Category: Warren Throckmorton

Late Friday afternoon might not be the best time to post this but…

I want to announce the new Sexual Identity Therapy Framework website and invite people to join the SIT Framework list serv.

Here is the listserv portal:

Click to join sexualidentitytherapy

The discussions will be geared primarily to mental health professionals but interested ministry leaders and others may find them to be of value. There may be some overlap with the blog but there will be unique material as well.

Well, maybe not your brain but this article is an intriguing review of some research relating to brain scans of sexual arousal. I have not examined the original sources yet (plan to) but wanted to put this up for some TGIF reading.

Perhaps the author was unaware of the Safron et al study but I am going to see if there are points of connection.

Thanks, Lynn David for the tip.

The York Daily Record ran a story in the September 6 print edition and then online on the 8th which examined the American Psychological Association report as well as the Jones and Yarhouse study. The article by Melissa Nann Burke included interviews from local Exodus ministries as well. Some good things here…

The men and women who come to Dan Keefer with moral distress about being gay or bisexual often seek to change because their sexual attractions conflict with their religious beliefs.

Keefer, who works at the Christian counseling center Day Seven Ministries in Lancaster, tells the men he can’t “turn them straight,” but he can help them work toward a way of living that’s congruent with their faith, he said.

“We approach it from the angle that ‘there’s hope for you,'” Keefer said.

Efforts might include choosing celibacy, learning to resist sexual urges or viewing the struggle as a way to draw closer to God. Some even go on to marry, Keefer said.

Note that hope and belief congruence are not mutually exclusive. One does not need to promote change as a means to instill hope for a value congruent life.

About the congruence model, Burke continues

For years, such an approach departed from the trend in counseling that encouraged clients to affirm their gay identities and embrace their sexuality.

That was troubling for counselors such as Dr. Warren Throckmorton, a psychology professor at a Christian college in Mercer County.

He encouraged the 150,000-member American Psychological Association to acknowledge that, for some people, religious identity is such an important part of their lives, it transcends sexual orientation.

“A number of us said many evangelicals are never going to affirm this. Is there any guidance for those of us dealing with them?” said Throckmorton, who teaches at Grove City College.

In a significant departure, the APA last month said it’s ethical for mental health professionals to help some people reject their same-sex urges. Indeed, it can be beneficial.

The association said counselors should explain that homosexuality isn’t a mental or developmental disorder and that there’s insufficient evidence that therapy can change sexual orientation.

I agree with the APA that some harm can come from reparative therapy.

Concerns about so-called “reparative therapy” prompted the two-year study by a task force of academics and counselors, who noted that efforts to produce change could be harmful and induce depression or suicidal tendencies.

Throckmorton said he’s worked with clients who did find harm in “change” therapies — most notably broken familial relationships.

“My particular concern is psychologists who tell people they have homosexual tendencies because of bad parenting,” he said. “I’ve worked with families who’ve been ripped apart over this.”

Here is a rather candid statement by an Exodus affiliated person:

One group that promotes the possibility of change is Exodus International, a network of ministries whose message is “freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus Christ.”

In the midstate, visitors to Exodus’ Web site might be referred to Tim Winters of Elizabethtown, a lay member at Hope Community Church near Mount Joy.

“The official stance of the people at these Web sites is that they’ve changed forever. Officially, they’ll say that you turn and stay turned, and you’ve gone on to another plane. But in reality, that’s not a lot of people that happens to,” Winters said.

“You can’t say a magic prayer and make it go away. I’ve known many gay people who have walked away from the lifestyle. But it’s behavioral modification. It’s choosing to do one thing over another.”

While I wouldn’t use the term “lifestyle” to refer to gay identification, I do believe I get what this man is saying. He is describing what the APA described as “sexual orientation identity” which does change and reflects what the APA called “telic congruence.”

The quote from the psychologist indicates where the ongoing work is needed now that the work of the APA task force is complete.

Dr. Elizabeth Revell, a psychologist in Hellam Township, said she probably wouldn’t work with a client who asked her to help him shunt his sexuality to the side.

“Mine is a more gay-affirming approach. If the person says I don’t want to be gay or lesbian, I don’t do those therapies,” she said.

“The concern I have with the ‘re-orientation therapies’ is they start out by promising something (change), instead of listening to what the person’s saying they need.”

Why wouldn’t she work with the client? Because she is gay-affirming. This woman should refer to another counselor in those situations. She seems to conflate “re-orientation therapies” with what the APA recommends. I wonder if she has read the report?

The article concludes with more from Jones and Yarhouse.

Jones said the task force overlooked noteworthy research suggesting otherwise. He and a colleague last month presented a study that followed people trying to change their sexual orientation through Exodus International programs.

Jones and Mark A. Yarhouse, a psychologist at Regent University, concluded that sexual orientation may be “changable for some;” however, those in the study who reported a change to heterosexuality stipulated they weren’t without homosexual arousal.

The study also concluded that concerns over the likely harm caused by re-orientation therapy to be overstated.

“We don’t know what causes (same-sex attractions). We don’t know what the probabilities are of change. It’s a very complex situation,” Jones said.

“We ought to be a lot more hesitant about making assertions about scientific conclusions.”

With all due respect to Stanton, I think the APA report was cautious. The task force concluded that the evidence was insufficient to recommend that therapists tell clients will change with therapy. Actually, given their study, I think the APA pessimism is warranted. Where are the controlled studies showing levels of change (not satisfaction) is likely? Their study did not provide a control group which would allow an examination of the role of spontaneous change.

(PS – to readers, it seems that the end of this post was truncated by the blog software. I am looking in to where it went.)

Discover magazine has an online article out today which covers the APA report, NARTH and the Jones and Yarhouse study.

Here are some excerpts:

Joseph Nicolosi, a psychologist in Encino, Calif., says he can rid adults, teens, and even children of homosexuality. For nearly 30 years, he has offered a “psychodynamic” form of reparative therapy for people—mostly men—seeking to change their sexual orientation.

“If [a patient] can accept his bodily homoerotic experience while staying connected to the therapist,” he wrote in “The Paradox of Self-Acceptance,” “the sexual feeling soon transforms into something else: the recognition of deeper, pain-generated emotional needs which have nothing to do with sexuality.”

He cites the following case: A 43-year-old married accountant was recalling another man that he had seen at the airport while on a business trip. “This had awakened his sexual fantasies and dreams. I asked him to hold onto that image and observe his bodily sensations while staying connected to me. As he did, he felt an intense sexual longing. But as he followed that fantasy through an imaginary sexual scenario, quite unexpectedly, he then experienced an embodied shift to sadness, longing, and emptiness. In tears, he spoke of his sense of deep unworthiness. ‘I would just love him to be my friend! He’s the kind of guy that I always wanted to be close to. How much I just want to be friends with a guy like him.'”

This describes an aspect of the approach advocated in Nicolosi’s new book, Shame and Attachment Loss. People I have seen who have been through this approach describe it as being a chase for making sense of what they eventually come to see as an automatic reaction in search of a justification. Having said that, perhaps this gives some men a greater sense of control over their automatic impulses.

The center of this so-called “reparative therapy” is the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). Its membership—around 1,100 people, according to current NARTH president Julie Harren Hamilton—is dwarfed by the APA’s 150,000 members.

Treatments follow from the assertion that homosexuality is not an innate trait, but rather a result of childhood trauma and lack of attachment to members of the same sex.

“The treatment is different for men and women,” Nicolosi, one of NARTH’s former presidents, told DISCOVER. “The principles are the same—we find that for the lesbian, there is a traumatic attachment loss with the mother, and for the males it’s a traumatic attachment loss with the fathers. We believe the male homosexual should work with a male therapist, and the lesbian should work with a woman.”

It is always difficult to know who Nicolosi is referring to when he says, “we.” Is he referring to NARTH or those who are reparative therapists, or the royal we, referring to himself? However, Hamilton seems to distance NARTH from the singular approach used by Nicolosi when she says:

These treatments take on several approaches. “Psychological care for individuals with unwanted homosexual attractions includes a variety of approaches. There are many paths that lead into and out of homosexuality,” NARTH president Julie Harren Hamilton wrote DISCOVER in an email. “Therapists who assist clients with unwanted homosexual attractions vary in their…methods, [which include] object relations, interpersonal therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy, family therapy, and many others.”

This would be a welcome departure for NARTH and Hamilton. On her video Homosexuality 101, she lays out the typical reparative drive explanation as the most common pathway. If NARTH truly wants to move away from the singular cause, it should make it clear what other pathways they view as possible.

Then the article turns to the Jones and Yarhouse study.

SOCE advocates have done studies in recent years to try and show that their efforts are working. One of the more influential among sexuality-change advocates was a study by two professors at Christian colleges: Mark Yarhouse, a psychology professor at Regent University, and Stanton Jones, provost and professor of psychology at Wheaton College.

The six-year study started with 98 subjects, most of whom were white, male, and religious—92 percent identified themselves as “born again.” All of the treatments were provided by Exodus International. Of the 61 who provided data in all six years, 14 of them—23 percent—reported that they had successfully converted to heterosexuality “in some form or another,” according to Jones. Meanwhile, 18 subjects—30 percent—reported that they had dis-identified as homosexuals and were now “chaste,” meaning no overt sexual activity at all. The results were based entirely on self-reported surveys.

I think Judith Glassgold’s assessment of the study was too harsh when she said:

The study was dismissed by the APA task force on multiple grounds, and held as an example of the systematic scientific problems of SOCE today. “Everything was wrong with that study,” Glassgold says. “[Yarhouse and Stanton] chose the wrong statistics to evaluate, they violated statistical laws, and they didn’t have a control group—just a small sample of people recruited from religious groups. They followed the individuals over a couple of years, but didn’t specify that the subjects should only try one intervention at a time, so they tried many at the same time. So we aren’t sure which, if any, intervention was causal.”

The reporter is a little sloppy here referring to Yarhouse and Stanton (Jones, I assume; a little later someone named Miller is named without a first name or introduction) and does not interview another person to provide another perspective. I think if anything the Jones and Yarhouse study is not very positive for sexual reorientation. Flaws aside, it does not help those who want to promote change as the proper focus of therapy or ministry.

There is a historical review of some of the behavioral sexual reorientation methods that might be new to some readers. The article notes that the polarization continues between NARTH and the APA. However, the article failed to really grasp the important news from the APA report, i.e., the respectful and appropriate treatment of religion as a diversity variable and the interface with client self-determination.

Just a postscript to my earlier posts on brain plasticity and sexual orientation…

Neil Whitehead first authored his signature work, My Genes Made Me Do It in 1999. Now he maintains the book on his website saying that “It is under constant review to keep it up-to-date so readers can be asssured (sic) of its on-going relevance.”

In chapter 8, on page 6, Whitehead recommends Norman Doidge’s book on brain plasticity. He takes some of the same liberties with Doidge’s book that he does in the Anglican Mainstream article and again fails to quote what Doidge actually says about sexual orientation.

Doidge gives a neurological principle: Neurons which fire together wire together. In human sexuality this means that if something extraneous is often associated with sexual arousal it will tend to become part of it. In brain maps genital response regions lie alongside the response region for feet, and Doidge wonders if this might relate to sexual fetishes involving feet. It also becomes very reasonable to suppose that (for example) intense emotional focus on someone of the same sex might get triggered together with sexual excitement, and if frequently repeated ultimately seem to be very deeply ingrained homosexuality.

Because of brain plasticity it’s quite possible that homosexuals can become more heterosexual and heterosexuals could become homosexual, though persistent work could be needed, about equivalent to learning a new musical instrument

A prediction of plasticity principles though not mentioned by Doidge, would be that any brain structures associated with sexual activity would be much changed in those very old people for whom such activity has long ceased eg those brain regions would have shrunk and lost function.

Doidge’s conclusion about sexuality is that “Human libido is not a hard-wired invariable biological urge, but can be curiously fickle, easily altered by our psychology and the history of our sexual encounters.” And “It’s a use-it-or-lose-it brain, even where sexual desire and love are concerned.” This would apply both to same-sex attraction and opposite-sex attraction.

There are numerous problems with Whitehead’s extension of Doidge’s ideas into the area of sexual orientation. However, I will note again that he selectively quotes the book and adds his own ideas as if they come from Doidge’s book.

Whitehead’s predictions that sexual reorientation should be as easy as learning a musical instrument should be offensive to celibate gays, ex-gays, post-gays, and ex-ex-gays. I have heard hundreds of narratives from people who sought change, are seeking change and/or congruence with their nongay-affirming religious beliefs and no one has ever described the process in those terms.

Another problem with this book is a reference to Paul Cameron’s anti-gay pamphlet, The Medical Consequences of What Homosexuals Do in chapter 6. He even incorrectly says the Family Research Council published the thing (Paul Cameron’s DBA Family Research Institute is the actual publisher). He quotes him two additional times in the book as well. One might understand these inclusions better if they occurred in the 1999 version. One could make the case that the degree of Cameron’s bias was not clear at that point. However, since this is an effort “under constant review,” I am assuming that the presence of these references is intentional.

Related posts:

Brain plasticity and sexual orientation: Train it to gain it?

NARTH authors again mislead readers: More on brain plasticity and sexual orientation