The most popular theories behind current gay conversion therapies are based on three childhood issues:
- An incomplete bond and resultant lack of identification with the same-sex parent
- Childhood sexual abuse or trauma
- Lack of strong or correct gender role modelling
During sessions, the participant is prayerfully led through childhood memories around these issues.
Before commenting on the problems with this technique I will say, most emphatically, that none of these issues make people gay. It is completely unfounded and damaging.
What makes it all even worse is the occurrence of false memories. We create these memories due to the prompting we receive, the expectations of those around us, our desire to change and please God, and as in my own case, desperation, simply because it was the only explanation I had left. I “remembered” supposed events that ended up demonising my father and family relationships.
Here is an article by Chris Paley, author of Unthink
Remembering something doesn’t mean it happened
We come to the truth in many ways. We read books, think, listen to other people and experience things directly. Other people lie sometimes. They skip the important details. Our thoughts are sometimes mangled. The most convincing way to learn things is to experience them ourselves. Our memories seem to be our unmediated store of the truth: the things we know for certain happened. But other people can give us memories of things we never experienced.
Elizabeth Loftus and colleagues conducted one of the earliest experiments showing how to do this, and highlighting how dangerous it is to rely on what we remember. They showed volunteers a clip of a road accident. Afterwards, they asked some of the participants, ‘About how fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?’ They asked others how fast they were going when they collided, bumped, contacted, or hit. Participants who heard the question with the verb smashed estimated that the cars were going faster*.
A week later, the experimenters contacted the participants again and asked them further questions on what they remembered about the accident. In particular, was there any broken glass at the scene? Those who’d been asked how fast the cars were going when they smashed were more than twice as likely to wrongly remember seeing broken glass after the accident. A single, apparently innocuous word changed what people remembered, and their memories afterwards built all the details of the accident to be consistent.
This was an early experiment. Researchers have since become bolder and better at manipulating people’s memories. They’ve had participants remember robbers carrying a screwdriver that wasn’t there. In controversial experiments, they’ve implanted memories of childhood events that never happened including being lost in a shopping centre, taking a flight in a hot air balloon and even meeting Bugs Bunny (a Warner Brothers character) on a trip to Disneyland.
When The X-Files was popular, the number of reported alien abductions, some recovered under hypnosis or in therapy, rose dramatically. It seemed like a fad, but the unfortunate abductees were just as distressed when talking about their memories as people who really had traumatic experiences. Memory’s a strange thing, and just as unreliable as those grainy photos of UFOs. The truth may be out there, but don’t rely on finding it in your head.
Chris Paley holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge, and is the author of Unthink, which has been published in six languages.
