Therapy

"My topic was limited to the forced or coerced use of aversion therapy, plethysmograph, and/or chemical castration by the police" But love, that's like writing a 25-paragraph article on minor-attracted adults that talks about sex addiction, abuse, and murder, and then saying afterwards, "I was only talking about a particular group of minor-attracted adults." If you're going to talk about a subject that is under attack as being entirely useless - as you make clear in your article conversion therapy is - then you *must* make clear whether you are talking about all aspects of the subject or whether your criticism is limited to one aspect of it. Your section on reparative therapy ends with the sentences, "Some also question whether therapists who use them inform their patients completely of their lack of scientific validity and their possible risks. The situation has been compared to that of other recent, experimental forms of therapy such as recovered memory therapy and multiple personality disorder therapy, which were eventually found to cause psychological damage, sometimes quite severe." And then you go straight on to the sentence, "They [the articles] describe the following [aversion] therapies, especially for use on teenaged boys who are attracted to younger children or adolescents and therefore classified as "deviant"." Since you (1) make clear through your quotation marks that you do not believe these teenage boys are deviant, (2) are likely to agree with the mental health community that recovered memory therapy causes severe psychological damage, and (3) quote the mental health community, without dissenting comment from other bodies, as to the "informed consent" issue, the impression the reader gets is that you are linking the mental health community's views on the lack of consent and benefit in reparative therapy with the mental health community's lack of consent and benefit in aversion therapy. And since you end the article with a sentence implying that no consent and benefit is possible in aversion therapy, the reader is left to conclude that you likewise believe no consent or benefit is possible in reparative therapy. If you believe the topics of reparative therapy and aversion therapy are separate, and that the issues of voluntary therapy and involuntary therapy are separate, then you *must* make this clear in the article. You do attempt to distinguish reparative therapy in the first paragraph in which you describe it, but quite honestly, that paragraph is so much surrounded by unwavering criticisms of conversion therapy that, the first time I read it, my eye slid over the words "more humane" and "more at peace." And I was reading your article more carefully, I think, than most of your readers would be likely to do. I'm continuing to beat the dead horse because I've made the mistake so many times during my years on the boards of thinking that my writing adequately conveyed my intentions - witness J's reaction below to my reply to you. It's gotten to the point where - when I'm thinking straight, which I'm usually not - I don't post anything until I've asked myself, "How could this post be misunderstood?" If you'd reviewed your article with that in mind, I think it's likely that you would have immediately seen that you didn't make clear in the article which aspect of conversion therapy you were attacking, and that your article could be taken - by somebody paranoid like me :) - to be an attack on conversion therapy in general. "I was not aware that people voluntarily did this to change their same-gender attraction or attraction to minors, and found it beneficial." There was quite a lot of discussion about this on the now-alas-demised sex offenders group whose name I can no longer recall, but which had an extensive archives online at one time. I imagine that this is a topic of conversation at alt.abuse.offender.recovery (AAOR) and Healing Together as well, though I don't get over to those groups as much as I should. (Incidentally, I wasn't meaning to confuse reparative therapy - which the ex-gays use - with aversion therapy - which as far as I know is only used in the secular sphere.) I don't want to belabor another point, but I do feel that researching destructive therapy without researching beneficial therapy is like researching child abuse without researching positive reactions to adult-child sex. However much one tries to be balanced, one always ends up giving an imbalanced view of the topic. I really haven't spent that much time in the sexual recovery world; one doesn't need much time to pick up the general sense of the issues being struggled with there. Couldn't you devote a couple of weeks to talking to recovering offenders to get their views on therapy? Incidentally, they'll be able to provide you with *lots* of anecdotes on bad therapy - it's a major topic at AAOR. Heather [E-mail]   [Home Page]