit this could happen to almost anyone, whether the man had fathering issues or not. The situation makes it more likely that such feelings would be elicited. It is more likely that I would feel tense and uncomfortable. A person trained to look for these reactions as a defense might then say I was defensive and thus clearly had father issues that need resolved. Only those in the NMTA can speak to this. I have been around the therapy world long enough to know counselors who look at all client reactions as theory-guided indications of pathology.

Here are a couple of others that would be a bit more intimate:

I.3. Massage

Pair up the men in the group and announce that this evening we will give massages. After the first half of the men have received a massage tell the men no more massages will be given. Lead a feeling check, first with the men who gave the massage and then with the men who received.

1. Would you have given knowing you would not receive?

2. Is there a sense of betrayal, and with whom?

3. The men who received. Do you feel you got away with something? Or do you feel like you are beholden to the man you received from? If so why?

4. Let this check in progress wherever it goes. How does this reflect our expectations when we offer some gift of service?

I.4. Changing Clothes

This exercise may also belong in the play section, but it’s definitely a stretch when it comes to intimacy. The set up goes like this. Have all the men remove their clothing and then have each man choose someone else’s clothes and put them on. Once everyone is dressed assume the characteristics of the man whose clothes you wear. Check in with one another and decide on an exercise that will give an opportunity for interaction with one another. Stay in role through the entire evening. Leave time at the end to process the feelings that have come up.

1. How accurate was the role-playing?

2. Did men see a different side of themselves as a result of seeing other men portray them?

Don’t neglect the hurt feelings. Exaggeration will cause a certain amount of misunderstanding. Give one another feedback on projection and shadow, how it appeared and how it was dealt with.

I suppose there is no law against people getting together and doing this sort of thing, but these exercises sound like they would be at home in a Gestalt and/or Jungian psychodrama paradigm. The creators of these exercises probably feel they are eliciting something buried or hidden in each man. However, I wonder if the demand characteristics set up by the exercises cannot help but bring predictable reactions.

As a probably weak illustration, consider this picture. If you had to tell a story about it, what feelings would you say it would elicit?

I would not be at all surprised if a depressing story was told in response to this adaptation of a picture from the Thematic Apperception Test. Would this mean the story teller was a depressed person? Perhaps, but there is no way to know since the stimulus here naturally elicits depression. Similarly, I think the I-group exercises may elicit a variety of emotions and reactions which may or may not be reflective of underlying issues or problems. My thinking here is influenced by the classic social psychology experiments such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies on obedience. At this point, I am not making a solidified judgment, rather I am clumsily attempting to articulate a social psychological perspective on the NWTA and related activities.

I have not even started on the Jungian shadow thing; more to come on that topic.

Keep the dialogue going…

Here is an article that bring together several topics covered here on the blog. The Healthy Self-Expressions program works to curb sexual cruising in Salt Lake City and is run by Pride Counseling, a GLBT oriented counseling center. Many men are married and identify as straight.

Buie says many of the program’s participants identify themselves as straight. Many are also active members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and roughly 40 percent are married, he says. The average length of those marriages is 23 years. Two of the men with whom he is currently working have been married for more than 40 years…

…”Just because you have an attraction to men doesn’t mean you have to be a slave to those attractions,” he says. “As a therapist I try to encourage people to be honest with themselves.”

Since my initial post on the New Warriors Training Adventure, I have been asking around for reactions to the weekend. Also, I have been in contact with a large group of people who have attended one of the initiations. There is much secrecy surrounding this organization and the tone often borders on fear. I plan a series of posts on this topic to provide some information about what has been a fairly popular recommendation within reparative therapy circles. In fact, a couple of years ago, there was a significant rift in the New Warriors about a local branch that hosted a talk by Joseph Nicolosi. More on that in a later post.

I start with an account by an alum of the weekend and the follow up program, used by permission but anonymously. This describes reactions to the “welcome” offered by the staff of NWTA.

My NWTA

When you arrive at the NWTA all your possessions are taken away from you and searched. I didn’t want to hand over my camera because it cost a lot of money back then and I didn’t want them to have it.

They asked me if I had a camera and I said no. Then they opened my duffle bag and emptied everything on the floor and searched it. They opened my sleeping bag too. They found the camera and were angry that I lied to them. They took everything away, including tooth brush and tooth paste. (You know after all these years it’s still a little painful to remember this.) The only thing we were allowed to keep was an extra change of clothing, extra shoes, sleeping bag and pillow. Everything else was violently taken away from us.

After they searched my belongings, then they searched me. They did a pat down frisk, like the police do to a criminal. I was told to give up wallet, car keys, cell phone, money, jewelry, wedding ring, everything. We were not allowed to keep one thing on our bodies except our clothing.

I felt like a common criminal. The whole time they yelled at us, degraded us. They wouldn’t let us look at the other men. We could only look where they told us too look. The whole time this was done by men who were dressed in total black. They also had black makeup on their faces to conceal their identities.

After this we were all taken to a small damp room and instructed to sit on a damp concrete floor. This was some kind of storage shed. There was no heat. This was in November. There was only one candle for light. After all the men were taken into this room, someone came in and yelled and cussed at us and he kicked over the candle, putting it out. We were then locked in this dark, totally lightless room for several hours.

I was cold and I was in pain sitting on the concrete floor. I didn’t know who was around me. I was separated from my friend that I came to the NWTA with. I didn’t know where he was and I wasn’t allowed to be by him. I began to cry. At last a door opened and we were allowed to go out. It was night and there was total darkness in the sky. We arrived at the NWTA at about 5 pm and it was light. Now it was after 9 pm and dark. Four hours in that lightless room. It was like I was kidnapped by a gang of terrorists.

I am aware this program is controversial and some who like NWTA might say that this is an unfair negative appraisal. However, the consistency of those who I am in contact with is significant and matches the stories of others who are more positive about the weekend. I provide this and future posts for information purposes.

Another blog that analyzes human potential groups has picked up on this issue a bit here…

Hoping your Thanksgiving is at least this much fun…