Rather, the main thing (I'm thinking) is to understand the factors that are feeding into your sex/gender confusion, depression, anger, compulsive risk-taking behavior, the emotional deficits or traumas or twisted experiences pushing you to sexually exploit others or leaving you vulnerable to being exploited by others. Right?
Getting a handle on these underlying causes could then give you the power you to diminish and get control over unwanted sexual urges.
Developing an abiding romantic/sexual interest in people of the other sex could eventually be a part of this, but doesn't have to be. If you don't end up decisively heterosexual, it doesn't mean therapy has failed.
For a Christianm, the goal would be to be able to live in a way which is pleasing to God. Could be honorable holy matrimony, could be honorable chaste celibacy.
I realize I'm blathering here. Not sure if I'm on the right track. Is that more or less what you had in mind?
Yes!!! That's exactly what I had in mind! The urge to copulate, is, in itself, morally neutral, just as the urge to eat is morally neutral. The urge to have sex in an immoral way (sodomy, bestiality, etc.) or the urge to have sex in an immoral situation (outside matrimony) is a temptation to sin, just like any other excess or deformity of biological appetite is a temptation to sin. It becomes an actual sin only when it is indulged mentally or physically.
The determination to define homosexual activity as a sin (which it is) often results in writers' giving the impression that sexual desire for the opposite sex is in itself a virtue (which it is not, any more than hunger is a virtue) and that sexually using the opposite sex is always right (which it is not, any more than eating "food" is always right, while eating auto parts is wrong).
You have done a great job saying what I meant. Help yourself to a Guinness and a kitten!
Meanaholics. That’s what proponents of sex perversions are.
Addicts to meanness.
Take care of the “meanaholism” and the perversion begins to be sapped of its power, begins to become visible as the wicked, dignity and joy spoiling thing it is.
We should not stop being sympathetic to them, while not feeding into the particular means that they have chosen to deal with their plights in life.
Jesus, being Creator and Savior, had and has this down to a T.
I’m not sure what technicalities are actually implied in the “state ban.” Instead of worrying about whether the state intends to stop them, they might just keep right on going, being crystal clear that this is religious or faith counseling, and let the state try to come after them if it wishes, choosing to deal with it only then.