Category: reparative therapy

Lesley Pilkington tells British radio being gay is about “daddy issues”

According to reports, a threat against a witness for UK reparative Lesley Pilkington has postponed her hearing before the British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy. I have heard through sources there that the threat is being investigated. Ms. Pilkington is being scrutinized due to her statements about homosexuality made to Patrick Strudwick, a journalist who went undercover to find out how a reparative therapist operated.

On the 17th, Ms. Pilkington went on radio to explain her approach and discuss the situation. Click the link to hear the broadcast.

In it, she refers to the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) as the largest reparative therapy organization in the world. I suppose it is, but she doesn’t mention that there are fewer than 100o members, with a smaller subset actually having advanced mental health degrees.

When asked by the host how one can convert someone from gay to straight, Ms. Pilkington said surveys show that “daddy issues,” namely relationship with father is the main factor involved. She says that the bond is the problem, but then hastens to add that “we’re not blaming parents, I am not blaming any father at all.” Hearing the contradiction, the host asks if Pilkington’s husband failed their son (he is gay), and she answered, “we don’t use words like that.” However, she then says, “there were serious mistakes” and adds that there was “a failure at some level.”

This kind of double speak is typical of my interactions with reparative therapists. Pilkington says reparative therapists don’t use the word fail, and then she uses it in the next breath. Reparative therapists often say they are not blaming the parents, and then proceed to do so.

Mrs. Pilkington then says she seeks to bring healing in her therapy because “there will always be pain.” No doubt in any therapy situation, one can find something that is painful. However, finding pain in the life of someone who is gay does not mean that it relates to the cause of the sexual orientation. Furthermore, many gays with warm, loving parents would have to manufacture problems in order to meet up with Mrs. Pilkington’s expectations.

Finally, Pilkington conflates spiritual healing with the repair of some kind of parent-child break. She believes God can heal the relationship problems which she is sure are at the root of the same-sex attraction. Sadly, when the religious techniques don’t work to effect change, as is often true, the result can be despair and a sense of failure. I know of young men who have become disillusioned with their faith, leaving it since it promised change without delivering on the promise.

British reparative therapist may lose professional association membership

Fallout from the Patrick Strudwick sting continues. Strudwick presented himself falsely as a client who desired to change his sexual orientation to two therapists, Paul Miller and Lesley Pilkington. Richard Cohen acolyte, Paul Miller apparently avoided sanctions from his professional medical body. Now Pilkington’s case is being decided by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). In the UK, counsellors are not regulated directly by the government, but can become members of charity professional associations such as the BACP. I suspect Ms. Pilkington could still practice if she lost her standing in the BACP but it would cast a shadow over her.

If the news account is accurate, one can hear the reparative theory loud and clear:

Mrs Pilkington says her method of therapy – Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (SOCE) – is legitimate and effective. The therapy is practised by a handful of psychotherapists in Britain.

Mrs Pilkington, whose 29-year-old son is homosexual, said she was motivated by a desire to help others. “He [my son] is heterosexual. He just has a homosexual problem,” she said last week.

Mrs Pilkington has accused Patrick Strudwick, the award-winning journalist who secretly taped her, of entrapment. On the tape, Mr Strudwick asks Mrs Pilkington if she views homosexuality as “a mental illness, an addiction or an antireligious phenomenon”. She replies: “It is all of that.”

And then…

“We say everybody is heterosexual but some people have a homosexual problem. Nobody is born gay. It is environmental; it is in the upbringing.”

The SOCE method involves behavioural, psychoanalytical and religious techniques. Homosexual men are sent on weekends away with heterosexual men to “encourage their masculinity” and “in time to develop healthy relationships with women”, said Mrs Pilkington.

Mrs. Pilkington, who has a gay son, sounds like a nice lady. Perhaps, she has helped people with other types of problems. However, on this issue, it sounds to me like she could use some assistance. It also sounds like her objectivity might be effected by her personal situation.

In any event, I am ambivilent about this situation. I agree that professional associations may intervene where false information and potentially harmful techniques are being offered. However, she was set up by the journalist who did not actually participate in counseling. Those opposing her might have a hard time proving actual harm to Mr. Strudwick. If other real clients who say they were harmed have come forward, I think that would change the deliberations. 

Instead of removing her membership, the BACP could ask her to complete additional courses in sexuality and perhaps consult with religiously compatible therapists who do not use reparative therapy. Even if Mrs. Pilkington escapes penalty, as Paul Miller seems to have, the BACP could use the incident to advance a balanced position, such as this one from the APA.

I am not a part of NARTH

UPDATE (Monday morning): The references to me have been removed from the CP article…

That’s the best title I could think of after reading this article in the Christian Post: Ex-gay Convention Draws Protestors in Penn.

I suspect Stephanie Samuel just doesn’t know the area well enough to know why the way she wrote her article is quite misleading. She wrote:

NARTH, an organization with faith-based views on homosexuality, acknowledges on its website that there are those who are comfortable with their homosexual identity. It values an individual’s right to choose. But it also upholds the rights of individuals with unwanted homosexual attraction to receive effective psychological care and the right of professionals to offer that care.

Those experiencing unwanted homosexual desires and who are conflicted by their values deserve treatment and spiritual counsel, NARTH maintains.

Several faith-based groups have created treatment to help those who do not want to embrace the homosexual lifestyle. Warren Throckmorton and Mark Yarhous, (sic) both psychology experts, have crafted a framework, Sexual Identity Therapy: Proactive Framework for Managing Sexual Identity Conflicts, focused on conflicting religious values.

While NARTH encourages therapy, it maintains that it is a professional organization that only promotes practices have been proven scientifically effective. NARTH urges against claims that there is “scientific knowledge” that settles the issue of homosexuality. Instead, it encourages a broad view based upon diverse understandings of the family, of core human identity, and the meaning and purpose of human sexuality.

She also wrote about my work against bullying which seems odd in an article about NARTH. Since NARTH has not commented on bullying, it seems out of place to even mention what other groups are doing.

It is the weekend so no changes are going to be made to the article until Monday but I did write a comment on the CP wall. Here it is:

The Sexual Identity Therapy framework (sitframework.com) is listed above in such a way that a reader might assume it is connected with or consistent with the work of NARTH. However, there is no connection. NARTH advocates sexual reorientation whereas, our framework does not advocate orientation change. Our framework is in keeping with the guidance of the APA and other professional societies whereas NARTH work has been questioned by those same groups.

While I appreciate the mention of my work against bullying, there is again no connection between that work and the NARTH organization. If anything, NARTH promotes harmful stereotypes about gay people which do not contribute to solutions to the problems of bullying.

I repeat, I regret the mention of my work in sexual identity therapy and bullying in the same context as mention of the work of NARTH. For more information or clarifications of our work, please see www.sitframework.com and www.wthrockmorton.com or contact me at [email protected].

You can read more about NARTH here (where and why I decided not to attend the 2006 NARTH conference) and here and reparative therapy here.

NARTH 2010: Schoenewolf returns

About this time four years ago, I was debating about whether to attend the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) conference. I was scheduled to talk about the Sexual Identity Therapy framework. However, I decided not to go (and Scientific Advisory Board member, David Blakeslee, resigned from NARTH) after a controversy broke out over an article on the NARTH website by Gerald Schoenewolf, titled Gay Rights and Political Correctness: A Brief History.  

In essence, Schoenewolf argued that civil rights movements simplified complex issues, one of which was slavery. He wrote:

With all due respect, there is another way, or other ways, to look at the race issue in America. It could be pointed out, for example, that Africa at the time of slavery was still primarily a jungle, as yet uncivilized or industrialized. Life there was savage, as savage as the jungle for most people, and that it was the Africans themselves who first enslaved their own people. They sold their own people to other countries, and those brought to Europe, South America, America, and other countries, were in many ways better off than they had been in Africa. But if one even begins to say these things one is quickly shouted down as though one were a complete madman.

Schoenewolf attributed the civil rights movement to Marxism and then made a leap to the modern feminist and gay civil rights movements. NARTH was pretty slow to react and then defensive when they did. Schoenewolf’s article was eventually removed, without a significant rationale or apology from NARTH. The LA Times and other outlets covered the events and fallout. 

This year, Gerald Schoenewolf returns to the NARTH schedule with a talk sure to delight the home crowd – The Suppression of Psychoanalysis in the Treatment of Homosexuality. This sounds like a lament that psychoanalysts  are now discouraged from considering homosexuality to be a treatable condition. Ironically, the first suppressor of psychoanalysis in the treatment of homosexuality was Freud. In 1935, Freud corresponded with the mother of a homosexual man who had written him looking for psychoanalytic help for her gay son. While he said a few things to hearten the Reparatives, he was not ebullient about the prospects for analysis (Click link for a scan of the letter).

Dear Mrs. X (April 9, 1935)

I gather from your letter that your son is a homosexual. I am most impressed by the fact that you do not mention this term yourself in your information about him. May I question you, why do you avoid it? Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty too. If you do not believe me, read the books of Havelock Ellis.

By asking me if I can help, you mean, I suppose, if I can abolish homosexuality and make normal heterosexuality take its place. The answer is, in a general way, we cannot promise to achieve it. In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies which are present in every homosexual, in the majority of cases it is no more possible. It is a question of the quality and the age of the individual. The result of the treatment cannot be predicted.

What analysis can do for your son runs in a different line. If he is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency, whether he remains a homosexual or gets changed. If you make up your mind that he should have analysis with me (I don’t expect you will!!) he has to come over to Vienna. I have no intention of leaving here. However, don’t neglect to give me your answer.

Sincerely yours with kind wishes,

Freud

P.S. I did not find it difficult to read your handwriting. Hope you will not find my writing and my English a harder task.

Source:

Freud, Sigmund, “Letter to an American mother”, American Journal of Psychiatry, 107 (1951): p. 787.

Sounds like he was suppressing her expectations for psychoanalysis. While we might quarrel with points of Freud’s statements here, his words are not a ringing endorsement for the treatment of homosexuality in the manner proposed by reparative therapists.

American College of Pediatricians answers critics; removes Rekers

The American College of Pediatricians is the small breakaway group from the larger American Academy of Pediatrics. The ACP maintains the FactsAboutYouth website which I have critiqued here and which is the subject of this Minnesota City Pages article. Gary Remafedi is the main subject of the article, although it mentions Francis Collins letter as well as the concerns I expressed in my post on the subject.

In short, the article revives the request from Remafedi to alter the way the ACP reports his work:

The ACP argues that schools shouldn’t support gay teens because they’re probably just confused. “Most adolescents who experience same-sex attraction…no longer experience such attractions at age 25,” the letter says, citing a 1992 study by Remafedi.

Except that’s not what Remafedi’s research suggested at all. His work showed that kids who are confused about their sexuality eventually sort it out—meaning many of them accept being gay.

“What was so troubling was that these were fellow doctors, fellow pediatricians,” Remafedi says. “They knew better, and they have the same ethical responsibilities to their patients that I do, but they deliberately distorted my research for malicious purposes.”

On their website, the ACP has answered their critics. In letters to Francis Collins and Remafedi, the ACP justifies their work. The ACP also mentions my critique but did not respond to it. They say here that I did not contact them. I did not contact the headquarters but I did contact some of the committee members with various concerns. Their rebuttals are not persuasive to me.

In a related development, the ACP has removed George Rekers from their website and psychosocial committee. According to Rachel Maddow’s blog, the move was because Rekers won’t answer their contacts and not because they are distancing themselves from his actions. The ACP added NARTH luminary Neil Whitehead to the committee.