Inheritance of Shame: a Story of Conversion Therapy

By Peter Gajdics
Other/Wise
May 15, 2020

https://ifpe.wordpress.com/2020/05/14/inheritance-of-shame-a-story-of-conversion-therapy/

I was born in 1964 in Vancouver, Canada, the youngest of five children to Catholic immigrant parents. My mother, an ethnic German, was born in the former Yugoslavia, and escaped three years in a communist concentration camp post World War II; my father, born in Hungary, was raised an orphan, and at about the same time, he also fled the rising communist regime and made his way to Canada, where my parents met and married, in 1956.

Religion and family all meant a great deal to my parents when my siblings and I were children. By most people’s standards, we were a close family: dinners together every night; piano lessons; Christmases with all the decorations; homemade European baking; Catholic schools for all us kids; and, of course, church every Sunday.

It was in my Catholic elementary school, when I was six years old, that a stranger molested me in the boy’s bathroom during a church gathering. I never talked about that abuse with anyone—already at the age of six, I’d learned to hide my shame and to silence myself. But there were cracks in my silence; soon after, I began experiencing night terrors, deep depression, and high anxiety.

As the years progressed into the 1970’s, I learned from various sources—the priests during church sermons, the media, even my own family—that sexual abuse “caused” homosexuality. As it became clear to me that I might also be this thing called “homosexual,” I could not differentiate between the past abuse and my emerging sexuality—the two seemed to intermingle in my mind, and the fear that my desires might have been “caused” by abuse stalked me like a shadow throughout my formative years.

Finally, when I was twenty-three years old, in an effort to break a pattern of lies and shame, I told my parents I was gay; I “came out.” And even though we’d never talked openly about the abuse, as soon as I told them my secret, they told me that a dirty old man had molested me into becoming a sexual pervert. My “deviant lifestyle,” as they described it, was a perversion of nature, and they forbade me ever to talk about it with them again. One day while my mother and I were arguing about my homosexuality, suddenly she blurted out that she’d been raped in one of the concentration camps where she’d been held prisoner, then quickly swore me to secrecy, and to not talk about it again, particularly with my father whom she’d never told. I was forbidden to talk about my sexuality ever again, instructed to keep her rape a secret, and implicit with that, charged with protecting my mother from her pain by never talking about my own.

After months of arguments, feeling conflicted, angry, and then depressed, I fled my hometown and moved to a new city. Within a short time, my depression, panic attacks and insomnia worsened, so my family doctor referred me to a psychiatrist for psychotherapy. All I knew was that I needed to talk to someone––I needed help.

At first the psychiatrist made no correlation between the abuse and my homosexuality, and I started therapy with him soon after, on a twice per week schedule. He taught me the process of his treatment model, based on the principles of primal scream therapy. All my sessions were conducted while lying on a mattress in the middle of his therapy room. With closed eyes, I was told to focus on past trauma, specifically the incident of sexual abuse, and to move my body like I was walking and then running, in order to release years of pent up anxiety and grief. Whenever I experienced anger, which for me was often, I was told to move to what he called a “batting station,” near one end of the room, pick up a baseball bat and begin striking a punching bag to release unexpressed rage. And always, the doctor instructed, I was to focus on past abuse.

A few weeks into therapy, the doctor told me that I would need to take medications, a sedative and an antidepressant, or else he would discontinue therapy altogether. Reluctantly, I agreed. The medication dosages were quickly increased, and he explained that we would need to “tweak” my use of various medications and that some experimentation would be inevitable.

Soon, the doctor began presenting me with conflicting causation theories:

he’d never met one happy homosexual, he told me; my misplaced maternal needs and my father’s poor role modeling had caused me to seek “homosexual love,” which he said I had reinforced through repeated sexual encounters with men;

I was confused because I’d been searching for the love of my parents in every man I’d been with sexuality; and,

ultimately, my history of childhood sexual abuse had “caused” my false belief that I was homosexual, and so my therapeutic goal, he said, would be to scream and to cry my pain (i.e., my homosexuality) away in order for my innate, dormant heterosexuality to once again resurface.

With my parents before him I had resisted the idea that the abuse had caused my homosexuality, but with the doctor, I could not resist. He was the big and powerful doctor, and I was young and powerless. He told me that the medications he’d been prescribing would all help to “silence the noise” of my homosexuality, because only then would I be able to “flip over to the other side.” We needed to “correct the error” of my homosexuality, as he phrased it.

Within that first year he directed me to move, along with several other patients, into what he called a “therapeutic house,” where we would all support each other emotionally while going through our deep regressions. Contact with anyone outside the house was strictly forbidden. Meanwhile, the more medications he prescribed, the less the medicine seemed to do, and so he kept increasing the dosages.

About one-and-a-half years into the therapy, I attended my first weekend marathon session—two days of nonstop regressions in the office with a select group of other patients. The stated purpose was to break down our defenses through repeated regressions and then to submit to our primal pain. In the middle of one of these primal sessions, while I was sobbing on the mattress, screaming about how I now thought my parents had caused my homosexuality, the doctor injected me with ketamine hydrochloride, an animal anesthetic. He then proceeded to nurture me, holding me in his lap like a newborn baby for an hour. Weekly injections of ketamine followed that first one, and they were always administered before such re-parenting sessions with the doctor, who became like my new “daddy,” or before sessions with a woman that he’d hired to act as a new “mommy” to all of his patients. The doctor later explained that the ketamine would help remove my “observing ego,” allowing him direct access to my self so he could heal my damaged inner masculinity and sexuality––both of which, according to the doctor, had contributed to my “false” homosexual identity.

Eventually, the daily medication dosages had climbed to what, as I learned years later, were near fatal levels: 4 milligrams of Rivotril (a sedative); 550 milligrams of Elavil (an antidepressant); as well as intermittent dosages of Surmontil and Sinequan (two other antidepressants), all administered on top of the weekly injections of ketamine hydrochloride (the animal anesthetic).

The side effects brought on from all of the medications were debilitating. Early one morning, at the moment I rose from my bed, it felt as if something inside of me unhinged. I collapsed, feeling the air rush past me as if I’d been plunged down an endless elevator shaft. A housemate found me later, conscious, lying motionless on the floor, still feeling as if I were falling through space––the endless landscape of my shattered mind. The doctor was called to the house and he added Nozinan (an antipsychotic) to my regime of daily pills. The feeling of falling, inside myself, continued for weeks. Despite all the medications and daily regressions, however, I still found myself drawn to men. The doctor said my obsessive compulsiveness toward men was part of my pathology, and so he added Anafranil (another antidepressant), specifically to deaden my sex drive. Now, all fantasy and erotic sensation was turned off entirely; even the possibility of erections was eliminated; my imagination was being whitewashed—and yet, still, my sensibilities were drawn, if only mentally, toward men. At this point the doctor started to use aversion therapy on me, later threatening to hook my genitals up to electrodes to help “retrain” my penis.

About five-and-a-half years into treatment, the doctor said I needed to take a short break from the regressions and medications, and then “dive back in for round two” sometime later. He reduced the medications, and as he did, for the first time in years the fog in my mind cleared. My anger over what I’d been doing to myself, and what the doctor had been doing to me, increased, and so too did my desires. Nothing about my same-sex attraction had changed.

Almost six years to the day that I met the doctor, I left this house and cut all ties with him.

For the first two post-therapy years, I felt shell-shocked. My mind was frozen; I could not explain or talk about anything that had happened during the previous six years. During this post “treatment” time it wasn’t so much that I wanted to kill myself, as it was that I thought I was already dead. The term “conversion therapy” was still foreign to me; all I knew was that I’d been referred to a psychiatrist for depression and insomnia, issues of child sexual abuse, familial estrangement, and I’d been led down a road of trying to “correct the error” of my homosexuality––and that road almost killed me. I was numb.

Then, slowly, I grew outraged as I thawed out from the ongoing assault against my senses, and withdrew from the last of the medications. I needed to do “something,” to take some positive action and regain my own sense of agency, so I wrote a five-page letter, detailing the facts of the treatment, and I mailed it to British Columbia’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. I wrote that letter to help me to stay alive—to resist the silencing effects of shame brought on not only from the childhood sexual abuse and the lie that it had ever “made” me gay, but also from a form of therapy that I now understood had tried to eradicate who I was as a person.

The college conducted a two-year year investigation into the doctor’s practice, culminating in an ethics “conduct review hearing” with the doctor, his lawyer, myself, and a boardroom of other doctors. At the close of the hearing, in 1999, I sued him for medical malpractice on the grounds, among others, that he had “treated” my sexual orientation in an effort to “change” me from homosexual to heterosexual. After all legal proceedings concluded in 2003, I began to write my memoir, The Inheritance of Shame.[2]

At this point, I needed to do more than write facts––I needed to make sense out of what had happened to me. I needed to mine my own as well as my parents’ history to better understand what had brought me to that traumatizing doctor in the first place, why I’d stayed for six long years, and what, if anything, I had learned. Whereas, in the past, the two issues of sexual abuse and my sexual orientation had always blurred in my mind, eventually, they became clear and distinguishable. The traumatic effects of sexual abuse had included issues of body dysmorphia, profound body shame, eating disorders, and compulsive sexual acting out––regardless of my sexual orientation.

Gradually, I could also see that my father’s personal shame––stemming from his orphaned childhood and his sense of abandonment and grief––had become like my own. His shame had helped normalize my own, long before I’d even met the doctor. From my mother’s side, even as a teenager, I had sensed a pattern that stemmed from her experiences in the concentration camp repeating through my life, although I could never have articulated it at the time. Now I could see that her imprisonment in the camp echoed in my own patterns. I had been incarcerated like my mother, not in a physical prison, but the prison of belief––belief in a lie. I had felt trapped in this prison, the prison of what I thought it meant to be gay, and then I’d spent years trying to “escape” myself, through various means.

A history of trauma, both intergenerational and personal, had distorted my perceptions, causing me to live out a kind of lie about myself and my body and the world-at-large. It’s almost as if trauma led down the “wrong” path in life, but I also came to believe that there was no such thing as a “wrong” path because trauma was simply information that I had ended up absorbing and internalizing. But, I now see that I have also had the ability to unlearn it, to see it for the lie that it is, and to transmute it into something helpful and meaningful. In this way, being embedded in trauma had been the potential to open me up to deep levels of self-awareness.

Starting in around 2012, as the U.S. and Canada began legally banning conversion therapy, I continued to work on my book––not just to understand myself and to unsilence my personal history––but also as a political act with the goal of preventing the recurrence of similar abuse on LGBTQ minors. Although my own experience had been with a secular psychiatrist, I could see that the most common forms of these “change” treatments were now through religious organizations. So-called “conversion therapy” was simply an umbrella term meant to include a whole spectrum of fear- and shame-based treatments aimed at “changing” or “curing” a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

As virtually every world-wide health organization started to denounce any form of “conversion” (or “reparative”) therapy, instead of talking about “changing” homosexuals, religious organizations changed their tactics and began portraying “conversion” treatment as “helping homosexuals”—helping them to never act on their homosexuality. “Love the sinner, hate the sin”—same old slogan. These religious organizations, such as Exodus Global Alliance (formerly Exodus International), Journey Canada, and Adult and Teen Challenge, typically rebranded their identities, adapted, changed and disguised their language, never claiming to actually practice such a thing as “conversion therapy.” But, these religious organizations still advocated and enforced the exact same shame-based treatments that I had experienced, and that caused prolonged suffering to countless individuals.

For those who do end up claiming to have “changed” from gay to straight, I also understood that so-called “conversion therapy” “worked” by dissociation: The person undergoing treatment was viewed as separate from their sexuality, and consequently, dissociated themselves from everything they had conflated with idea of “being gay.” In retrospect, I could see that I had always objectified my sexuality; for years I had talked openly about “leaving homosexuality,” as if “the gay world” had been a thing in itself, some thing outside of me that I’d walked into—or had ben “pushed” into—and so of course I could walk out of it and leave it all behind. Conversion therapies confused a person’s “map” for their “territory:” the patients are encouraged to think that by changing their outer map of identity they would also, magically, change their inner territory of desire. They don’t. What people in these treatments do experience is cognitive dissonance—outwardly identifying as heterosexual or “ex-gay,” while simultaneously still experiencing their inner same-sex erotic desires. Unsurprisingly, when maps and territories do not match, patients often leave treatment dissociated, depersonalized, depressed, confused and, at times, suicidal.

Conversion therapy is a problem of ideology, but it is not simply theoretical; these “therapies” play out in real time, in real people’s lives, and each survivor’s story is different. The truth is, advocates of these treatments prey on the vulnerability of people, often young people, grappling with complex issues around sexuality or gender––oftentimes with a history of trauma, coupled with cultural lies and a deep need to belong. These treatments attempt to turn a desire to belong—belong to a church or community, family and friends—into a desire to change one’s sexuality or gender. The locus of attention no longer remains on the ignorance or hatred of the treatment or the practitioner, but on the person whose sexuality or gender is now under direct attack.

While legislative intervention to end these treatments is important, I also do not believe that the answer to the problem of conversion therapy lies solely in legal bans. Education is crucial and ongoing dialogue needs to occur. Survivors need to speak out and tell their stories. People need to understand that these treatments still exist to this day, under various guises or labels, and continue between patient and “helping professional” behind closed doors. People need to understand that these treatments are all lies; and are all masqueraded torture. In addition to creating laws, then, we need to change hearts; unless the heart is changed, the mind will always find some new way to oppress. And, I think we can change hearts, and then help to change the world a bit at a time, by telling the truth of our lives. Remembering is a form of healing, and then by speaking up and “unsilencing” our histories, by sharing the truth about what we’ve lived through, we educate the world about what we’ve learned.

If you would like to contact Peter Gajdics, his email is: gajdics@hotmail.com

[1] A version of this paper was presented at a conference of The International Forum for Psychoanalytic Education in Seattle, Washington, on October 25, 2018. For additional information, see: www.inheritanceofshame.com.

[2] Published in 2017, Brown Paper Press, and winner of the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal in LGBT nonfiction.