I do know one adult gay male who was attacked as a teen...he said he was around 16 when it occurred and the attacker was 20. That’s rather post-pubescent.
I’ve worked with many gay people and the vast majority have had rather normal up-bringings without histories of molestation to hear them tell it. Otherwise normal and rational people in everyday dealings.
The most telling discussion I ever had with any of them was one where I was told to think about the feelings I had for girls in high school and he said that he had those same feeling for other boys instead. He couldn’t explain it other than that’s what his brain and body told him to do. I had a hard time countering that argument.
Not all molesters are homosexuals and not all homosexuals are sexual predators. How many hetero child molesters (hello, fundamental LDS’ers) are lurking out there in our midst victimizing the young?
Homosexuals are usually the product of weak or non-existent fathers. Ask these homosexuals what their relationship with their father was like....I bet it was either that the dad was working all the time and ignored them, or beat them (that isn’t strength, but weakness), or psychologically abused them (mockery, mind games, etc.). The child didn’t develop the masculine traits needed, and became vulnerable to feelings for men that a lack of a strong father had.
Well, that must be the truth then. Every time homosexuality comes up, there’s someone saying, “Yeah, but I know a lot of homosexuals who aren’t that way” or “My brother Bob is a homosexual and that wasn’t how it was with him!” I think there’s more to this Penn State story than what’s being reported.....so far. Look at all those stories that nbc and the new york times and abc run about their outrage over homosexual child abusers. What? There aren’t any? Why this one? Thank you for lumping in the Mormons with child molesters. Sound logic there.
A lot of what we learn emotionally is learned before we are able to process it mentally so it feels to us as if it is just a natural emotion/feeling. This is true for lots of things besides feelings of emotional or sexual attraction.
For instance, my dad was emotionally abused by his mother and it has affected his life ever since. He has a violent temper as well, and my emotions “learned” from before I was able to even process it that if Dad blew up it was somebody else’s fault. I “learned” that if somebody else is mad at you it’s your fault. My husband grew up in a home that was the same way. When we got married I had lots of problems because our relationship had that same basic emotional foundation. I went to a counselor who told me that if just concentrated on pleasing my husband everything would be fine. I kept struggling with a strong desire to drive off the road on the way home from those counseling sessions, for some reason.
It was only when I began to deal with a recurring nightmare (that I had been having ever since I was a teen) that I began to realize the “automatic thoughts” that my mind had accepted. (The idea of “automatic thoughts” was the one valuable thing I got from the counseling sessions). I had “learned” that my dad’s anger was my fault, and as a result I “learned” to automatically think (when somebody was angry) that it must have been something I did. That thought/belief led me to FEEL guilty, even when I intellectually knew it was not my fault. I could reason with myself all day but still had the FEELING. That’s because my first, automatic thoughts opposed reason. They weren’t based on reason. They were based on a little 2-year-old girl trying to make emotional sense out of her world in a Pavlov’s-dog type of way. What should have been dealt with on an intellectual level was handled on an EMOTIONAL level, so I learned an EMOTIONAL response that I couldn’t overcome through reasoning.
All I could observe as an adult was my feelings. Those feelings “came natural” to me. But they were problematic. For me to accept that those feelings are just the way I had to live the rest of my life would have been a death sentence. We are not at the mercy of our feelings. Our feelings are there for a reason.
When I was trying to figure out and correct the problem so that my feelings would make sense, I tried a lot of other things that I thought would get my feelings where they needed to be. One of those things I tried was getting married. Having a guy think I was wonderful would fix everything, right? It didn’t. In 4th grade I decided to try being useful. That got more people to like me but it didn’t fix my feelings. I tried being a missionary to atheists as a reason to justify my existence; that didn’t work either. Nothing I tried worked. My feelings were only fixed when I finally emotionally came to terms with the fact that good people can still have others be mad at them. Having somebody be mad at you isn’t a “guilty” verdict.
Since I am not looking to my husband to validate my existence and his anger doesn’t threaten my emotional stability, our relationship is totally different than it was. Since I am not looking to my “missionary work” to validate my existence I don’t have to clutch desperately to it and have it run my life, which frees me up to go whatever direction the Lord truly does lead. I’m much healthier now than I’ve ever been, even though I still sometimes have to fight my feelings all over again.
The point of this long missive is that we think of our feelings as being who we are, but emotional feelings have causes just as much as toothaches have causes. When we adjust our chewing to accommodate a toothache it causes other problems in our life - displaces the pain so maybe the tooth doesn’t hurt but the jaw does. Or maybe there is no obvious pain but there is tension that eats away silently and causes chronic ulcerative colitis (which is how my husband dealt with the dysfunction rising from his dad’s emotional and physical abuse as a kid).
So a person may well say that they have these “natural” feelings and have had them their entire life, and yet those feelings may be the only clue the person has that will point them to a source of deep problems in their life.
I am a normal, rational, capable person who would not be classified as mentally imbalanced. And yet I spent a large part of my life suffering because of irrational feelings that I thought were normal because I had always had them. There was a rational reason for me to have those feelings, and they were not my fault. But they were hurtful to me and caused me to behave in sometimes-desperate ways. A person in similar circumstances could well have sexualized their response and had catastrophic results.
“I’ve worked with many gay people and the vast majority have had rather normal up-bringings without histories of molestation to hear them tell it.”
Which is to say, they lied.
I’ve worked with many gay people and the vast majority have had rather normal up-bringings without histories of molestation to hear them tell it.
What you say is precisely the opposite of every study that’s been done, and the conclusion drawn by therapists who work with homosexuals helping them repair their lives. I don’t quite believe you...