Defining Homosexuality

DEFINING HOMOSEXUALITY
(Richard Cohen, M.A. © Coming Out Straight 2000; Oakhill Press)

HOMOSEXUALITY IS A SYMPTOM

Same-sex atraction feelings, thoughts, and desires are symptoms of underlying issues. They represent a defensive response to conflicts in the present, a way to medicate pain and discomfort. They represent unresolved childhood trauma, archaic emotions, frozen feelings, wounds that never healed. They also represent a reparative drive to fulfill unmet homoemotional love needs of the past—an unconscious drive for bonding with the same-sex parent.

A homo-emotional love need is an unconscious drive for bonding between a son and his father, or between a daughter and her mother. This is a hidden and profound wound in the soul of anyone who experiences same-sex attractions. If questioned, the active homosexual would not say he is looking for his father’s love in the arms of another man. This is often a hidden, unconscious drive buried deep in the psyche. As Dr. Harville Hendrix states, “Each of us enters adulthood harboring unresolved childhood issues with our parents, whether or not we know it or will admit it. Those needs have to be met, because their satisfaction is equated, in our unconscious minds, with survival. Therefore, their satisfaction becomes the agenda in adult love relationships.”

HOMOSEXUALITY IS AN EMOTIONALLY BASED CONDITION

There are three underlying drives to same-sex attractions:

Need for the same-sex parent’s love: Most case histories demonstrate that same-sex attraction thoughts and feelings originate in preadolescent experiences. Therefore, it is basically a nonsexual condition. The homosexual love need is essentially a search for parenting.. . What a person with same-sex attraction seeks is the fulfillment of these normal attachment needs, which have abnormally been left unmet in the process of growth.” That is, a man is looking for his father’s love through another man, and a woman is looking for her mother’s love through another woman. Therefore, the drive is one of reparation, seeking to fulfill unmet love needs of the past. It is a homo-emotional reparative drive.

However, these deeper emotional love needs can never be fulfilled through sexual relationships. It is tried, tested, and proven that sex never heals nor fulfills the deeper love needs, simply because they are the unmet needs of a child. Only through healthy, healing, nonsexual bonding will true and lasting change occur.
Need for gender identification: The person strugeling with same-sex attraction feels a lack of masculinity or femininity within himself or herself and seeks to fulfill this need through another man or woman. This resulted from a distant or disrupted relationship between father and son or mother and daughter in early childhood or adolescence.

Gender identity is an awareness of one’s masculinity or femininity. In persons with same-sex attraction, there is a feeling of inadequacy and incompleteness in the inner essence of their being. Therefore, they search for the missing part of themselves in another person. Through a sexual contact or union with another person of the same sex, they feel, at least momentarily, whole and more complete.

Fear of intimacy with someone of the opposite sex: In the case of a same-sex atracted male, there may have been an abnormally close mother-son attachment. In a marriage where the husband does not meet the mother’s emotional and physical needs, she may turn to her son for emotional comfort and support. This is not done with conscious intent to hurt. Nonetheless, it has a profound and damaging effect upon the psychosexual development of the son. He may overidentify with his mother and femininity and disidentify with his father and masculinity.

Later in puberty, the son may experience sexual attraction toward his mother that leads to extreme guilt and the repression of a normal sexual drive toward women. He might then turn to men for intimacy and sex, not wanting to “betray” his mother or reexperience his guilt. This process may be completely unconscious.

The father or another significant man is usually the abuser in the case of a same-sex attracted female, followed by female sexual abuse. The abuse could have been sexual, emotional, mental, or physical. This leaves her deeply traumatized by men. Not wanting to reexperience the memory of abuse, she then turns to women for comfort, love, and understanding.

HOMOSEXUALITY IS A SAME-SEX ATTACHMENT DISORDER (SSAD)

Homosexuality represents an attachment strain, defensive detachment, or defensive exclusion from the same-sex parent, same-sex peers, one’s own body, and one’s own sense of gender identity. Same-sex attraction is an attachment disorder, whereby the individual feels separated from parents, self, body, and others. “I don’t fit in,” “I don’t belong,” “I’m different from the rest,” “I’m neither a boy nor girl,” are some of the thoughts of those who experience same-sex attractions. The result is a Same-Sex Attachment Disorder.

Dr. Martha Welch defines four types of attachment in the parent-child relationship:

Secure Attachment—Parents are available, responsive, empathic, and effective; the child is competent, self-confident, resilient/cheerful, cooperative, and humorous/playful, and tries harder.
Insecure Resistant Attachment—Parents are sometimes available, less responsive, less empathic, and less close; the child is clingy, rebuffing, tense, volatile, impulsive, passive, and defeatist.
Insecure Avoidant Attachment—Parents are rebuffing (having been raised by rebuffing parents), avoid closeness, are inconsistent and ambivalent, and reject; the child is hostile/bullying, whiny/needy, compulsively self-sufficient, distant, and demonstrates little give and take.
Insecure Disorganized Attachment—Crosses boundaries of all three other types of attachment. Mother is depressed, was abused or neglected herself, and is mourning; the child is depressed, anxious, passive-aggressive, inhibited, clingy/tearful, gloomy/joyless, hard to comfort, can’t get out of anger, and will perceive the mother as neglectful because someone else is abusing him even if the mother doesn’t know about the abuse.

All children who suffered the three types of insecure attachment experienced separation anxiety and hyperarousal, and therefore learned to cut off and detach emotionally from self and others.

I submit that anyone who experiences same-sex attracted thoughts, feelings, and desires has a Same-Sex Attachment Disorder (SSAD).

There is nothing “gay” about the gay lifestyle; it is full of heartaches and most often an endless pursuit of love through co-dependent relationships.

It is not bad to have same-sex attractions, as they represent a drive to heal unmet love needs. However, acting upon the desires leads to frustration and pain

It is a lifestyle, whereby the individual is disidentified with his own masculinity or her own femininity and tries desperately to fill the deficit by joining with someone of the same sex. It is therefore not gay, nor bad, but SSAD!!