Reparative therapy – Reflections and feedback
By Rosally Saltsman, Jewish Press (H/T JONAH)
[...] There are gay men who are making it their life's cause to keep people from attempting therapy, by decrying the efficacy of change therapies in the media. They do this because of their own inability to achieve success in these therapies. It's like secular Jews who feel so threatened by people who become religious that they do everything in their power to keep them secular. Militant gays petition for the right to be acknowledged for who they are but don't accord others the right not to be gay anymore if this is what they desire.
"The gay community sees themselves as a persecuted minority group," says Rabbi Shmuel Rosenberg, who lives in Elizabeth, New Jersey and who has been a Clinical Social Worker and family therapist for 22 years. In the course of his work he says, he has helped dozens of people, most of them men, overcome the limits of SSA (Same Sex Attraction).
Homosexuals often suffer a great deal of pain and rejection, condemnation and judgment by their families and their community and deal with a tremendous sense of frustration and failure when they feel they are unable to change. But when a gay man succeeds in changing his lifestyle, he is met with displeasure and even coercion from the gay community in the form of social hostility for having betrayed them. On the other hand there is a tremendous amount of support among strugglers and ex-strugglers themselves.
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