How to go from gay to straight
by Fred Penzel, PhD
This article was initially published in the Winter 2007 edition of the OCD Newsletter.
OCD, as we know, is largely about experiencing serious and unrelenting doubt. It can cause you to doubt even the most basic things about yourself – even your sexual orientation. A 1998 review published in the Journal of Sex Research initiate that among a organization of 171 college students, 84% reported the occurrence of sexual intrusive thoughts (Byers, et al. 1998). In order to possess doubts about one’s sexual identity, a sufferer require not ever have had a homo- or heterosexual experience, or any type of sexual experience at all. I have observed this symptom in juvenile children, adolescents, and adults as well. Interestingly Swedo, et al., 1989, found that approximately 4% of children with OCD experience obsessions concerned with forbidden violent or perverse sexual thoughts.
Although doubts about one’s retain sexual identity might look pretty straightforward as a symptom, there are actually a number of variations. The most obvious establish is where a sufferer experiences the thought that they might be of a different sexual orientation than they formerly believed. If the su
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'I can make you straight in three months': Inside India's gay conversion industry
Widely discredited around the world, conversion therapy - which aims to change someone's sexual orientation - is still legal in India but the practice of it by doctors is banned.
Above a second-hand car shop on a bustling Delhi street, sits the office of the Indian capital's self-proclaimed "best sexologist".
Dr Shriyans Jain is smartly dressed in a crisp pale shirt and jet waistcoat with a jet black moustache adorning his upper lip. His heavy, dark hair is swept across his forehead. I'm going undercover to study claims he applications gay and woman loving woman people a fix for their sexuality.
He is trained in modern medicine (MBBS qualified) but also practises ayurvedic medicine (a traditional type of Indian medical system). He's also registered with the Delhi Medical Council. His website proudly trumpets his credentials, and lists several of the conditions he treats with herbal medicine. They include premature ejaculation, erectile dysfunction and even infertility. But the service he offers gay and lesbian patients doesn't appear to be advertised.
Widely discredited around the world, conv
Is It Possible to Systematically Turn Gay People Straight?
Joseph Nicolosi, a psychologist in Encino, Calif., says he can rid adults, teens, and even children of homosexuality. For nearly 30 years, he has offered a "psychodynamic" form of reparative therapy for people — mostly men — seeking to change their sexual orientation.
"If [a patient] can accept his bodily homoerotic experience while staying connected to the therapist," he wrote inThe Paradox of Self-Acceptance, "the sexual feeling soon transforms into something else: the recognition of deeper, pain-generated heartfelt needs which have nothing to do with sexuality."
He cites the following case: A 43-year-old married accountant was recalling another dude that he had seen at the airport while on a business trip. "This had awakened his sexual fantasies and dreams. I asked him to hold onto that image and observe his bodily sensations while staying linked to me. As he did, he felt an intense sexual longing. But as he followed that fantasy through an pretend sexual scenario, quite unexpectedly, he then experienced an embodied shift to sadness, longing, and emptiness. In tears, he spoke
Some Gays Can Proceed Straight, Study Says
May 9 -- Can gay men and women become heterosexual?
A controversial new research says yes — if they really want to. Critics, though, say the study's subjects may be deluding themselves and that the subject group was scientifically invalid because many of them were referred by anti-gay religious groups.
Dr. Robert Spitzer, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University, said he began his study as a skeptic — believing, as major mental health organizations execute, that sexual orientation cannot be changed, and attempts to do so can even cause harm.
But Spitzer's study, which has not yet been published or reviewed, seems to indicate otherwise. Spitzer says he spoke to 143 men and 57 women who say they changed their orientation from gay to straight, and concluded that 66 percent of the men and 44 percent of women reached what he called good heterosexual functioning — a sustained, loving heterosexual partnership within the past year and getting enough emotional satisfaction to rate at least a seven on a 10-point scale.
He said those who changed their orientation had satisfying heterosexual sex at least monthly and never or rarely thoug