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SERMON 3 of  Karen Kellock

SAME-SEX ATTRACTION EXPLAINED:

HOW   THEY'VE   BEEN   CHAINED.

      

in Psychoanalytic--Family Systems Theory  terms

THE POWERFUL, CONTAGIOUS AND ADDICTIVE GAY SPIRIT as it relates to FRACTURED GENDER IDENTITY

What has brought on this gay explosion?  KK: The feminist revolution made men into wimps temporarily "repaired" through sex  (masculine incorporation) with other men--but  becomes an insatiable  and temporary fix

All fascists regimes were filled with homosexuals, in  times when marginals become thugs with superior status in their   combined masculinity and women become mere childbearing tangents. 

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What's inherited is the fractured gender identity which necessitates incorporation of the same sex to feel whole, yet also causes shame temporarily relieved by gay union which becomes an addicting  trap. 

 The fractured gender  identity is genetic, YES--but then other circumstances/ traumas enter in,   reinforced by the gay-tolerant  culture.  The Psychiatric  view lends understanding of the addictive and  contagious gay phenomenon taking  over government and education. These dynamics make it obvious why

  A FATHERLESS NATION IS A GAY NATION

Contagious Gay Phenomenon is  Explained  through Family Systems Theory  and  Psychiatry [ Joseph Nicolosi Ph.D.]

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BLIND GUIDES & GAY  SHAME

We must see through the pretense and falsehood of  BLIND GUIDES misleading  an entire nation:  These pit vipers want you to "stay positive" like the monkey who sees no evil to avoid their own upheaval

It is well established that gay acting out is  reparative: The person is attempting to "repair" unmet same-sex affective needs (attention, affection and approval) as well as gender-identification deficits.  Due to the early family system he has a fractured  male identity.

Homosexual activity  temporarily relieves the stressful  shame, conflicted assertion and depression called  the   "Grey Zone," and the social posture of the False Self.

For Nicolosi's  clients,  gay sex went against their  life goals and  was unsatisfying yet the addiction was insatiable:  the gay patterns below  became clear as they sought to reduce these attractions  and develop as heterosexuals.  

Homosexual acting-out was  an attempt to restore  psychic equilibrium  to maintain the integrity of the self --a way of   seeking  authenticity, assertion, autonomy, and gender-relatedness--but  it didn't work, leaving only a  nagging feeling of inauthenticity and even deeper discouragement.

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Homosexual Enactment as Reparation of Blocked Assertion

AND SHAME for parental mal-attunement

Psychoanalysis unravels the complexity of same sex attraction in traumatic or fatherless homes. 

The best thing a man can do is become a BIG BROTHER

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As his clients became more authentic  they became more assertive.  Authenticity gives  freedom and  healthy social relations. Initially this assertion is  childish acting-out--an old maladaption--but healthy assertion creates healthy relationships fulfilling  male identification needs while mastering  interpersonal conflicts--especially those arising with other men.  Growth in assertion means experimenting  with new behaviors  while refraining from acting out sexually.

Assertion vs. Acting Out

"The exhilaration of the transgressive--the false vitality" one feels when engaging in sex with other men is maladaptive: a  compulsive, stereotypic, repetitive yet  unproductive attempt to resolve the early trauma--the conflict between love and fear with the  father figure--but  never resolves this conflict  while creating  further intrapsychic and relational stress.

The homosexual impulse is an attempt to rediscover the free, expressive,  open and powerful male  self,  but this requires the  very self-assertion  bringing  humiliation in the original system.  Homosexuality  attempts to repair this conflict by affirming manhood while also  being "seen" as an attractive male.

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"Thanks for this clear synopsis  of difficult psychoanalysis--it's now clear why  my gay son  had trauma and conflicts with his drunken father."  R. J.

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Homosexual Enactment: A Reaction against the False Self ("Role Reparation") Nice Guy

Most men can't maintain the False Self of the "Good Little Boy" or  "Nice Guy"  making them  beloved by feminists.   So to repair  the  repressive and inauthentic self presented to the world they choose  the opposite: the rebellious, shocking, "naughty," offensive, "bad boy" and "sexual outlaw" roles.  As a   rebellion against the restrictive and false  "Nice Guy," gay sex feels liberating,  transgressive, outrageous, "free."

The perception of danger adds to the excitement even to the point of allowing (or seeking)  exposure to the AIDS virus,  or seeking  sex in a public  bathroom or park with high-risk of being seen. One client described the thrill as "the possibility of getting caught, doing something naughty, risky and illicit. In that moment I get an adrenalin rush... 'F--k you, world!' It gives me energy, purpose...I feel alive. It's empowering, it's powerful.  I'm in charge of my life.' Yeah... it's a temper tantrum."

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A youth  tries to  explain his anonymous sexual contacts:

"My sexual exploits are like, 'You know what, I can be bad like you guys.' I can have battle scars...'I've been there, I can tell you stories.' It's like showing off to my friends, 'I've done this and this and this. I've got something to talk about,' like, 'Here I am!!"'

"I wanted to feel I could go out and do whatever I wanted. I wanted to feel independent... 'I can make my own decisions, and be open to anything... I could be myself, and check things out and decide for myself...go explore, and feel my own power. After all, my power to say 'no' has to be based on my freedom to say 'yes.'"

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ADDICTIVE, INSATIABLE, "CAN'T GET ENOUGH"

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Homosexual Enactment: Reaction to the Needs of the "Grey Zone"

Feeling alive, excited and  connected;  homosexual activity promises that visceral "zap" of primitive arousal rescuing  him from  the impotent "shut-down" from the  depressive Grey Zone:

"I'm so used to covering up my sadness with sexual arousal that, when I feel sad, I know arousal is right around the corner. I used masturbation ever since I was a kid. I'd [do it] three times a day, so as not to feel like a loser...to feel weak, sad."

Attempting to explain his anonymous sexual contacts a teen  said:

 'It makes me feel kinda alive inside my body. I feel established, in touch with myself.  Usually I forget my body; I go through the day in this hyper auto-pilot mode; I don't eat right or sleep enough."

The Grey Zone is  profound despair,  a pre-grief state. One man said:

"If I grab hold of my sadness and pull it close to my chest, I believe it will absorb me, consume me."

 Anticipation of  despair prompts manic defenses and [even unwanted] gay sex.

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Homosexual Enactment: A Reaction Against Shame (Esteem Reparation)

Shame cuts one off from self and others, feeling humiliation and a sense of being defective.    Homosexual acting-out [as narcissistic self-reflection] promises the opposite feelings of  attention, admiration, adoration and masculine reassurance. It seems to  repair the weakened masculinity  while ending  isolation and alienation of SHAME.  Special attention, approval and "specialness"  dilutes  feelings of humiliation and insignificance because he has a    "worthy male body".

But these promises always fail to deliver:

 

"I've always asked myself why all these other distractions don't satisfy. The whole power of the fantasy is that I'm not good enough. All that I seek, everything I do, is to keep me away from the feeling of inadequacy; that I'm nothing.

"The empty pleasure of porn is like every other anesthesia; it dulls life. Its roots are in darkness.... It's a pleasure that closes off life; [with] a turning-away from relationships.....

"What makes me want to do it is a greater emptiness beneath that condemns  me. Gay sex  temporarily defeats that condemnation."

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Shame and Narcissism

See here the narcissistic function of same-sex attraction :

"I was so attracted to him, I either had to be him, or have him."

Shame and narcissism are essential to understanding homosexuality as a narcissistic defense against  shame--for masculine assertion felt in the original family system.

Same-sex attraction is the  narcissistic illusion that gender-based shame can be "made better" through same-sex behavior.  It's the   knife splitting the  Self  from the  "disavowed" or "denounced" male and thus homosexuality is used to  "close the wound" by importing masculinity from another man.

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The Shame Moment

The Shame Moment is the recurrent conflict between  ASSERTION and SHAME: a vital affect colliding with an inhibitory affect.   The painfully shamed can't defend  against an overwhelming yet unarticulated injustice.      The feeling of shame is

 "I can't explain myself, and no one will understand me. I can never win."

The result is a "shutdown" of assertive affect. There is a frozen, paralyzed quality to the Shame Moment:

 "that palpable fear that keeps me from connecting with others...I'm still, I'm numb. My mind is blank and I'm just taking the abuse."

The Double Bind and the Creation of Shame

Shame is not an "emotion" which moves but rather a "counter-emotion" which blocks:   SHAME SPLITS  gender identity from the totality of the self, creating a

 FRACTURED MALE IDENTITY AND FALSE SELF

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NARCISSISTIC EARLY FAMILY

"there's no winning so may as well start sinning"

In the narcissistic family the child is placed in the DOUBLE-BIND or "no-win predicament."   If he assumes responsibility for not being lovable the child is rewarded with attention and approval.  But if he ASSERTIVELY maintains his own integrity and PERCEPTION OF REALITY  he's  punished with parental inattention and withdrawal: a profoundly painful SHUNNING. Choosing to maintain his own perceptions means abandonment:  ANNIHILATION.

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Abandonment as a Cause of Shame

Essentially, shame is about not being seen, becoming non-existent, invisible. As one client said, "At that [shame] moment, I could disappear, hide under a rock." The Italian word for  shame is  "scompaire," meaning "to disappear." 

Shame represents death of self, evolutionarily rooted in the survival instinct seen in wolves:

 Each wolf's acceptance by the pack is essential to its survival as expulsion  results in  death. The outcast wolf slinks and COWERS  to be accepted in the pack and this reflects the  shame moment: sinking chest, shoulders caved in, bodily collapse, with the back hunched over.  

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The Narcissistic Family's Double Bind and Creation of Shame

The double blind splits the child from his SELF,  causing him to disown his True Self  of  Masculine Ambition.   This creates  the FALSE GENDERLESS SELF  [not the same as androgyny] and homosexuality   as a narcissistic attempt to unify this  shame-induced split: Same-sex attractions substitute for the lost masculine within.

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Shame and Grief:  LOSS

Shame implies SELF-BLAME for attachment loss.

The notion of "loss" is central here: The client identifies with dad's  pain and sadness and feels he's caused it--and this makes him angry:    Shame "switches places" with sadness and anger,  blocking their  open expression.   The client must FULLY RE-EXPERIENCE these two emotions to  grieve and to heal--because shame is the door  to his unexpressed grief.

Shame in the narcissistic family also  preserves the relationship with a parent:  preserving the false hope that if he keeps trying, someday that parent will "see" him and attune to him for who he really is. Thus, shame "fills in" for grief.

One client of Nicolosi's  in the middle of his grief said,

"There's a hollowness inside that I used to fill with shame."

 When he abandons shame he feels the FULL IMPACT OF PARENTAL "ATTUNEMENT LOSS"  BY  "BODY HOLLOWNESS".     FEELING THIS REJECTION AND ACCEPTING IT WITHOUT SHAME ALLOWS HIM TO MOVE ON TO WHOLENESS.

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Shame for Gender Autonomy

For the son  of the narcissistic family, the parents fail to support their boy's  gender autonomy through explicit punishment for  autonomous strivings .    Reinstatement into the family may mean accepting the message "You do not qualify to be masculine." Or, they failed to support  his masculine strivings through a non-response (like not defending him from an older bully).    In the case of the

 temperamentally sensitive and  non-stereotypically masculine boy,

the boy who is

biologically predisposed

to struggle with gender identity--

 the parents in some way neglected to elicit his biologically appropriate masculine strivings, and these  reactions are experienced by the boy as parental emotional detachment, initiating "body hollowness" and the desperate

NEED TO IMPORT MALE APPROVAL AND  IDENTITY THROUGH INCORPORATION

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Shame from Non-Response

"Have you ever told a joke and no one laughed?"   That's how shame develops from non-response.  That explains what few understand:  how shame develops when neither wrongdoing nor punishment is present.

"Faced with the choice between his biologically-based imperative to be an authentic, separate, gendered individual, and the shame-inducing experience of parental non-response to that natural imperative, the boy who became homosexual has chosen the latter "(Nicolosi). He felt unworthy  to actualize his True-Gendered Self. The perceived threat of "expulsion from the pack" has made him accept  he was defective: he  renounces his gender ambition....

....and a flood of  shame erupts when he even expresses his masculine ambition.  He wants  male attention, affection and approval but  feels "weak," "flawed," "silly," "stupid," or simply "bad." One  said, "I recognize my need to be affirmed by a man. But to seek it seems weak."   He compromises:  his homosexual attractions emerge from the conflict of  wanting masculine identity but feeling shame for seeking it.

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Shame for Masculine Ambition

Shame's domination derives from the unexamined assumption that one deserves to be shamed:  The person assumes responsibility for this situation, thus essentially blaming himself for being unworthy of affiliation. As one 45-year-old man confessed, "I am rejected because I am rejectable. I am unloved because I am unlovable." Shame is the affective "shutting down" with a flood of self-blame for the desire to authentically assert oneself.

Anticipation of Shame

Anticipatory shame is auto-generative: a  punishing distortion from  the internalized critical parent  projected outward and imposed back on self.  He does to himself what he felt his parents did to him.   There is the ever-present fear of devastating rebuke:  always underneath is the little boy ready to be punished.

The Embodied Anticipation of Shame: The "Shame Posture"

The Shame Posture is a stance toward the world  "braced" for the next Assertion-Shame collision. It's the false self's  state of continual vigilance against suddenly and unexpectedly becoming the object of contempt while in the act of some sort of innocent, spontaneous self-expression. Thus he takes the "Shame Posture" in anticipation of the next Shame Moment:

 "I don't feel I relate to people as people, but as negative judges of me, harboring mean thoughts about me. I think, 'Yeah, they're right about me; I am a failure, loser...weak, fake, stupid, defective, weird, 'sissy,' 'queer,' not male.' I live with the fear of someone discovering I am fake. I'm always anticipating rejection, but when the moment comes, I never seem prepared for it."

Tracing his False Self back to childhood, one 28-year-old man admitted

 "As a kid I felt like I didn't belong to my family. I have flashes of smirks, contemptuous glances, disparaging looks. I tried to understand it. I thought, "What did I do? My behavior? My looks?"

Another man described his anticipatory shame as

"...this interior sense that I am unlovable. On some level I convey this sort of unspoken plea; 'Please don't do anything to remind me that I'm unlovable. In fact, if you want to be my friend, you'll work hard at distracting me from that truth.'"

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Anticipatory Shame: A Lifestyle of Hiding

 "This ever-present vigilance of anticipatory shame creates a lifestyle of hiding, avoidance, withdrawal, and passivity. This anticipatory shame can be so intense it  approximates paranoia, with the frightening conviction that another person has the power to turn everybody against him: he is  helpless against slander. His projected omnipotence of the other person (a shame-based distortion) obliterates any belief that he can have a direct impact upon others: the  "offended other" has all the power.  He is still a child in the world of adults, powerless to directly influence others' opinions of him. Past associations to this frightening anticipation often go back to early adolescence, when a bully turned the other boys against him, and earlier yet, to the 'omnipotent' mother who could turn family members against him.  While children may experience shame for a wide repertoire of behaviors, the pre-homosexual boy somehow felt shamed for desiring attachment to his father-- shamed for exposing his masculine ambitions. If  he's a hyper-sensitive boy  (usually the case)  he felt shame for desiring the emotional needs associated with male bonding-he felt unworthy of the three "A's" of attention, affection, and approval. Perhaps his gender assertion also violated the mother-son relational stability. Whatever its source, the result was shame, and the boy's ultimate abandonment of his true-gendered self. " Nicolosi

Central to Nicolosian reparative therapy is the transition from the False Self to the Gendered True Self.:

TRUE SELF	FALSE SELF
Feels masculine	Feels unmasculine
Adequate, on par	Feels inferior, inadequate
Secure, confident, capable	Insecure, lacking confidence, incapable
Experiencing authentic emotions	Emotionally dead or alternatively, hyperactive
Energized	Depleted
At home in body	Body is object, not self
Physical confidence	Anxious clumsiness
Feeling empowered, autonomous	Feeling controlled by others
Accepting of imperfections	Perfectionistic
Active, decisive	Passive
Trusting	Defensive posture
With Others
Attached	Detached
Outgoing	Withdrawn
Spontaneous	Over-controlled, inhibited, "frozen"
Forgiving, accepting	Retaliatory, resentful
Genuine, authentic	Role playing, Theatrical
Seeks out others	Avoidant
Humility	Self-dramatization
Aware of others	Constricted awareness
Assertive, expressive	Nonassertive, inhibited
Mature in relationships	Immature in relationship
Respectful of others' power	Resentful of others in power
Empowered	A victim
Integrated; open	Double life; secretive
Rapport with opposite gender	Misunderstanding of opposite gender
Sees other men as like self	Pulled by mystique of other men
NO HOMOSEXUALITY: "Homosexuality rarely comes up for me. I can willfully visualize it - but it doesn't have that compelling quality."	HOMOSEXUALITY: "I'm in that whole gay mindset... Sexual attraction to guys preoccupies and dominates my entire outlook."

Joseph NICOLOSI Ph.D.:

The therapeutic setting provides a "holding environment "where clients  explore, re-experience and assimilate painful trauma. This corrective experience  liberates from old REPEATS of  patterns of self-sabotage, and establishes authentic new relationships of cohesion and integrity. Genuine intimacy diminishes homosexuality's illusory power:  Freed from the fearful trigger of  grief  a new identity emerges.  As the client faces his illusive distortions he is curious  about his true identity:

"When I give up my

False Self

who am I?"

But through Grief Work the emerging

New Identity

has a quiet, sure conviction that 

 "I am good enough."

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