Category: Warren Throckmorton

I guess change is possible.

To those with a mind for history, a question. Has a president ever been the subject of praise songs? Remember this?

In an op-ed dated today but available online over the weekend, the Washington Times assails Obama safe-schools appointee, Kevin Jennings for his handling of a 15-year old student’s sexual revelations when Jennings was a young teacher.

According to Mr. Jennings’ own description in a new audiotape discovered by Fox News, the 15-year-old boy met the “older man” in a “bus station bathroom” and was taken to the older man’s home that night.

FOX News has also reported on this and pointed to that recording. That audiotape was recorded by someone who attended a speech Jennings gave in Iowa in 2000 and then given to me. The relevant clip is here. You can read more about Brewster and the controversy in the article, Remembering Brewster and in this prior post on the topic.

There is another wrinkle to this story. It appears that Brewster had a name change in 2006 for Jennings book, Mama’s Boy, Preacher’s Son: A Memoir. Below, I have excerpted the passages in the book where he discusses a boy named Robertson, who has issues like Brewster. The first two selections are from pages 161-162. Jennings, a young teacher at Concord School, answers the boy’s concerns in the same way as he answered Brewster. Continue reading “The saga of Kevin Jennings and Brewster: Enter Robertson”

Last Friday, I wrote about father-son estrangement and the new book by Joseph Nicolosi, Shame and attachment loss: The practical work of reparative therapy. Since then, I have looked off and on for illustrations of father-son estrangement in current events, literature and movies. Others are sending illustrations via email as well. Feel free to add examples in the comments section.

In these stories, both fictional and real life, the vast majority of abandoned or injured sons are straight. Of course, this is not research, but I reason that if the father-son disruption theme was so tied to homosexuality, I would find homosexuality in the sons. However, it looks like father-son estrangement is a straight guy problem.

Take this story, “Healing the Father-Son Wound” from straight guy John Lee.

Some of you may know what a rocky relationship I have had with my father. I was raised in an alcoholic home where there was tremendous physical and emotional abuse. I have written about this in my books as a way to heal and hopefully to help others. Because of my wound, I wandered through the swamps and deserts of a ten-year period of estrangement from my father. We didn’t see each other or talk during that time.

Lee goes on to describe a distant, shame-filled relationship which eventually resolved due to Lee’s efforts. This man was clearly “delight deprived,” as Nicolosi describes the typical situation he reconstructs from the narratives of his clients. It seems clear that Lee perceived his father as someone who fit the narcissistic, shaming father Nicolosi describes in Shame and Attachment Loss. On one visit, accompanied by his wife, to his father, he knew his dad was going to shame him.

My third visit was just before I came down with Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. Susan and I had spent about two hours at my parents’ house and were getting ready to leave when my father said, “Susan, did John ever tell you about the time…”

I froze in terror. I thought my dad was going to do to Susan what he always did to anyone who liked or loved me– tell a story that would make me look silly at best, stupid at worst.

As he began to talk, I began to shrink.

This sounds like it could come out of a reparative therapist’s casebook. Lee goes on to say that on this occasion, his father praised his son, which was completely unexpected. However, it seems clear that Lee’s historical feelings about his dad did not involve “shared delight.”

Remember that Nicolosi made inferences about the childhoods of both gay and straight males when he said recently:

In other words, that fact remains that if you traumatize a child in a particular way you will create a homosexual condition. If you do not traumatize a child, he will be heterosexual. If you do not traumatize a child in a particular way, he will be heterosexual. The nature of that trauma is an early attachment break during the bonding phase with the father.

There are many of these stories where straight males clearly felt traumatized (e.g., ignored, distanced, hated, unloved, etc.) by their fathers and did not become gay.  The experience of father-son estrangement seems universal with the longing for connection universal as well.

Related posts:

Shame and Attachment Loss: Going from bad to worse

Shame and attachment loss: Reparative therapy and father-son estrangement

Also read Fathers, Sons and Homosexuality for a father’s view of the reparative thesis.

Things that make you go, hmmmm….

Check out this story of “change.”

Case Report

The patient, a 57-year-old right-handed man, sustained his first cerebral vascular accident in the right middle cerebral artery region at the age of 45, which resulted in right-sided hemiparesis that resolved completely within 3 months. He continued to run his private business successfully while living with his mother.

The patient lost his father in early childhood. There was no evidence of an emotional or conduct disorder during school years, and the patient eventually obtained his university degree. He continued to manage his successful practice until he sustained the second cerebral vascular accident in the left middle cerebral artery region at age 53.

The patient became aware of his homosexual orientation in his early teens and had several gay partners. He suffered a major depressive episode at age 26 that resolved within a few months. He also had a diagnosis of excessive harmful use of alcohol, but there was no evidence of dependence.

The patient started complaining of his changed personality and heterosexual orientation 6 months after his second stroke. At the same time he complained of excessive mood swings and changed interests. He became preoccupied with photography and had a successful photographic exhibition a year after his second stroke. His sexual orientation remained heterosexual 4 years following the second stroke, and he preferred to describe himself as bisexual because of his previous homosexual orientation.

Discussion

The mechanism by which a person acquires his sexual orientation is complex and ranges from pure psychological theories to more complex biological concepts. Our patient was aware of his homosexual orientation beginning in his early teens. He always enjoyed his gay relationships and had had at some point a live-in partner. He grew up with an absent father and had a strong bond with his mother. He went back to live with his mother after separating from his partner 4 years before his first stroke. It is unlikely that his psychological reaction to his first and/or second stroke could explain his altered sexual orientation, and his sexuality was accepted by his social network and family members.

Taking into consideration the interval between his first and second stroke, it is likely that an organic process within the left middle cerebral artery region is the cause of his altered sexual orientation.

The sexual needs of patients suffering from a brain injury are centered on hyper- and hyposexuality rather than altered sexual orientation. The alteration of sexual orientation raises serious challenges to patients and their care. It may be essential to address the issue of sexual orientation in assessing patient needs following brain injury in addition to other possible behavioral changes that might be encountered.

This is one of those head-scratchers that make you wonder what role “the middle cerebral artery region” plays in sexuality. I have had no chance to look into this but wanted post it due to the nature of the report.

Something has been bothering me, running around in my head since I did the brief series of posts on Dean Byrd’s review of LDS book, In Quiet Desperation (here, here and here).

In their review of Ty Mansfield’s book, Byrd et al make this statement:

The book inadvertently limits the power of the Atonement in the lives of people who struggle with homosexual attraction. As professionals with many combined years of practice in treating those with unwanted homosexual attraction, we have witnessed changes in the lives of many of these individuals, and the epiphanies have been many.

Like all emotional challenges, the outcome data has ranges of success. What is clear is that when the same standard applied to treatment outcomes of similarly situated difficulties is applied to the treatment outcomes of those with unwanted homosexuality, the results are remarkably similar. There is much in the professional treatment protocols that are compatible with the restored gospel. Appropriate professional help along with the healing powers of the gospel have repeatedly convinced us that there is no struggle for which the Atonement is not sufficient.

There are several things that bother me about these two paragraphs, but for now I want to focus on this sentence:

What is clear is that when the same standard applied to treatment outcomes of similarly situated difficulties is applied to the treatment outcomes of those with unwanted homosexuality, the results are remarkably similar.

Despite a claim of clarity, nothing is particularly clear to me about treatment outcomes for “unwanted homosexuality.” It is not clear to me what other conditions are “similarly situated” in comparison to same-sex attraction. This was not explained.

However, my thoughts about outcomes ran to the studies reported in the NARTH literature review of sexual reorientation, the Jones and Yarhouse study and the usual reparative therapy contention that change results were along a continuum – one-third dramatically changed, one-third somewhat changed and one-third not changed. However, whatever numbers one likes, one cannot put it in context without a control or comparison situation. Another term for this in this context is spontaneous remission. Don’t some people change in various ways for reasons unrelated to therapy?

Certainly that is the case for other situations which are the proper focus of therapy. Note this abstract for a study of improvement rated by patients at a community mental health center in Utah.

It was hypothesized that outpatient psychotherapy in a mental health center would result in an improvement rate of 65% or more, a spontaneous remission rate of 36% or less, and a difference of at least 29% from gain in improvement due to therapy. The analysis of 201 follow-up questionnaires supported all three hypothesis. A five-year follow-up questionnaire provided evidence for external validity in the form of a correlation between original improvement rate and subsequent need for outpatient treatment and inpatient treatment. The results were interpreted as being significant evidence for the efficacy of psychotherapy and for the validity of self-report method of measuring improvement and spontaneous remission.

Note that the rate of improvement was significantly higher than expected based on a spontaneous improvement rate of 36% or less. The authors had reasons to predict this rate and took it into account when assessing the meaning of a 65% improvement rate overall. 

My point is not to compare sexual reorientation to mental health improvement near Salt Lake City, Utah. However, I want to raise the issue that considering spontaneous improvement is important when one is communicating the meaning of changes reported without a control group. There are a couple of studies which have looked at spontaneous change, although none would be directly comparable to any current studies of sexual reorientation. Diamond found spontaneous change in her study of 100 women. In 2005, Kinnish, Strassburg and Turner reported varying levels of sexual orientation flexibility in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Their report found that 19% of men and 17% of women in their sample moved in a heterosexual direction (from gay to bisexual,  or bisexual to straight — none went from exclusively gay to exclusively straight). In 2003, Dickson, Paul and Herbison reported spontaneous change in a New Zealand cohort. The chart of movement can be viewed here. Note that 5 of 15 went from some same-sex attraction to only heterosexual attraction and none from “major attraction to the same sex” to straight.  

While these studies are suggestive, they cannot be directly compared to existing studies of sexual reorientation.  However, the fact that some men with some same-sex attraction and many women might shift spontaneously should be taken into account when thinking about the role of therapy in mediating sexual orientation change.

The Dickson study is intriguing in that the results can be interpreted as supporting the existence of different types of homosexual orientation. About their results, the authors note in the abstract:

These findings show that much same-sex attraction is not exclusive and is unstable in early adulthood, especially among women. The proportion of women reporting some same-sex attraction in New Zealand is high compared both to men, and to women in the UK and US. These observations, along with the variation with education, are consistent with a large role for the social environment in the acknowledgement of same-sex attraction. The smaller group with major same-sex attraction, which changed less over time, and did not differ by education, is consistent with a basic biological dimension to sexual attraction. Overall these findings argue against any single explanation for homosexual attraction.

To me, this is a reasonable hypothesis. I believe there are multiple pathways to adult sexual orientation and for some, apparently the social context means more than for others. Also, for some the trait may continue to shift around through life with changing circumstances, yet for others, not at all.

UPDATE: In an odd attack piece, the gay website Queerty reads this post (actually the Crosswalk version) as a kind of strange defense of change therapies or change of orientation in general.  A commenter named Timothy (is it our Timothy?) gets the point, but whoever writes for them and the commenters thus far over there are clueless.