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A GAY GUY SAVED FROM REPARATIVE THERAPIES
#1
I'm 31 years old and, after a long struggle with myself, I started to live again, I have been destroying myself for several years and I think I have found happiness just a couple of years ago. I often hear people exalting family as if it were a beautiful thing, that is, as if it were the ideal place for a boy to grow up serenely but for me, and I’m only realizing it now, the family has been a terrible place. From outside my family seems a family like many others, a father who has a good job (very good), a mother who worked but then left the job after my birth to devote herself completely to me (unfortunately she did!). Both my parents are of a good cultural level. 
 
I have no memories of any of my grandparents, but I think that my grandparents have been the ruin of my parents, just as my parents have been my ruin and maybe even worse. Both my father and my mother are only children exactly like me. I have never once seen my father and mother exchange a gesture of tenderness so as I have never seen my father tired or unkempt or my mother not perfectly settled. My mother has always been a freak of order, cleanliness, etc. etc. … The fundamental value that has always dominated my family is social prestige. My parents are wealthy, we can say it, but they are not rich in the true sense of the word, certainly, for them, not feeling up to their world would be a great suffering. I grew up being alone or with people much older than me.
 
The school was an obsession for me since elementary school, I couldn’t be the second in my class, I had to be the first one and this cost me a lot. My mother sometimes asked me questions, questions like those the teacher asks at school, just to see if I was able to answer. My parents were very attached to the church, today I think it was more for reasons of opportunity and politics than for religion itself. In particular since I was seven or eight years old I often saw a priest in my house who could have been about forty years old, I will call him Don Luigi here. Today I say a “prete”, but then I said “sacerdote” [the two words mean “priest” but while “prete” in a common word, “sacerdote” is the official word, used by the Church itself ], because my mother was convinced that, under the word priest, said by me, there could be something quite derogatory. He was an important priest, very respected and then he struck me because he was a bit my father's ecclesiastical version: short hair like Germans, perfect clergyman, always perfectly ironed, shiny shoes, etc. ...
 
I understood only many years later how much this priest has influenced my life since I was very young. It was Don Luigi who, in practice, decided that I had to attend elementary school in an institute of nuns, but I don’t have a bad memory of the school or of the nuns, except for the fact that the environment was almost military and the study was really a torment for me. But that school had two big flaws that I didn’t see at the time, in the first place it was totally out of the world, that is it was all muffled, muted, the children grew up and didn’t realize they lived in a world completely separate from reality and then there was the fact that the children were addressed to religion beginning from 6-7 years old with a substantial brainwashing of which they could not absolutely realize the consequences because they lacked any possibility of comparison with the lives of other boys.
 
At seven years old the sisters prepared us for the first confession, but a seven-year-old boy has very little to confess, so I assimilated all external attitudes; clasped hands, kneeling, reciting penance, etc. etc., What the priest told me in confession at that age was always that I had to obey my father and my mother like I had to obey Jesus, who loves us if we do what he commands us.
 
Toward the end of the fifth grade I made my first communion, but I still didn’t understand anything about what I was doing. The sisters taught us catechism and I studied it like any school subject and I was also proud to know why God had created the world, etc. etc. … The choice of middle school, even this in a religious institution, was warmly sponsored by Don Luigi who said that for me a "serious school" was needed, serious for him was the same as religious, that would prepare me well for what life would have presented to me, implying that the public school was a very bad environment in which I could only have ruined myself. In the seventh and eighth grade the environment was quite similar to that of the nuns, even though there were no nuns but priests. The school sometimes, I would say quite frequently, organized a camping or a stay in the country for three days and I liked it a lot. They called them "retreats" and were used to prepare for the confirmation I received at age 12.
 
My life was completely quiet, confession and communion every Sunday, which for me was a obvious but also very mechanical thing, for the rest I had to study and to try to be the first in the class, at home I had to obey dad and mom, that was all.
 
Then, suddenly, at the beginning of the eighth grade, my world of child safety goes into crisis. One night, for the first time I have a wet dream and I remember perfectly that I had dreamed that I was spying on one of my classmates in the shower, or rather, before he undressed to get a shower, when I imagined that his underwear was down I had my first orgasm. The dream, I still remember, was really exciting and the physical sensation of my first orgasm was very intense and even the impression, vaguely embarrassing, that I felt later, feeling all wet and sticky, was very strong. I didn’t know what had happened because I knew why God had created the world but didn’t know that sexuality existed, or at least I couldn’t connect what had happened to me with that minimum of concepts about sex that I had been able to steal from the external world, in practice only from TV because the internet in my house had never existed except as a working tool for dad.
 
In short, it was the first time I felt embarrassed for sexuality. I didn’t know what to do: talk with dad or with mom? And then tell them everything? Even that I dreamed of spying on a friend of mine and of seeing him naked? Or would I have to go immediately to confess because dreaming of such a thing is surely not a good thing? And then what was all that sticky substance that I had found on myself. I decided to avoid my mother, because I thought she would not understand, I went to talk to my father who immediately understood what had happened, but I didn’t tell him that I had dreamed of seeing a naked boy. He told me that now I was growing up and that what had happened was the awakening of my sexuality and that it was not a dangerous thing but in order to have a serious advice on how I would have to deal with these things I had to talk to the priest.
 
I understood only many years after the absurdity of a similar speech, at that time the answer seemed to me clear and comprehensive. I went to confession in the afternoon with a priest I didn’t know because I was very ashamed, I found an old man who told me that those things are useful when you get married and have children and that until then you have to maintain purity, that is you have to preserve absolutely a gift so great that can make you a collaborator of God in spreading the gift of life. Then I told him, almost as if it were a banality, what I had dreamed of and he stopped and told me: "This is a serious sin because men are made for women and women for men", and added that I had to pray much for Jesus to make me return to the right path, etc. etc., then he gave me the absolution. For me it was a tremendous shock. What had I done wrong? I really could not understand it.
 
However, I decided not to say anything to my father about what had happened in confession and to commit myself to the maximum so as not to think any more about those things that I had been said were a serious sin. Since then, maybe I was still 12 years old or I had just turned 13, my life became a continuous struggle against myself. I discovered masturbation after a few days, but with serious feelings of guilt and with even greater guilt feelings, I continued in my gay sexual fantasies. I went to confession every Sunday with a different priest telling him just that I had masturbated because for me the sin was that. From the priests I heard things of all the colors, always on the negative, clearly, but with many different degrees of negativity.
 
After the intermediate school, my fate was marked, and for the intervention of Don Luigi I ended up for the third time in a religious school, always of priests, like the middle school, even if of another order, there is no need to say that I was sent to the classic high school, the thing was obvious a priori. A mixed class with a predominance of girls, however, the guys were a dozen, not very few. Of course I had attended also elementary and intermediate school in mixed classes of boys and girls together, at the time such a thing seemed quite secondary to me, but entering the ninth grade I saw things in another way, that is I had begun to look at the boys, clearly with the maximum circumspection and with a thousand scruples of conscience, but I had begun to look at them. I knew I should not have looked at them but I couldn’t not help looking at them.
 
At school there was very little to do, surveillance was very strict and at most you could have seen smiles between a boy and a girl and also this with a lot of sense of limit. In practice, I experienced anguish all the years of gymnasium-Lyceum, not for school, where I was definitely not the first, with great disappointment of my mother, but for sex. Attempts to repress me have been really absurd because when I entered the Gymnasium I received as a gift my first computer and my first internet access with the warning on the part of my parents that "this must be switched on only for school and when we are at home". But as the facts didn’t follow the words, I almost immediately started to go on the internet to look for gay photos and videos (which at that time were still few and very short). With internet the frequency of masturbation has increased exponentially, once a day and even more.
 
To this my very private sexual life corresponded the confessions in which I had begun to tell the priest that I had gay fantasies and in confession I was told by the priest and starting from the first time that in order to definitively solve this problem and to have a normal life one could resort to a psychologist, because there are very good psychologists who can help the boys to "get back on track", I was then 16 years. That's how I made the most absurd decision of my life, as if it were a heroic choice of which I had to feel proud: I would have gone to a psychologist to get out of this story of masturbation and homosexuality, but how? My parents should have known it. I thought to tell my parents that I didn’t sleep at night, that I felt very agitated and that I wanted to talk to a psychologist, in response I was told that Don Luigi was precisely a psychologist and that I could talk with him. Against such a proposal my refusal has been categorical. My mother tried to insist, I ended up convinced not to talk to Don Luigi but to contact a "serious psychologist" indicated by him. I knew that there was professional secrecy and I tended to trust.
 
After a few days I went to the first appointment with the psychologist, he must have been between 35 and 40 years, everything was very ritual, bed, notebook, low light, etc. etc., I was a little frightened, I told him of my problem: "compulsive masturbation and homosexuality, etc. etc.". He tells me that a lot can be done but that my commitment must be total.
 
After the first sessions he makes me compile some tests and gives me a book to read about reparative therapies where there are terrible stories of homosexuals finished badly, I bring the book home and hide it because I don’t want my parents to find it, I read the book but it makes me sick, the psychologist tells me that my doctor should prescribe me anxiolytics but I don’t want to take medicines, then he sends me to a religious group that deals with these things and tells me that "operating on two fronts" things are much easier.
 
The group met in the evening, going there for me was an experience of a terrible self-inflicted violence. I resisted only the first two meetings, then I told the psychologist that I couldn’t take it anymore, he tries to insist on getting me back to the religious group saying it's for my own good. But I had no intention of going back there, so he proposed a more gradual way ...
 
In the meantime, I had practically stopped studying for school and I found myself with a debt in Greek that made my mother go on a rampage. I turn seventeen and I feel truly destroyed, a nothingness destined for failure. I spend a whole night crying, I cannot do it any more, I’m tired even of my live, I'm truly at the limit.
 
Talking to a classmate of mine, I come to know that she goes to a psychologist and that she is well with him. I tell my mother that I want to change the psychologist, she sees me right on the edge and does not object. I wait for the day of the first date.
 
The environment is Spartan, just reduced to the minimum, the psychologist is old, about sixty, white hair, sweater. We shake hands and he tells me to sit down in an armchair, he sits in a chair in front of me, I tell him my problem: "compulsive masturbation and homosexuality", he asks me: "masturbation how often?" I tell him "Even once a day" that seemed to me very much, he smiles, opens his arms and says, "And with this? This is the norm!" I insist: "But with homosexual fantasies ..." And he answers me:" So what? If one is gay it's obvious that he thinks about guys and not about girls, these are normal things!" I told him: "I do not know what to do anymore, I can’t  go on, I'm just at the limit ... ". Then he let me tell a little about my life and he told me: "We must simplify things, you don’t have to do the things that others tell you but what you want, you don’t have to live badly, because otherwise later you'll have a thousand regrets, you're a very young boy, a gay boy, so what? What's the problem? The absurdity, for a gay guy, is to force himself to desire to be no longer gay or worse to commit to not being gay anymore! You must begin to become autonomous, to do what you think is right, the problem lies in the fact that you are worried for things that don’t concern you, for things that others want from you, but you must do only what you want. You will have problems because your family will not easily accept your freedom of doing what you want, but your autonomy you have to earn it day after day."
 
When I got home I felt free, the feeling was very strange but I knew that the things that this psychologist had told me were basically those I didn’t have the courage to say to myself. It was not easy to build a real autonomy because actually my parents did everything to put me in trouble, and here the psychologist was really useful. Now I have a boyfriend for two years and I love him deeply, he also helped me a lot, he had an enormous patience with me. Now we live together! One day we were walking on the road and I told him: "Take me by the hand!" He looked at me questioningly as asking why, and I added: "There is Don Luigi!" And then he hugged me and kissed me in the street, that's why I love him!
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A GAY GUY SAVED FROM REPARATIVE THERAPIES - by gayprojectforum - 07-13-2018, 09:55 AM

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