Trying to Change What Is

Trying to Change What Is

I watched “Criminal Minds” tonight. The show was about a young gay man who was put in a camp by his parents to change him to be straight. The camp used shock therapy, prostitutes, what is considered masculine behavior models to change the thoughts and ideas that were currently inside the brain of the gay children.

I help people change thought every day. That’s what I do as a hypnotherapist. When someone asks me to help him/her be motivated to study more, I place trigger thoughts in the mind to remember easily and activate stronger attention. When someone wants to lose weight, I induce positive thoughts about good eating behavior and project into the mind ideas about having energy and desire to exercise. When someone wants to quit smoking or another habit, I help introduce ways of change that will consider the old habit as extraneous and impure, and create new habits that will overpower the neuro pathways in the brain to make positive change. That’s what hypnotherapy does.

But always, on the onset of the therapy, the client is asked the simple question: Is this what you want?

Plenty of times, I have told people to leave their appointment when they told me that they were simply doing this to appease a spouse or their children. You can’t change to appease anyone! You only can change to help yourself.

Now, let’s break down change. In a matter of hypnotherapy, we are talking behavorial change that is generally a quality that is affecting the individual in a bad way. The behavior is creating ill health, bad grades, bad self-esteem, or something that might promote negative life patterns.

Now can we look at homosexuality in this same way? This is the conundrum that many of these homosexual to heterosexual conversion workshops are trying to unfurl.

A couple years ago, I had been privy to a friend, actually an ex-lover who had been married with two children. He wanted to stay married because of his Bible-thumping belief that homosexuality was sinful. Nonetheless, when his job would take him out of town, he would be on the Internet immediately and be hooking up with men every time. Soon he would get HIV. As a result of the disease diagnosis, he had to come out to his wife and kids. This man decided in an effort to get his wife and kids back, that he would go to a conversion camp.

After the first week at the camp, my friend called me and basically was on this huge high. He believed without a shadow of a doubt, that the reason he was gay was totally psychological. His sexual behavior had to do with his childhood and the way he idealized men. The project made him believe that if he developed solid relationships with straight men that this would solve the problem with his sexuality. But throughout the entire time he was going to this conversion therapy, I know he was “acting out” with strangers almost every week. He even came on to me a couple times then would get mad at me afterwards. Later, he would call and apologize, saying that he was out of order and that God would lead him back.

As you can imagine, I was trying to be supportive of whatever my friend needed to feel safe and loved, but what he was getting into was making him hate himself and the behavior he had come to know as a normal outpouring of his own sexual needs and desires. Though, for some, that may be sin, for this man it had become simply self-hate.

When I am given a choice between feeling self-hate and feeling as if I have sinned, I’m going to think, it is simpler to think that falling prey to sin and wrong-doing is normal. No one person should feel too badly about sinning since it is a commonality of the human existence.

But when the kind of self recrimination of saying you can’t be who you are or God will hate you comes into play, then now you get into the game of self-hate, which can turn into suicide and retribution actions on the part of the person being blamed for acting improperly.

This was the case in the victim in the television show this evening. He fell in love with a man and killed him because he was taught it was religiously wrong. Then he tried to hook up with women to appease his father’s belief. When he couldn’t perform, he killed the women too. Before the confused gay man was caught, the story unraveled about his childhood and his father hiring a prostitute and forcing him to have sex with her in front of him until he got it right. Then the verbal abuse about God hating homosexuals happened. And when nothing else worked to get the child to conform to the parent, he turned to conversion therapy in the worst kind of conditions.

As you can imagine all of this combined was enough to turn a beautiful, innocent young man into a rage-filled killer. Though it was fiction, I believe the story was based on a true account.

Seriously, are we the kind of humanity that has to have everyone be the same homogenous creatures doing the same behavior? Or are we willing to accept the many colors of society and people and embrace our differences?

Until society gives each individual the right to his/her personal belief, we are going to keep procreating individuals who think dualistically. And in this homogenous society’s fight to keep everyone thinking the way they do, we will eventually destroy the human fabric of anyone who is young enough and fragile enough to be manipulated by condemning beliefs.

This kind of behavior in America has to stop. What are we doing to help this stop today?

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Bo Sebastian is a Hypnotherapist and Life & Health Coach, available for private sessions to QUIT SMOKING, Lose Weight, New Lap-Band Hypnosis for Weight Loss, CHANGE YOUR MIND, CHANGE YOUR LIFE! at 615-400-2334 or www.bosebastian.com.

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