My Conversion Therapy Story
This is what Conversion Therapy looks like
It’s hard for me to share my experience with conversion therapy because I still worry that I won’t be believed. I suppose this means I’m still working toward healing.
Although it’s clear to me now that I fit the typical description of what it means to be a conversion therapy survivor, my realization is fairly recent. When you’re taught not to trust your intuition, not to believe your senses, not to look too closely at the root of any issue, reality can become elusive.
I suffered the painful loss of a close family member when I was thirty-two. I turned to therapy for help to cope with the impact of that loss. As anyone who’s been to therapy knows, the skeins of trauma yarn get teased apart and things come to the surface that have been suppressed for a long time.
I got real with myself. Seven years into my marriage, I finally admitted that I couldn’t choose heteronormativity. I discovered it wasn’t a matter of willpower, but an innate fact of my humanity.
I knew it wasn’t safe to confide in my church leadership about my attraction to women, because I would be assessed as unworthy to participate fully in church membership and I couldn’t bear that shame. The effects it would certainly have on my family would be catastrophic and I wasn’t ready to blow up my life yet.
I asked my secular clinical therapist to help me survive my marriage until my young children were grown. I couldn’t even entertain the idea of abandoning them prematurely and leaving them without a mother, so I began my 17-year marathon to survive until my children graduated from high school. Then I would be free to end my life, because I’d been taught that death would restore my spirit to an appropriately straight orientation.
