Joseph Nicolosi – Page 6 – Warren Throckmorton

The roots of preventing homosexuality: George Rekers uncovered at Box Turtle Bulletin

Jim Burroway at Box Turtle Bulletin has an extraordinary report on a young man treated by George Rekers in 1970. This is a must read and a significant contribution to understanding the roots of treatment for homosexuality. As most readers of this blog know, George Rekers, former NARTH board member, was caught with a male prostitute last year. His efforts to prevent homosexuality were unsuccessful on that personal level and according to Burroway had tragic consequences for a young man who launced Rekers career.
Here is just a snippet of the report. This section is relevant to the post I did last week on Chuck Colson’s promotion of Joseph Nicolosi’s book on preventing homsexuality.

UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute wasn’t just one of the world’s great research facilities, it was home to some of the top experts on gender identity. Dr. Robert Stoller, who established the Gender Identity Clinic at the Institute in 1963,is credited with coming up with the concept of “gender identity” as a distinct concept in which one’s self-perception of his or her gender can be different from one’s apparent anatomical sex.
Stoller was a leading expert on “transsexualism,” but he didn’t venture much into homosexuality in the 1960s, calling it “a large issue beyond my present understanding.” But by the 1970?s he was willing to tackle homosexuality as well, since he regarded homosexuality and transsexualism as two expressions of the same problem. Stoller believed that the most feminine boys — the most extremely feminine boys — would grow up to become transsexual. But those boys who somehow managed to pick up some stray bits of masculinity along the way had considerably more options available to them. With a touch more masculinity, a boy might avoid becoming transsexual and instead become merely homosexual. Add still more masculinity, and maybe he would be straight but a cross-dresser. More masculinity still, and he’d be “normal.” How much masculinity a boy picked up depended entirely on his mother.
This meant that feminine boys weren’t the only ones in psychology’s crosshairs. Mothers were targeted as well. This was nothing new. Psychology had long blamed mothers for all sorts of problems in their children, including schizophrenia, autism, asthma, and, of course, homosexuality and other forms of gender non-conformity. Stoller told a panel at a 1976 American Psychoanalytic Association meeting, “Most feminine boys result from a mother who, whether with benign or malignant intent, is too protective, and a father who either is brutal or absent (literally or psychologically).” That statement apportions some blame on the father, but Stoller let them off the hook because, after all, it was the mother who chose to have the father in the picture to begin with. “He was chosen by his wife to be a distant, passive, nonparticipating man.”
Stoller was just one of the many stars at UCLA. Dr. Ivar Lovaas, who established the ward that housed the clinic, was head of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. He was already famous for his controversial behavioral treatment program for autistic children, some of which involved electric shock therapy. Some of his behavior modification techniques (minus the electric shock therapy) made their way into UCLA’s treatment program for suspected “prehomosexual” or “pretranssexual” children. Another UCLA researcher, Alexander Rosen, published several important articles describing his work with gender nonconforming children and adults. Three of his early papers were co-written with Stoller. Later, he would co-write at least fourteen more with Rekers. Peter Bentler was another noted researcher, and his contributions were in the field of “psychometrics” — in developing psychological tests and performing complex statistical analyses in order to interpret the results. He would write five papers with Rekers and Rosen, including three papers vigorously defending the Clinic’s experimental children’s program against its more vocal critics.

As noted last week, Chuck Colson promoted these same theories in his columns encouraging parents to get Nicolosi’s book on preventing homosexuality. Guess who wrote the only professional recommendation for Nicolosi’s book on Amazon.com? George Rekers is the correct answer. Rekers wrote:

“Every concerned parent will benefit from this practical parenting advice on how to help a child develop a secure gender identity that leads to a normal heterosexual orientation in adulthood. Joseph Nicolosi is an internationally recognized professional expert on therapies that promote normal heterosexual adjustment. He is known for his long-standing leadership in a key professional association that applies scientific findings to psychosexual adjustment. But his breadth of technical scientific knowledge is combined with years of extensive clinical experience helping everyday people. This combination has enabled the authors to explain psychological research findings to parents in a very practical way. Their book provides clear guidance on what parents can do to promote their child’s sexual adjustment.” (George A. Rekers, Ph.D., professor of neuropsychiatry and behavior science, University of South Carolina School of Medicine )

This recommendation should be read in the light of Burroway’s new report. According to Burroway, Anderson Cooper at CNN is also covering this story beginning tomorrow night. I will be following it as well, and providing additional material that highlights the roots of efforts to prevent homosexuality in children and the parent blaming that goes along with it.

NARTH reviews Finnish study on parenting and sexual orientation

Dr. Joseph Nicolosi often tells his audiences that, in essence, homosexuality in males derives from lack of bonding with the father. In this YouTube video, he describes several factors which he believes could be important in the development of male homosexuality, including a masculine, sports-minded older brother, peer rejection and sexual abuse. However, referring to these hypothetical factors, Nicolosi says

…but none of these are as important as the early relationship with the father, because if he has a solid relationship with the father, then he’s not going to be too damaged by his older brother, he’s not going to be too damaged by his peers, he’s not even going to be damaged by same-sex abuse from an older man, if he has a solid relationship with his father.

Last year, at a London conference, Nicolosi said,

I advise fathers, ‘if you don’t hug your sons, some other man will.’

Thus, fathering is the lynchpin of the reparative theory of male homosexuality. Most older studies of parenting examining sexual orientation find modest differences between gay and straight groups. However, there is often much overlap between the two groups, meaning that many gay males recall warm, accepting relationships with their fathers and many straights recall distant, unaccepting fathers.

Given that detachment from the father is theorized to occur before age 5, the potent experience is difficult to test directly. Researchers try to get at this indirectly via surveys of how gay males recall the relationship with the father. A finding that gay males and straight males recalled their fathers similarly would be evidence against the theory.

Thus, I was surprised recently to find a review of a Finnish study of sexual orientation, parental relationships and gender atypical behavior reviewed on the NARTH (National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality) website. Reviewed by Robert Vazzo, the study also provides evidence which addresses NARTH’s view of homosexuality and pathology. I summarized this report last year when it came out, but I want to provide another look in light of Vazzo’s review. First, the abstract (after the break):

Continue reading “NARTH reviews Finnish study on parenting and sexual orientation”

Another controversy opens a NARTH conference

Just over three years ago, I decided not to make a planned presentation to the annual conference of the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality. At the same time, friend and colleague Dr. David Blakeslee resigned from the NARTH Scientific Advisory Board. We decided to take these actions in response to NARTH’s slow and, in my opinion, inadequate response to statements by NARTH members and advisers, Joseph Berger on bullying of gender variant kids and Gerald Schoenewolf on racial politics.

Three years later, NARTH is about to open another conference in Florida. No advisers have made offensive comments but the organization has in recent days featured an interview with Michael Glatze on their website. The interview is quite positive and promotes Mr. Glatze as a successful role model for others and particularly same-sex attracted kids. However, Mr. Glatze has made statements recently which raise the same sad red flags raised by Berger and Schoenewolf three years ago.

Glatze has indeed gone through a series of changes (change is not just possible but apparently frequent). Of concern here however, is his views on race and bullying. The blog where he wrote the following is down now (that changes too so perhaps it will come back), but there is no indication that his views have changed since they were written.

On race, Glatze had this to say about President Obama:

Have I mentioned lately how utterly *disgusting* Obama is? And, yes, it’s because he’s black. God, help us all.

This was retracted when I asked Glatze if he had any comments about it. He wrote

Yes, I can. I was talking with some friends about Jimmy Carter’s recent comments along the lines of that anybody who disagrees with Obama is a racist. My friend posted that on my blog, as sarcasm.

Warren, I am about fed-up with the “race card” being pulled, any time someone so much as *suggests* that Obama may not be doing something right. It’s getting to the point, where people are literally losing their minds trying to speak up, trying to have their voices heard. You don’t know how many friends I have who feel crippled, in a country that has its foundations in the notion of freedom and – more importantly – liberty.

You’ll see a quote on my little blog – now – that says, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” It’s a quote by George Orwell. I’m trying to do my small part, in the midst of all this insanity, to find integrity.

No, I’m not happy with the current administration. No, I don’t hate Obama because he’s black. What I do hate is evil, and many of the things he has done I would consider evil.

Although he backed away from his earlier comment, the words were still careless as was his explanation. Making or allowing a friend to make a racist statement on your public blog is playing the “race card” which he said in his explanation he was tired of others doing.

On bullying, Exgaywatch quoted from an entry on Glatze’s blog just before it was removed, where he said:

We live in a culture that hopes to destroy manhood, by promoting policies that shame men, and make them out to be villians. “Patriarchy is bad! Down with patriarchy!” What is “patriarchy”? Patriarchy is the idea that men exist. There is nothing more. People invent “matriarchy,” otherwise known as a more emotional approach, a more flowy approach, to doing things, as though men have no emotions or desire to have a happy existence. The false duality created by non-“patriarchy” thinking leads to the corrosion of humanity, as exhibited by political correctness, Liberalism, and embodied by The One … a.k.a., Barack Obama, the world’s first official girl-man President.

Even so much as uttering the statement in the previous paragraph gets the victim-minded whiners, those lacking a backbone, those denying their manhood, to heights of hysteria and indignation. “That’s the very type of behavior that leads to bullying in schools.” Bullying in schools is a part of life, a part of growth. Every time somebody needs to grow up, even just a little bit, the process will be painful and probably not the first choice for what that individual might want to do. Take away every one of these instances in the name of “compassion,” and you will tear out the souls and spirits of everyone you hope to control with such insidious policies.

While this is a bit hard to follow, he appears to be saying about the same thing Joseph Berger said three years ago when he said:

I suggest, indeed, letting children who wish go to school in clothes of the opposite sex – but not counseling other children to not tease them or hurt their feelings.

On the contrary, don’t interfere, and let the other children ridicule the child who has lost that clear boundary between play-acting at home and the reality needs of the outside world.

Being bullied is a growing experience? If they miss out on the bullying then their “souls and spirits” are torn out? Is this the kind of masculinity it takes to leave the gay behind? No, on the contrary, bullying can tear out souls and spirits.

Nicolosi didn’t hear this kind of thing in the interview and so he wants to make Glatze a role model for youth. From the interview:

Joe Nicolosi: Do you think you could be of help to young people who are struggling?

Michael Glatze: …Do you think I could?

JN: I think so.

I don’t.

If you need a soundtrack for this post, try this. Here’s some better guidance about how to be “of help to young people who are struggling.”

The lyrics to the rap at the end of this song are:

Little Mikey D was in the one class

Who everyday got brutally harassed

This went on for years

Until he decided that never again

Would he shed another tear

So he walked through the door

Grabbed the 44 out of his father’s dresser drawer

And said I can’t take life no more

And like that life can be lost

But this ain’t even about that

All of us just sat back

And watch it happen

Thinkin’ it’s not our responsibility

To solve a problem that isn’t even about me

This is our problem

This is just one of the daily scenarios

Which we choose to close our eyes

Instead of doing the right thing

If we make a choice

And be the voice

For those who won’t speak up for themselves

How may lives would be saved, changed, and rearranged

Now it’s our time to pick a side

So don’t keep walking by

Don’t wanna intervene

Cause you just wanna exist and never be seen

So let’s wake up

Change the world

Our time is now

UPDATE: This statement has replaced the Glatze interview on the NARTH website:

Following the counsel of our friends at Exodus and others in the ex-gay community we have removed the Michael Glatze interview from our site. Some of his public comments have been found to be offensive to NARTH and hurtful to others. It is never appropriate to make some of the comments attributed to Mr. Glatze and we at NARTH wish to make our disapproval public.

You can see below what was there this morning. The first interview from 2007 is still available.

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

Picking up the narrative on the new book from Joseph Nicolosi, Shame and attachment loss: The practical work of reparative therapy, I want to focus on the family dynamics Nicolosi proposes to be at the source of male homosexuality. There are two basic types of family soil which Nicolosi believes grows some same-sex love: the “classic-triadic family” and the “narcissistic family.” If you are looking for the “relatively-normal-often-happy family” in this book, you won’t find it. According to Nicolosi, they don’t produce same-sex attracted men.

In the classic triadic family, the boy “experiences the father as an unsafe/unworthy object of identification,” mothers are “over-involved, intrusive, possessive and controlling,” and the sons are “temperamentally sensitive, timid, passive, introverted, artistic (!), and imaginative.” The result is that the mother and father do not have a good relationship, the father is distant and/or hostile with the son, the son avoids masculine play, the father fails to bring out the son’s masculinity, the mother smothers the boy and robs him of his assertion.

The narcissistic family is worse, it seems to me. The parents are more into themselves than the children. The family is invested in looking good to the world but has many family secrets which must be protected at all costs. I could say more about this family but I will save that for another post. What I want to get to is Nicolosi’s concept of “shared delight.” He says same-sex attracted males didn’t have any of that with their fathers. In a section with the heading, “The ‘Delight-Deprived’ Boy,” Nicolosi expounds on the experiences he says same-sex attracted males missed.

In my search for the particular quality of father-son bonding that is fundamental to the development of the boy’s masculine identity, I have been led to what I call a “shared delight.” I am convinced that the healthy development of masculine identification depends on this phenomenon. This special emotional exchange should be between the boy and his father, although a father figure or grandfather may serve the purpose where no father is available. It is not a single event or one-time occurrence, but should characterize the relationship.

This particular style of emotional attunement is especially important during the critical time of gender identification. Homosexual men rarely if ever recall father-son interaction that includes activities that they both enjoy together. In this vital experience father and son share in the enjoyment (“delight”) in the boy’s success. (p.52).

Nicolosi then declares that homosexual men have great difficulty recalling childhood father-son times which were fun and exciting and which included success for the son. He stacks the deck a bit in favor of his thesis here by saying that gay men infrequently remember being coached by their fathers in an activity that “involves bodily activity or strength.” I say he stacks the deck because he is no doubt aware of research which finds a strong correlation between childhood gender nonconformity and adult homosexuality. While not true of all gay males, many do not remember such activities because neither father nor son liked those activities. And where dad did like them and son did not, it is often a sign of sensitivity that the dad did not force the son to pursue a sport for which the son has no interest or aptitude. An aspect of what Nicolosi defines as “shared delight” sounds like having fun playing sports or active games together.

He then gives an excerpt of Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiography where he describes going to his father’s office.

When he saw me, his face always lit up, as it had a way of doing, quite suddenly, thereby completely altering his appearance; transforming him from a rather cavernous, shrunken man into someone boyish and ardent. He would leap agilely off his stool, wave gaily to his colleague…and we would make off together. There was always about these excursions an element of being on an illicit spree, which greatly added to their pleasure. They were the most enjoyable episodes in all my childhood. (Wolfe, 2003, p.26).

He then contrasts this depiction of father-son bliss with clinical tales of clients who were not delighted with their fathers.

When I read this section, I was reminded of stories my clients have told me about their fathers over the years. Most of those clients were straight, and many of those stories were sad and empty. People do benefit when they feel approved by their fathers and indeed people with clinical concerns often relate pain from their upbringing. Here again, Nicolosi seems to be oblivious to the fact that his clients are unhappy and experiencing various problems which bring them to counseling. That these men fail to remember happy office visits may not say anything generalizable to all gay men.

Then I also thought of an email exchange I had with a gay man who wanted to understand my positions on various issues related to sexual orientation. The man is well educated and was raised in the Catholic church. He also sought reparative therapy for several years in an effort to reverse his homosexuality. He eventually determined the effort was futile and accepted that he was attracted to the same sex and worked toward a resolution within his faith. I asked him what he remembered about his father and he wrote:

My father was probably one of the most honest men I ever knew. Being Italian, FAMILY was important and he showed his love by making sure that we did things as a family. We ate dinner together always and took many educational vacations. Dad was very handy with his hands and could fix almost anything around the house that “broke.” I often helped him when he needed a “third” hand. He was intelligent and hardworking. When I was young, he tried very hard to get me interested in sports and other traditionally “masculine” activities, etc., but I just wasn’t interested. So…what I was able to give him — something that he also valued — was being good in my studies, ultimately obtaining my Ph.D. He was very proud of me. When my mother was so rigid in her religious beliefs that she was not able to accept me as a “gay son,” it was my dear father who told me he loved me and who kept the family together.

Does this sound like a distant father and son? It is clear that this man loves his dad, knows his dad loved him and was proud of him and viewed him as a salient father. If we are to believe adult recollections as Nicolosi does when they come from unhappy men, then what keeps us from believing this man? If the reparative therapist complains that this man is in denial, I will respond that reparative therapist’s clients have been indoctrinated. Or perhaps a more neutral response would be to say that the therapist’s clients are correct and so is my email friend. In which case, perhaps “shared delight” is a feature of the child development of many fortunate boys, gay and straight, but has little, if anything, to do with eventual sexual attractions.

I emphasize attractions here because I do think a poor relationship with father could affect self-control and thus influence a person to gravitate to a more behaviorally promiscuous life, whether gay or straight. I also wonder if some men are so damaged by their fathers that they respond to any kindness and their sexual responses are guided and shaped by their emotional hunger. Although it is possible that father-deprived males compose some important share of the caseload at Nicolosi’s Thomas Aquinas Psychological Services, I do not believe the lion’s share of gay males who are not in therapy would describe their lives this way.

In fact, father-son estrangement is as universal as fathers and sons. Books and movies (note this website with this theme in 25 movies) use this theme constantly as it tugs at the experience of so many men, gay or straight. For a description of this estrangement from a straight male, see this book (I Thought We’d Never Speak Again) and especially the story of Paul Howerton (“There was nothing about his father that Paul wanted to emulate…”).

The next post will address more of the father-son issues raised by Nicolosi’s book and discuss the concerns I have about Christian groups ratifying them uncritically.

Shame and Attachment Loss: Going from bad to worse

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

Shame and attachment loss: Going from bad to worse

Trying to keep up on the new developments in reparative therapy, I purchased NARTH’s co-founder Joseph Nicolosi’s new book, Shame and Attachment Loss: The Practical Work of Reparative Therapy. This post is not a review but more of a prep for a review. I am going to provide some excerpts and comments which may form the basis for a more formal review at a later date.

You have to get past a couple of features of Nicolosi’s writing in order to proceed. He has an annoying (to me) habit of speaking of himself in the plural (“When a man finds masculinity mysterious and exotic, and seeks it outside himself, we believe he is living in a false self…). This form reappears throughout the book. You also have to grasp the jargon being used in order to understand what he proposes (“grey zone,” “double bind,” “double loop”). In some respects, reading this book is like reading material from object relations theorists such as Masterson and Volkan. It is inside baseball to most folks who are not conversant with attachment and object relations theory.

However, this book is published by Christian publisher Intervarsity Press and makes an effort to make some of the concepts accessible to a lay and non-psychodynamic audience. To be sure, Nicolosi doesn’t leave the reader unclear about his views. Regarding homosexuality, he begins by dismissing Daryl Bem’s empirically derived theory of same-sex attraction because it does not stigmatize same-sex attraction. He then, indicates what has remained the same since his earlier books and what has changed. First, what has remained the same:

The essential principle of reparative therapy remains the same – simply stated by one client as “When a real man sees me as a real man, then I become a real man.” (p. 31)

The real man is the therapist or some other model of masculinity and then to become a real man is apparently to become straight. Simple, right?

What has changed?

Recently, reparative therapy has expanded to conceptualize homosexual attraction as more than a striving to repair gender deficits. We now see it more broadly, as a striving to repair deep self-deficits. (p.31)

Translation: If you have SSA, you are worse off than Nicolosi first believed. You are not just deficient in your sense of gender identity, but your core sense of self is a wreck too. He continues:

My longtime clinical observation suggests one repeated trend in early childhood: specifically, an accumulation of early, core emotional hurts that have led to an attachment injury. I believe that homosexuality is not only a defense against gender inferiority, but a defense against a trauma to the core self.

Beyond the previously recognized needs of same-sex identification and affirmation, we now better understand the condition as an attempt to heal an abandonment-annihilation trauma. We see homosexuality as typically an attempt to “repair” shame-afflicted longing for gender-based individuation. As such, homosexuality can be seen as a pathologic form of grieving. Adopting concepts from bereavement and grief literature, we thus turn new attention to the contributions of attachment theory and the role of shame.(p. 31-32; all italics in the original)

I suspect those adopted concepts of bereavement and grief will want to return to their original family. According to Nicolosi, men (women, what women?) are drawn to sex with men because it somehow helps them grieve the loss of attachment to important figures in their childhood, most notably the father. However, these losses are not restricted to gender concerns.

This understanding that homosexuality is a symptom of a larger issue of self-identity is supported by the almost universal complaint of clients that they feel “insecure,” “inadequate,” “a little boy in an adult world,” “out of control” and lacking relational authority. For years I have heard clients express this interpersonal powerlessness: “She upsets me, they annoy me, he doesn’t take me seriously. (p. 33)

The trauma is broader than lack of attachment to the same sex parent. He notes:

Attachment is the foundation of our self-identity. It is through the mother-child attachment that we develop our sense of self and discover who we are. Shame felt during this process of attachment and individuation subverts development of both self-identity and gender identity.

Since our clients report a core experience of not having felt “seen” by their parents for who they are, they inevitably also felt that they were not loved – at least in the deepest and most genuine sense. There is a deep perception that the parents, even though they may have been truly well-meaning, have failed to fully see, know and accept them.

Because parents are not perceived as loving them for who they are, gay men develop a “false self” to defend against the abandonment of not being truly known. Kids start doing things they think will get their parents and other people to like them but those things are not really them. When they actually move toward what they want to do, they get depressed because they fear attachment loss. This is very nearly the same concept as the “false self” and “abandonment depression” of James Masterson. Masterson is nowhere referenced in the book which is a curious oversight. I wonder if it is because Masterson writes about the same dynamics with straight people being the primary clientele.

According to Nicolosi, reparative therapy helps clients give up the false self, a feature of which is same-sex attraction, in order to experience real attachment and affirmation from “real men.” As this occurs, the homosexuality will diminish and heterosexuality will emerge.

This should be reasonably easy to test. If all of this is true, homosexuals should be unable to hold jobs, or advance in careers, or do other things which require secure object relations and attachments. And of course, this is the practical problem for the practical work of reparative therapy. Many gay, ex-gay, post-gay, and SSA people do not have lives which correspond to the predictions in this book. Nor do their lives indicate the kind of deep self-deficits which are predicted here.

This is first in a series of occasional posts on this book. Stay tuned…