Can homosexuality be cured?
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Homosexuality is sexual attraction to persons of one's own sex. In chromosomes, sex hormones and physical constitution homosexuals are normal. There was a time, Freud's time, when it was thought to be due to hereditary factors, but this hypothesis has now been scientifically discarded. Homosexuals are biologically normal, what is not normal is the exercise of homosexuality. It should be noted that homosexuals have heterosexual instincts; what happens is that they are blocked for some reason, which may be an inferiority complex. Those who are really determined to fight against this complex, even in cases of transsexuality, end their obsessions in one or two years. To give the impression of normality, there are those who claim that perhaps one in five men have homosexual "tendencies", but the statistics deny this and show that in reality it is only one or two percent.
The global movement for the emancipation of homosexuals tries to evade fundamental questions, uses half-truths and total falsehoods and uses the concept of discrimination to arouse sympathy. It makes the homosexual a victim.
One cause: lack of maturity
At puberty, it may be a transitory phenomenon. There are cases in which homosexuality takes root in the first years of youth. This fact has led some to think that it makes no sense to try to uproot it. The most popular theory is that homosexuality is based on a disturbance of the so-called "sense of sexual identity". Reality shows that homosexuals are affected not only in their sexual facet, but in their entire emotional world. Their emotional life coincides very much, for example, with the anxious, compulsive or depressive type, characterized by depressions, nervousness, relational and psychosomatic problems. They are not capable, in certain aspects of their emotional life, of maturing and of being adults and, in spite of wanting to appear jovial and joyful, they are not happy internally. The cause does not lie in the discrimination of which they want to accuse society, which would make them "victims" of it, but in forces at work within themselves (...)
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Can homosexuality be cured?
Many people do not know that the psychic genesis of this sexual condition is not at all mysterious and that its therapy is possible. The method I have used consists of two parts: the first is to make the person concerned acquire a clear vision of his own identity and his own affective world; the second is to confront this situation. We lead people to laugh at themselves (humor can be very healthy) and to the acquisition of positive habits: courage, honesty with oneself, self-discipline, capacity to love others, and so on, until the homosexual loses his neuroinfantile habits.
It is essential to neutralize chronic self-pity. It is obligatory to say that:
- In thirty percent of the cases, the cure is complete: they end up developing normal and affective sexual attitudes and habits and an adult emotional life. Of course, a sexual cure alone would not be a complete cure.
- Another thirty percent of people change more or less gradually, lose their homosexual obsessions and assume a new emotional attitude, although not enough to be able to speak of a complete cure.
- There are others who progress extremely slowly because of their severe neurotic state, but these too, if helped by constructive assistance and treatment, gain strength and courage and gradually lose their depressions, nervousness and anxieties.
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Responsibility of educators
Homosexual complexes can be avoided by educating a boy as a boy and a girl as a girl. They cannot be interchanged and mixed up. A total identification, the total identity of roles that a certain exacerbated feminism wants is absurd. Priests and educators have a very important role when they contribute much more to psychological growth than they are sometimes aware of. Beware of believing that all "love" is good; there are compassionate and neurotic forms of love that reveal a personality divided in itself and in need of firm and sure moral guidance. Patients who live their faith in a positive way have the greatest hope for a radical change in their homosexuality: this is my experience over the years.
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The problem of homosexuality is presented in an unjustified atmosphere of fatalism. Homosexuality is still seen by most people in the light of prejudices and preconceived, unfounded and outdated ideas from which, unfortunately, professionals (doctors, sociologists, psychologists, priests, journalists) are not absent. If we add to this the lack of updating of psychiatry and psychology, a situation is created which is exploited by the strategy of emancipation of militant homosexuals, flanked by the Western "progressive establishment" which tries to make people believe that homosexuality is a normal variant of human sexuality, that homosexuals are born and cannot be changed. All of them could do with better information.
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The fallacy of resignation
Those in charge improve concrete situations little by little. There are spiritual directors who rightly encourage homosexuals to live chastity and self-mastery, but in fact consider it impossible to uproot it. It is very wrong the attitude of not a few men of the Church who, in good faith, but probably victims of the scarce diffusion of therapeutic experiences, consider that the best way to help homosexuals is to teach them resignation and acceptance of the sacrifice that their situation entails, instead of encouraging them and helping them to come out of it, with patience and perseverance.
In addition to ignorance, they show naivety, since it is very difficult, if not impossible, to live with one's homosexual tendencies without being dragged down by them. The path to healing for homosexuals does not pass through compassion and much less through the acceptance of their situation as "normal".
It is impressive and painful to note how many doctors, therapists, priests, psychologists ignore the desire to change that many people with homosexual tendencies have. Deviant affectivity is nothing more than an aspect of an immature personality. Therapy should aim at teaching the patient to recognize and combat a whole range of expressions of infantile ego-centeredness, fears, inferiority complexes, consolatory reactions, affectations and self-pity. In the affective sphere we grow the more confidence we have in ourselves as men or women with fulfillment and happiness. A Dutch psychiatrist who was a militant in the homosexual emancipation movement tells of the healing of a lesbian thanks to a priest endowed with good psychological sense, who told her: "But you have remained in your childhood...! !". Her process of change lasted a while, but she ended up admitting to the psychiatrist that her problem had disappeared "like an amputated leg, which does not come back".
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Gerard J. M. van den Aardweg is an accredited Dutch psychologist, professor for more than thirty years, married, father of seven children, who has taught courses in the United States, Canada and Brazil. Author of numerous books, essays and articles on homosexuality, he discusses in this article the causes and possible solutions to one of the variants of homosexuality.
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