The following was a presentation given by Dr. Robinson on October 6, 2002:
I appreciate the opportunity to speak today at this conference. My aim, my goal in this presentation, is to dramatically change the way each one of you thinks about homosexuality. Whether you believe that it's something that is inborn and cannot be changed, whether you believe it can be changed, whether you believe that these men are selfish, who are willful in choosing this--I want to change the way you think about it, and I think it's important to change the way people think about this problem.
It's important because every year we are losing many, many young men to this difficulty. We're losing them, and we're losing family members who are being told all kinds of false doctrines regarding homosexuality and are having their faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ shaken and undermined because of that. So I hope today to follow Paul, who said in talking to the Saints of his day that he had determined “to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” To me to discuss this topic is to bear my testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ and its power and ability to change the lives of men.
A little over ten years ago, I was a graduate student here at BYU in marriage and family therapy and was troubled. I had read an article recently published in a magazine by a prominent LDS psychiatrist that seemed to indicate that here were a group of men who could not change their behaviors or their outlooks or their orientations. And I was troubled. I'm the kind of person who's always drawn to quandaries, and I thought, “If the gospel is not true for these men, then it cannot be true for me.”
But as I was pondering those things and thinking about it--we had received absolutely no instruction or no discussion in any of our classes on how to treat this problem--and one day I was sitting in the intern's office, and the person who assigns cases walked in, and he held up a folder and he said, “Anybody here want to talk to some guy who thinks he might be gay?” Everybody kind of looked at the floor, and I being troubled by this, having read this article recently, I raised my hand and said, “I'll talk to him.”
A few days later, I sat down with a young man, as I have many, many times since then, and had him tell me his story. He told me that he was trying to make a decision about whether he was going to enter into therapy and try to overcome this difficulty, or whether he was going to leave the state, move to California, and never contact his family or anyone he knew again.
He asked me, he said, “Can you promise me that if I enter into therapy and try to overcome this problem, that I will never have any of these feelings ever again for the rest of my life?” I looked him square in the eye, and I said, “I don't know.” He wasn't impressed. I said, “But I'll find out.”
And so after that session, I went to the library and started looking as fast as I could and talk to people and find out anything I could about treating this problem. I found a doctoral dissertation, and it seemed to indicate that yes, many of these men are successful at changing. And I photocopied some pages out of that and brought them back in our second session and showed them to him. And he kind of looked at them--it doesn't inspire a lot of faith when your therapist is showing what he found in the library the day before--and I thought, “I'm not going to see this young man again; I've really blown this. He's not coming back.”
But he made the appointment--I thought, “He won't show up”--came back to his third appointment and sat down across from me, and he said, “I have made up my mind that no matter how long it takes and no matter what I have to do, I am going to live the gospel of Jesus Christ, and I am going to overcome this problem.”
I was stunned. I'm not the kind of person who, especially at that point in my life, had a lot of faith in whether what I was feeling was the Spirit. But there were a number of occasions in my life when I felt something so profound and distinct that I was sure that it was, and this was one of them. I felt the distinct impression as I talked to this young man, and the impression was this: this young man's parents have been praying for him. That is why he has made this decision. And you are to be part of the answer to their prayers, so you be careful.
After that, I began to work with quite a number of men dealing with this issue and became quite interested in the issue, and when somebody would come into the clinic here on campus dealing with this issue, they'd say, “Well, let him see Jeff. Jeff's hit a bunch of these guys.” And pretty soon I was seeing quite a number.
I became so intrigued, in fact, that I decided that I would do a doctoral dissertation on this topic. I was very interested in the question of whether or not men who struggle with homosexuality can change. And it occurred to me that if it is possible for these men to change, there must be some men who have changed. If you can't find anyone who was successful at changing, it's kind of hard to make the argument that change is possible. Not many people are going to be impressed if you sit down with them and say, “No one's ever done this successfully, but we're sure you're going to be the first one.”
And so we found a number of men who had successfully overcome this problem and sat down with them and talked to them about what they meant when they said they had changed. And then we took a careful look and said, “What do these men have in common? What story are they telling us here when they describe their experience of change?” And it's interesting, because when you ask somebody, “How have you changed?”, the first thing they start to tell you is how things used to be. So not really wanting to, we nevertheless got a very rich description of how this problem developed in their lives, and most of the material that I'm going to present to you here today comes directly from that doctoral dissertation. Since that time, I've presented this material to literally hundreds and hundreds of men struggling with this issue--and many women also--in individual counseling sessions, at conferences and workshops, firesides, and other situations. And I want to help you understand today what it is these men experience, what it is like for them, for them.
When people tried to understand why some men struggle with the issue of homosexuality or homosexual problems, they tried to understand what these men have in common. What is similar about these men that sets them apart from other men who might not struggle with this issue? If you have read the popular media at all, you have seen reports on differences in brain structure and hormone levels and kinship ties, identical twin studies, father/son relationships, mother/son relationships--none of those have really been conclusive. It's interesting in the media you always hear when they find the correlation; when they fail to replicate that or fail to substantiate it, you never hear about that.
Among the men I know who deal with this issue, I see three traits in common. These traits are almost universal; in fact, when one of them is missing, it's a pretty good bet that these men have been, had some sort of strong introductory experience.
These are the three characteristics: first, they are unusually emotionally sensitive. They tell me things like, “I have always been more tenderhearted than other people”; “I have always felt things more deeply than other people”; “I've had trouble controlling my emotions,” or “I've cried more easily.” These kinds of statements come out again and again and again, as I talk with these men. Unusual emotional sensitivity.
Second, they are unusually introspective. They are almost always men of above average intelligence. They do a lot of thinking, and a lot of their thinking is self-analytical thinking. They tell me things like, “People tell me I think too much”; “I analyze things to death”; “I think myself into circles”; “I think myself into knots”; “I'm always trying to understand myself.” Very intensely introspective.
The third and most ironic trait that these men have in common is that they have an unusually strong sense of right and wrong, and an unusually strong desire to be right. I use that term very broadly: to be right, to be worthy, to be righteous, to be normal, to be popular, to be liked, to be attractive, to be okay, to be talented, to be good looking. Any of those things, they just want to get it right, to be good. When parents find out they have a son dealing with this issue, they will sometimes say, “This was my best child. He was the most devout, the most obedient, the most tenderhearted.” It is not unusual for these men to have had outstanding histories of activity in the Church, to have held positions of responsibility in their Aaronic priesthood quorums or on missions, to have been Assistants to the President, or other things. So this is ironic.
These three characteristics--unusually emotionally sensitive, introspective, and wanting to be right. Now the question is, are those three characteristics good things or bad things? I think they're good things. Does the world need more men who are sensitive and thoughtful and want to do good? Sure. But I believe that those three traits are exactly the characteristics that get someone stuck in the problem of homosexuality. Here is a great irony: three positive characteristics that can lead to such an agonizing difficulty. And I hope by the time we're finished talking today, you'll understand perhaps why that can happen. It's almost as though Satan says, “Here are a group of men who could do much good in the world; what can I do to trip them up?” And he has found something that in many cases is very effective.
To begin to help you understand, though, I want to talk about some of the false doctrines or false ways that we think about homosexuality in our culture. I want to start by talking about my pen. If I let go of this pen, what will happen? It will fall. Why? Gravity. People say gravity; the pen falls because of gravity. The fact of the matter is, we don't why the pen falls; all we know is that things that are unsupported fall. Gravity is one of the four fundamental physical forces of the universe that explain everything else, but nothing explains them. We just know that everything that is unsupported falls, and we call that fact gravity. We label the fact that things fall gravity. Now I like that; one of the most, one of the things that influences our life the most is gravity. It influences me every single day of my life, and we don't why it happens. I think that's wonderful, wonderful. We tend to think the world's pretty explained; we label it and call it gravity, and then we do an interesting thing: we talk about it as though we have explained it. So why does the pen fall? Well, because of gravity. Well, how do you know there's gravity? Well, because things fall. What makes them fall? Well, gravity.
Do you see it just goes in a circle? It doesn't really add any information; we do that all the time in our society, in our culture: talk about things, label them, and then describe them as having acted as a result of the label. We do it a lot in the social sciences; take, for example, the concept of self-esteem. Self-esteem began as a description of what people were doing. People who said or thought good things about themselves had high self-esteem. People who said or thought bad things about themselves had low self-esteem. But what began as a description of what people were doing--saying or thinking good or bad things about themselves--came to be talked about as though it was the reason they were doing it. Why does that guy say such bad things about himself? Well, it's because he's got low self-esteem. How do you know he has low self-esteem? Well, because he says such bad things about himself. Why does he do that? Low self-esteem.
You and I grew up in a culture that taught us through its language that we have something inside of us called our self-esteem that can make us do things. We don't have a lot of agency or a lot of choice in the matter; it makes us do things. Why are you so down on yourself? It's my self-esteem. We have government programs to increase self-esteem, and it is simply a manifestation of language.
Now the same thing is true when it comes to talking about homosexuality. Why is that man sexually attracted to other men? It's because he's homosexual. How do you know he's homosexual? Because he's sexually attracted to other men. What makes him do that? Homosexuality. We have created a condition, a trait, a disease, an orientation called homosexuality and given it power to make people do things.
The implications of this are pretty important. Because of that, you've probably heard people say something like this: “You know, when I found out I was gay…” The implications of that simply phrase, “when I found out I was gay,” are astounding. It means, before I had any homosexual thoughts, any homosexual feelings, or any homosexual behaviors, I was already gay. And when those things began to occur in my life, they were simply manifestations of an underlying condition that had already been there.
Can you begin to see why this is dangerous language for someone who is intensely introspective and perfectionistic and sensitive? Let me give you an example. I had a client once, many years ago, one of the first men I worked with dealing with this issue, who had no homosexual thoughts, feelings, or behaviors until he was in his early twenties--that's unusual. Almost always, it occurs earlier than that, but you can learn a lot from unusual cases.
He began to have these feelings when he attended a fireside that was sponsored by Evergreen--Evergreen is a great organization that supports LDS men who are struggling to overcome these issues. He went to this fireside to support a friend who was dealing with this issue, and while he was sitting there, many men got up and gave testimonials: descriptions of their lives, what had happened to them, of what it had been like. And this client stood there, or sat there at the fireside, and he thought, “Boy, you know, that sounds a lot like me. I wonder if I might be gay.” Well, he had to know. I mean, it's bad enough to be gay, but you don't want to be gay and not know it. If you're gay, that's information you want to have.
So he went out and started to have sexual fantasies about other men and found out that they could be very arousing for him, and now he knew the truth: he knew he was gay, too. He never stopped and thought for a second, “I just taught myself to do something. I just acquired another response. I just trained myself to respond in a certain way.” That idea never crossed his mind because it was not available to him in the culture in which he lived. The only available explanation was, “I just found out who I am, what I am.” This becomes critically important. This teeny piece of false doctrine, I believe, has influenced many, many hundreds--probably thousands--of young Latter-Day Saint men in their thinking about what they're experiencing in adolescence. We'll talk more about that in just a minute.
I think the second mistake we make is that we begin to take our metaphors too literally. We speak metaphorically in our language, and the social sciences are highly metaphorically. So we talk about people having unmet emotional needs; when I say “unmet emotional needs,” suddenly somebody realizes, “Yeah, needs, that's something I really have to have unless I get enough of it that I don't need it anymore unless I use it up, then I'll need more of it.” It's a metaphor from economics, needing things. There's some truth in it: it opens up a way of understanding. But it blocks out other ways of understanding. Once we have adopted a metaphor way of understanding something, it limits how much we can understand it in a different way.
We have orientations now--orientation is a geographical metaphor; I'm oriented by the position I take relative to other things in my environment. I can take a map and compass and go orienteering. But now we all have sexual orientations, and it's important to know what yours is. It's right in there close to your self-esteem, and it's pulled down by gravity.
“Drives” is another metaphor; we have strong sexual drives. “Drives” is a mechanical metaphor--a drive is a piece of machinery that transfers energy from one place in the machine to another, usually the source of the energy to a place where it's used, like the drive shaft on a car. “Drives” are very powerful forces, and we all have sexual drives. I often talk to young men who struggle with all kinds of sexual issues before their mission, went on a mission, served worthily, and for two years it was not a problem. For some it was, but for many it was not. They often think, “Where did that drive go? Where did that incredibly powerful force go?” A few years ago, Anna Landers said that abstinence was not a realistic expectation because the human sexual drive was the strongest drive in nature next to hunger.
Now we can't get away from metaphors; we can't say, “Well, I'm not going to talk metaphorically; we're just going to talk reality here,” because that's all we have to understand. Some of these things in the social sciences are metaphors, but I want to introduce to you a different way of thinking about it. Anna Landers said that hunger is stronger even than the sexual drive, so I want to talk about hunger for just a minute.
I experience hunger as a pain right here in my stomach--very unpleasant sensation. I don't like it. And for me, that sensation happens to be very similar, if not identical, to the sensation that I feel when I'm nervous. I'm a moderately nervous person--I can work myself up into quite a dither. If you'd been at my house this morning, you'd have known that. There have been a number of times in my life when I have said to my wife, “Oh, I am so nervous about something. Something, I don't know what I'm so nervous about--something's just eating me up.” And she has said to me, “Have you eaten today?” And I'll say, “Well, no, I haven't had time.” And she'll say, “Oh, sit down.”
And so I'll sit down, she'll feed me, and it goes away. Interesting. I had a physical sensation in my stomach, but in and of itself it had no meaning until I put meaning on it, till I interpreted it, till I decided what it meant, till I told a story about it. I might have that sensation, and I might think about Mexican food, or I might think about all kinds of different things pop into my mind when I think about hunger or feel hungry. I might also feel that sensation and think, “I am fasting. This pain in my stomach represents a spiritual endeavor, to become closer to my Heavenly Father.” I might think when I feel that pain in my stomach, “I'm dieting. This represents an effort to loose wait.” I might think, “I'm on a hunger strike. It represents defiance and anger. I might also tell a story that would go something like this if it was told out loud: “My life is completely out of control and hopeless. I have no control over anything, and I am in constant depression and anguish. The only thing I can really control in my life is what I eat, and I will lose weight. In fact, when I feel anxious and out of control, I can feel that sensation in my stomach, and it soothes me. It gives me a sense of control in my life until it reduces my anxiety and I literally become addicted to that feeling in my stomach, until I can starve myself to death.” Happens all the time: anorexia.
I use that example, because when I talk about things regarding sexually being, interpretations, stories, or meaning, people are sometimes offended and think, “No, this is very real.” But the meaning and the interpretations that we put on things in our world are incredibly powerful. They are the means by which we interpret all of our experiences, who we are, and what we are. When we talk about hunger this way, it feels a lot less like some innate, physical drive and more like an experience of meaning-making, of interpretation. Now the same thing is true when it comes to sexuality, except now instead of having an unpleasant physical sensation, we have the ability to become strongly sexually aroused, an incredibly pleasant sensation. But I believe that that sensation in and of itself has no meaning until we interpret it, till we place meaning upon it.
Who am I attracted to? Well, my wife. Let's say that I grew up in the South Pacific a hundred years ago in some island in the South Pacific; what kind of women might I be attracted to then? Heavy women. Why? Because being heavy meant that women were healthy and well-off. In fact, the same thing is true today: there are places in Africa where beauty queens can pay money and go to gain weight so they can be heavier for beauty pageants, because in places in Africa, being heavy means that you are healthy and well-off. In our own culture, if I took a beauty queen of today and entered her into a beauty contest in 1930, what would people say about her? She would literally be comic relief; they would just hoot and holler and slap their knees. It would be the funniest thing they'd seen. She would be so incredibly tall and gangly, she's look like a beanpole; so skinny that she'd look sickly; and tanned like a common field laborer, like a lower class person. She'd have no chance at all. In other cultures, men might be attracted, however, to women who stretch their necks out with brass rings or stretch their earlobes down to their lips or who shave their heads or knock their front teeth out. And men in those cultures find those attributes to be erotic. When we talk about sexuality that way, it sounds a lot less like some innate physical drive and a lot more like an interpretation, a way of viewing things, a way of understanding things.
Now there's good news and bad news about this point of view that I'm presenting to you. The good news is this: all of the men who I know who have been successful in overcoming homosexuality have said that one of the things that had to happen is they had to learn they weren't as different from other men as they thought they were. They thought they were incredibly different; they had universally overinterpreted themselves as being vastly different than other people. And I look at my clients all the time and tell them, “Here's the good news: I can say with complete confidence, I believe with all my heart that there is no difference between you and me with regard to something called sexual orientation or homosexuality. No difference. There is no difference between us, except this: you can remember how to be sexually aroused by other men because you've done it. I can't remember how to do it because I've never done it.”
Gay rights activists sometimes say, “You think we can become straight? Well, could you become gay?” And my response is, “Probably. I would prefer not to--it seems to cause a lot of hassle in people's lives. I've got my own hassles, thank you very much.” But I do believe that most people could probably change and be oriented in a different way. That's the good news.
The bad news is this: if the metaphor we use is one of disease, we would hope to find a cure. If it was a wound, we would wait for the wound to heal; if it was a condition, we would look for treatments for the condition. But if this is a memory, if this is something I can remember how to do, how do you get rid of a memory? Amnesia? I will look at clients all the time and say, “For you to completely lose the ability to ever be sexually aroused by another man”--now losing the ability is different than losing the compulsion or the habit, but to lose the ability so you just couldn't do it--“that would be about as easy as if I were to say, ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed…', and for you not to think ‘Reindeer.'”
How would you do that? Well, they say, “Well, I would substitute something.” Okay, I would sing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Buffalo” 50,000 times, and pretty soon “buffalo” is coming to mind more readily than “reindeer.” But guess what? Every once in a while out of nowhere, random firing of neurons in the game--“reindeer” comes back into my mind: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Buffalo,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Now what do I do? I'll show you what you might do if you were emotionally sensitive and very introspective and strongly perfectionistic. You might do something like this: “Reindeer…Oh, no, reindeer! I did reindeer again; I can't believe it! I still have this reindeer orientation! It's always going to be reindeer! I can't believe it! All of my prayers, all of the therapy, all of the work, it's ruined--it's reindeer, reindeer, reindeer! I'm never going to be--it's reindeer! It's going to be reindeer my whole life! I can't believe I'll never be but a reindeer!”
What have I just done? Strongly solidified the interpretation, reinforced it; instead of saying it once, I said it a dozen times with great emotional emphasis. That's what many of these young men do. What we try to get them to do is do something like this: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer…Oh, I used to do that a lot…Rudolph the Red-Nosed Buffalo,” and go on, move on, decrease their emotional reactivity to this. It's a key component in treating this problem and very, very difficult to do. They believe that they're supposed to fight it with all of their heart, that they should have strong emotional reactions to it, that that's what a good person would do. But it just digs them deeper and deeper like a man struggling in quicksand is pulled lower and lower.
Now I want to talk to you quickly about how this problem develops. Okay, Jeff, if it's an interpretation, if it's meaning, if it's not a thing that people have that makes them feel this way, how does the story get started? How do they develop that interpretation? Well, there are some fairly common patterns, and I want to talk about two of the most common today.
The first is very simple and straightforward: a young man hears in preadolescent years or early adolescent years about chastity, virtue. And he makes up his mind at a very deep level that he is not going to think sexual thoughts about women. And he moves all women into a category like his sister or his mother--he would never do that, they're too pure, too sacred to think that way about. But nobody ever said anything to him in a sacrament meeting talk or a priesthood lesson about thinking that way about men. And there is somewhat less resistance to thinking that way about men because they hadn't been warned or taught about that. In addition, they are men; they get to see themselves in the mirror, they get to go to the locker room. There's less of a barrier there. And so I will often talk to clients and say, “If you were to have explicit sexual fantasies about a girl that were just as explicit and real as the fantasies you might have about guys, which would you feel most guilty about?” And almost all of them will say, “I'd feel more guilty about thinking that way about a girl.” I'd say, “Really? Would you feel twice as guilty?” “Yeah, twice as guilty.” “Three times as guilty?” “Yes, three times as guilty.” “Four times as guilty?” “Hmm, not sure.” Three to four times as much guilt thinking about women that way as about men; see how someone who is introspective and wants to be good gets caught up in that pattern?
Second pattern, a little bit more complicated but even more universally true. And when I present this to men, nine out of ten at least will say to me, “You have just described my life. You have just described me. How did you know?” Well, I ask. Here's how that pattern goes; this is what men will say to me: first, “I have always felt different from or rejected by other men or boys.” For some men, this has to do with the relationship with their father; some felt distant from their father or felt that their father didn't approve of them. Some didn't like their father, didn't want to be like him. But for many men, it doesn't have much to do with their father at all; traditional psychoanalytic ways of viewing this problem say it's always about the father, but I run into men all the time who say they had good relationships with their dad. The traditional viewpoint on that is, “Well, you might have thought you had a good relationship with your dad, but we'll get down to it.” But I believe them.
Some it was just relationships with peers: they might have been made fun of, or felt different, called “gay” or “fag” or other kinds of names when they were growing up. Some were left out of activities, some just simply did not like traditional masculine activities like sports or cars or other kinds of things; they were drawn more to artistic endeavors. They're more expressive, they were more verbal. They like art or music or drama or other kinds of things. But in somewhere in there, they felt different from or rejected by other men. Because of this, they began to focus on other boys very intently; almost obsessively they focused and thought about other boys, and that focus took one or more of three different forms.
The first was envy; they did a lot of comparing: “Why can't I be like other guys? I am so different. Why can't I have that guy's good looks, that guy's popularity, that guy's muscles, that guy's body, that guy's sexual development, that guy's popularity?” Lots and lots of comparing.
Second way that they focused on other boys was wanting to belong; they saw people walking around friends, buddies, slapping each other on the back, being friends, and they wanted to belong. They wanted to fit in. They wanted to be cared about and included.
Third way they focused on other people: fascination and curiosity. They found them just intriguing, these other men, they were intrigued by their masculinity, by their sexual development, intrigued by them aesthetically--they found them beautiful. So in one or more, often all three different ways, they became very focused on other men.
And then came puberty. And I apologize for being a bit specific and graphic here, but it is important if we're going to talk about this issue, that we talk about it in its reality. Young adolescent boys are very easily sexually aroused, beginning at about twelve years of age. They are sexually aroused by any change in their physical environment, by any change in their emotional state, or for no reason at all. So their pants are too tight, they get aroused; their pants are too loose they get aroused. They're hot, they get aroused; they're cold, they get aroused. They're angry, they get aroused; they're relaxed, the get aroused. They're bored, they get aroused; they're nervous, they get aroused. They get aroused very easily or for no reason at all. When I am presenting to groups of men, I joke with them about this, and tease them about it, and they laugh because they know that it's true. So I talked to one client who was sixteen years old, and he said, “You know, I'm doing so much better not doing sexual fantasies about men, so I just have the normal arousal about every 45 minutes.” I thought, “Whoa, goodness, goodness!”
But that is the reality of a young boy's life. At this stage in their life, this arousal is what I would call non-differentiated. It is not aimed at anything in particular; it just happens to anything and everything. And most boys at this stage of life are almost bored with other boys--I've been playing football with these guys, we've been hanging out together, there's nothing new or exciting or intriguing there--but those girls over there, now they're shaped different. They talk different. And my culture sends me all kinds of messages about sexuality, romance, girlfriends, marriage, all kinds of things, and so pretty soon this arousal that happens so easily is beginning to focus on those girls--that's where I'm intrigued by, that's where I feel different then, that's where I have strong emotional reactions to. But for a significant minority of boys, their focus isn't on those girls; their focus is still on these other boys because of fascination, curiosity, wanting to belong, and envy of comparison. That's who they want to be close to, that's who they have strong emotional reactions to, and in this stage where arousal occurs so readily, pretty soon they find themselves being aroused by these other boys.
When that happens, three things occur, sometimes very quickly, sometimes over a period of years. First, over-focus and over-interpretation. This becomes huge in their life. They think about it constantly. They worry about it all of the time. They worry about the future. They worry about why. They try to figure it out. See where a boy who's introspective gets caught up in over-focusing and over-interpreting what's going on here? Universally, I describe to clients and say, “It's like this. Here is the fact that you get aroused by other boys, and over here is every other thing in your life: your family, the Church, friends, hobbies, everything else in your life, school. And as far as the amount of concern and mental energy and effort you put into these things, this fact that you get aroused by other boys outweighs every other thing in your life.” And often they nod their head, and their eyes tear up, “Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It matters more than everything else combined.”
When I focus that much on something, does it get larger or smaller? Larger. Another metaphor that they use, I'll take my clipboard in my office and I'll say, “Let's say that this clipboard represented the fact that you get aroused by other guys, and let's say that everything else in the room here represents all the other things in your life.” Boys will take the clipboard and think about, “Okay, I get aroused by boys. Boy, look at that--oh, no, my goodness, look at this! Oh, no, can this be true? I can't believe this! Oh, my word!” And pretty soon, this is all they can see; I might see other things off in the periphery here, but this has filled by entire field of vision. When I do this with clients, they're nodding their heads, “Oh, yeah, that's it, absolutely. I can't think of anything else.” That's the first thing that happens when they recognize they get aroused.
Second thing: self-loathing. Self-loathing, they start to hate themselves. “I wanted to have my calling and election made sure before my mission, just to get that out of the way. And now I've got the worst possible thing you can have; no one will love me because of this. This is so disgusting, so loathsome. I'm so disgusting and so loathsome.” Self-loathing, very strong.
Third thing that happens: isolation and secrecy. “Nobody must know about this; I cannot tell anybody. I will will it gone, I will pray it gone, I will force it out of my heart and my mind, but I cannot tell anybody.” So I talk to men all the time who say, “I have not told anyone about this is five years,” or ten years, or fifteen years, or twenty years, or thirty years. Or I told one bishop a while ago, good man, but didn't know what to do. That was embarrassing; it was humiliating. This thing that matters more than everything else in my life, and it has been a complete secret in my life. Not only that, but I have had to be very careful about how close I let other people get to me, because they might figure me out. So I put a lot of effort and energy into creating a façade. Occasionally I see young men who might have looked withdrawn in adolescence and introspective or introverted, but most often they become world-class fakers, and they just smile when I say that, world-class fakers. Oh, yeah. They walk down the hall at school, giving high-fives and talking to people, and they're all everybody's favorite kid, and they're the, hold all these positions in the Aaronic priesthood, and they're, at church everybody's complimenting them and telling their parents how wonderful they are. Nobody knows the inner hell that they are living through day by day by day; it is a complete secret, and they've isolated themselves socially and emotionally from other people.
Those three things--over-focus and over-interpretation, self-loathing, isolation and secrecy--to those and as a result of those add two other things: some level of compulsive sexuality, some level of compulsive sexuality. I take a very simple approach to this; it simply means, “I'm having some sort of negative emotions; I'm feeling lonely, I'm feeling guilty, I'm feeling unworthy, I'm feeling tired, I'm feeling bored, I'm feeling some negative emotions and I know how to make them go away. I know something that will replace them with feelings that are exciting and intensely pleasurable and intriguing to me, feelings that will make me feel close to other men, other boys, if only in my fantasies. That's why I turn to fantasy and eventually to masturbation, pornography, and sometimes acting it out with other men.” This becomes very, very common, and they spend much of their waking hours turning back again and again and again to sexual thoughts and fantasies.
Eventually a young man in this situation becomes like an alcoholic. Think of an alcoholic sitting on the street corner looking in the gutter and he says, “Alcohol has ruined my life. My wife has left me, my kids won't speak to me, my health is ruined, my career is shot, I've got no friends. I think I need a drink.” But instead it's this young man thinking, “I'm a fag, I'm a queer, I'm evil, nobody will love me if they knew this--I think I need a fantasy.” And so they turn to it again and again and again; they spend many, many hours, and I say to these young men, “If you had spent as many hours practicing the piano in the last ten years as you've spent thinking sexual thoughts about other guys, how good a piano player would you be?” And they say, “Oh, Jeff, I'd be playing in Europe, I'd be playing all over the world, I'd be fantastic! You just can't imagine how good I would be! I'd be incredible.”
And so they practice these sorts of sexual thoughts and feelings and arousals for hundreds and thousands of hours throughout their adolescence, and then they think, “Where do these feelings come from?” Ironic, ironic. Some sort of compulsive sexual behavior, medicating the pain. I've likened this to overcoming this problem like an alcoholic giving up alcohol, well, walking around with a bottle of whisky open in front of him with a straw in the bottle and the other end in his mouth, and he's not going to drink, because this young man doesn't have to go anywhere to get this. He doesn't have to purchase anything. He just turns his mind to it and experiences those, that rush of pleasant feeling again and again and again.
And finally, finally these young men experience some sort of religious turmoil or crisis as a result of this. These young men have often been extremely devout, and they are hurt and wounded and wondering, “Why have my prayers gone unanswered? Why when I needed it the most has the gospel not been there and saved me from this problem?” Some lose their testimonies and leave the Church; some become ultra-orthodox and try very, very hard; and some switch back and forth, but some level of religious crisis or turmoil. That pattern is almost universal.
Can you see why a young man who is emotionally sensitive, introspective, and wants to be good, gets caught up in that pattern? It is the introspective young man who over-interprets what's happening to him and focuses on it incessantly. It is the young man who wants to be good, who loathes and hates himself because he is not. It is the young man who is emotionally sensitive, who isolates himself because he cannot bear the thought or the pain of anyone else knowing about this problem. And so he shields himself from all kinds of intimate relationships, or from those who might help him.
I want to review that pattern for you real fast: “I felt different from or rejected by other men. I focused on other men because of envy, wanting to belong, or fascination and curiosity. I hit adolescence when I was strongly and easily aroused by all kinds of different emotions and feelings. I was having strong emotional responses to men, and so I focused on men more and more and became aroused by them. When that happened, I over-focused and over-interpreted. I hated myself because of it. I isolated myself socially and emotionally and kept it a secret. I developed some sort of compulsive sexual behaviors to medicate all of this pain, and I developed some sort of religious crisis or turmoil in my life.”
Now the question is, how do these men change? What helps them change? Men who are successful at overcoming this problem do so by reversing those last five things that I talked about. They stop over-focusing and over-interpreting. They stop making it the center of their life. They thought that it was a good thing to focus on it so much--I mean, if you've got a problem, if you've got a difficulty, if you've got a sin, you should worry about it and think about it and focus on it. It doesn't work. What works is to leave it alone.
I talked to these young men and use a metaphor that often rings true to them; I say, “When people begin this battle, they think it's going to be like this: There's a terrible dragon over here. He has caused untold pain and misery in my life. I must kill him. So I draw my sword and I go to do battle, and he knocks me down, and I knock him down, and we fight and we fight and we fight and it's a terrible battle, but finally, because I'm so valiant and so diligent, I get a couple of good blows in, I drive my sword into his heart, and he goes down, and I collapse in exhaustion, covered with dirt and mud and blood and sweat, but victorious.” That's how they picture this happening; that's how they've been trying to do it.
It doesn't work. Those who are successful would describe it this way: there's a terrible dragon over there; he has caused untold pain and misery in my life. I draw my sword, he lunges at me, I hold him back. I back up a little bit, I back up some more, I back up some more and keep backing up and finally I turn and walk from him, and I walk and I walk and I keep walking, and the farther I walk, the smaller he becomes on the horizon until he becomes irrelevant in my life. He just doesn't anymore.
Might seem logical to us, but to a young man who is very perfectionistic and introspective, some of them just can't stand that thought. Remember my first client? “Can you promise me if I do this, I will never have any of these feelings ever again?” They want it gone completely, vanquished, completely destroyed. They cannot tolerate any of it in their life, and it simply keeps them there, fighting the dragon. I joke with these men when they come back in for counseling and they've worried about it and they've relapsed and they've had these difficulties. And I've said, “You've had your nose in the dragon's armpit again, haven't you?” “Yeah, I have. I have. I just can't leave it alone.”
They need to get on with their life, they need to stop putting their life on hold. Many of them have put their life on hold spiritually, academically, socially, in their careers or other things, waiting to solve this problem. “I can't really move ahead with my life until this problem is taken care of, and I can't tell anyone about this problem.” And so they're stuck and they need to move on, simply move on with their life. Stop making it such an intense focus. They give up self-loathing, they stop hating themselves, they stop focusing so much on themselves. They become focused on other people, they develop more compassion, more caring for others, and they develop not what I would refer to as high self-esteem--I'm not sure on how comfortable I am with that--it looks more like self-forgetfulness, or perhaps the gospel virtue of hope.
To focus on themselves is they hope and have a belief in the redemption of Christ and stop trying to earn their way into heaven. They give up the isolation and secrecy; they tell significant people in their life. It is not necessary nor helpful to tell lots of people, but tell a handful of significant people, usually parents or a spouse, a bishop, a counselor, maybe some close friends, so that somebody else knows and they can talk to someone else about that. This act alone is incredibly agonizing for so many of them, and yet incredibly liberating. They say, “I cannot believe people could respond so positively to me. I cannot believe they still care about me or love me or like me.” They were quite sure they would be rejected because they have rejected themselves so long. They develop healthy, non-sexual relationships with other men and women and become more socially comfortable, more open and honest, more direct, more caring. They overcome compulsive sexual behaviors, and for some this is the greatest and most difficult thing they have to do, overcoming these compulsive sexual behaviors and leaving them behind. And many of them, it's similar to the dragon story: they've been going about it wrong their whole lives.
They've been feeling so terrible about themselves--I've never met a man who successfully hated himself out of homosexuality or compulsive sexuality, never. In fact, the ones who hate themselves the most are universally the ones who are most stuck.
And finally in this series of overcoming, they experience some kind of a spiritual or religious rebirth. Universally these men, when they are successful, attribute it to having been spiritually born again. I tell my clients, “Your goal has got to be nothing more or less than to be born again through the Holy Ghost and to have the desire for evil removed from you.” Now the question comes up, “Well, that's great; I've been praying for that. So can't we just skip to that part and forget all the stuff about getting on with my life and not focusing and stop hating myself and learning to love other people and being honest and open and overcoming the compulsive sexual--let's just skip to the born-again part and we'll be done with it.” It doesn't work, doesn't work. Those elements prepare them for that final step in overcoming. It softens their heart, opens their understanding, increases their compassion and their humility.
Many men say, think to themselves, “Can I possibly be saved in spite of this problem?” And my firm believe is that many of them will at one point say, “No. But I was saved because of this problem. This was the problem that drove me to my knees, that humbled me, that made me realize that I stand redeemed or I do not stand at all.” And I have talked to men who have said to me, “I wouldn't trade this problem, what it has taught me, how it has helped me.” Men who struggle with this issue are often men who in their adolescent and early years, are men who understand the part of the gospel that says, “Obey. Keep this commandment. Don't do this, don't do that. Repent. Be good. Be outstanding. Be perfect.” They get that part of the gospel; that just sinks into them, and they get it. It's an important part of the gospel, and boy, they get a hundred percent there. They understand it completely.
But the part of the gospel that talks about redemption, atonement, unconditional love, being born again, the love of the Savior--that confuses them. They don't really understand it. They don't really get it. They could give a great sacrament meeting talk on it, because they're very bright and they know how all the words fit together. But in their hearts, that part of the gospel confuses them. Many of them are men who think to themselves or who seem to view it as though, “I can accept the atonement of Jesus Christ after I've repented and overcome this and left all this alone. After I've done this, then I can accept the atonement to kind of clean up the mess I made along the way. But not right now, not while I'm so bad. I've got to overcome this on my own, and then the atonement is available to me.” It's the equivalent of saying, “I can accept the atonement as soon as I prove I don't need it, as soon as I prove I don't need it.”
It's interesting, many of these men have struggled for years with spiritual perfectionism, wanting to be perfect spiritually. And I tell them, there are two possible errors or problems or disasters that deal with spiritual perfectionism: the first is that I'm going to have myself because again and again I'm going to fail to be perfect spiritually. I'm going to loath myself. That's a terrible thing to endure: hating myself because I can't be perfect. The second error that can happen as a result of spiritual perfectionism is worse than the first, and it's that, “I believe I've achieved it. I believe that somehow I was able to do it. I believe that sure, everybody needs the atonement, but I need it a little bit less than most. I've done pretty good, I've done pretty good.”
And I have wondered--I don't know--but I have wondered if some of these men who struggle with this issue are not such men of such intelligence and talent and devotion and feeling that were it not for this difficulty, they might be in danger of that second error, of believing they had achieved it. But right into the middle of their high achieving, outstanding lives drops this terrible problem. I sometimes say to clients, “If I had a pill in my drawer here that would make this problem go away, I wouldn't give it to you.” They'll look at me, like, “What? What do you mean?” And I'll say, “I think our Father in Heaven has a pill like that in his drawer, and I'm guessing you've asked him for it.” “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.” “And I'm guessing the answer was no.” “Yeah, it was.” I tell these men our Father in Heaven seems to be stingy with taking this problem away from people, with taking it away, but seems to be magnificently generous in showing them what the very next step is for them, what the very next thing they need to be doing when they humbly and consistently ask.
But that change of these patterns is difficult. It is possible, I have seen many men do it and move on with lives that are filled with happiness and joy, but it is not easy. It is a difficult trial. They are in the same position that you and I are in: they must rely on our Father in Heaven and the atonement of Jesus Christ, or they will not be successful. But they have to change the way they think about it, they have to change their perception of what living the gospel means, because simply hating themselves and striving so diligently hasn't worked for them, but understanding mercy and moving away from these behaviors, walking away from the dragon, seems to be successful and has been for many, many men.
We're out of time. I appreciate the invitation to be here. Thank you.