(Authentic Core Emotions,
Counter Emotions or Inhibitory Feelings,
Defense Mechanisms and Distractions,
Rejecting Shame -- and Accepting Ourselves As We Are,
What We Did to Effect Change)

• Rejecting shame, secrecy, isolation and a false front, we learned to love and accept ourselves just as we were, right then, unchanged.
  
  
• We learned to experience authentic connection to our feelings. We embarked on a courageous "inward journey" to uncover and heal long-buried pain that lay at the root of much of our homosexual feelings. We dug past defense mechanisms and inhibitory feelings to connect deeply and authentically with our core emotions, especially anger and grief.
  
  
• We learned to experience authentic connection with others - to stop living our lives for others, to speak our truth, and to be more genuine and authentic with others, undefended and without detachment.

The journey out of homosexuality is a journey inward, a journey of self-discovery, authentic self-expression and renewal. It is not a journey of willpower. It is a journey of healing -- of uncovering and healing the underlying pain and emptiness that had caused so much of our homosexual yearning to begin with.

During the long years before we found a path out of homosexuality, many of us had been living a lie for so long, we no longer knew what it was to be authentic or to be connected with our true feelings. We had put on a false front and lied that everything was "fine." Many of us went out of our way to be especially "good boys," never getting into trouble, being moms' and teachers' favorites. But inside we were in pain, silently aching.

The lies we lived go back to well before we became aware of emerging homosexual desires. They were about buried pain that we couldn't understand and were sure that no one else could either -- pain about feeling different, not fitting in, feeling alienated from Dad, feeling more like one of the girls than one of the boys, being picked on by bullies, or being desperately lonely. Some of us carried secrets and shame about sex play with other boys or even sexual abuse by older boys or men. Some of us were taught when we were very young that our emotions -- especially anger, sadness (or tears, anyway) and fear -- were bad and wrong. Being sensitive and "good little boys," we tried to comply by shutting off our feelings altogether.

To avoid feeling the pain, we shut down emotionally. Feeling nothing at all was inordinately preferable to feeling the full weight of our fear, sadness, loneliness and hurt.

Reparative therapist David Matheson writes:

"Emotional disconnection is ubiquitous among the men dealing with unwanted homosexuality with whom I've worked. This doesn't mean that these men are completely disconnected from feeling (although some are). Rather, it means they are disconnected from feelings about certain important aspects of their lives or history - some of them primal, pivotal or even traumatic life experiences about which they have shut off real feeling."

Time alone would make the pain go away, if we could just keep it buried long enough -- or so we hoped. But we were woefully wrong. Past hurts don't die. Buried pain becomes stronger, not weaker. It festers and rots and finds sneaky ways to express itself and be "heard" -- through addictions and obsessions, envy and lust, shame and helplessness, or other self-destructive forms that fed our homosexual yearnings.

Eventually we learned that if we were ever to be freed from unwanted homosexual desires, we would have to free our hearts and reconnect with our core emotions, fully and authentically. We had to release our shame, and work through and heal long-buried anger and hurt. We had to rediscover ourselves.

But it would not be enough to feel authentically. We would also have to live authentically in our relationships with others. We had to stop living our lives for others or trying to be what we thought they wanted us to be. We needed to be genuine and authentic with others - undefended and without detachment. We had to let go of our defenses and facades and trust that we were good enough, just as we were, to be fully seen and heard.

Authentic Core Emotions

In the Journey Into Manhood weekend retreats presented by People Can Change, the staff teaches that there are four core emotions, and that authentic connection to these feelings is essential in any kind of emotional healing. The four core emotions are:

• joy (which includes love and peace),
  
  
• sadness (which includes grief)
  
  
• fear (which includes frustration)
  
  
• and anger.

Core emotions create powerful sensations in the body, and with those sensations they create impulses to move or act or respond. Core emotions are those feelings that have the capacity to move a person toward greater maturity and wholeness. They cause one to want to expand rather than contract, to open up rather than shut down. Sadness, for example, moves a man through the experience of loss by expanding him to encompass the loss. He becomes something more than he was before.

Counter Emotions or Inhibitory Feelings

What happens, though, if a man's grief is too overwhelming, his anger too out of control, or his fear too shameful? What happens, in other words, if his authentic emotions are just too painful? He may learn to contain his authentic emotions, to hide them or box them in. He may protect himself from experiencing these authentic emotions by putting up a wall of "counter emotions" or inhibitory feelings.

So his authentic emotions may be subsumed by shame, depression, anxiety, lust, helplessness, passivity or other feelings that prevent him from feeling his core emotions. These are considered counter or inhibitory because, rather than impel a person to action, they inhibit action. Rather than bring about healing, they prolong hurt. Rather than increase self-understanding, they cloud it. Rather than tell him the truth, they tell him lies. They are feelings that cause him to shut down rather than to act, to go within rather than to move outside of himself and connect with others.

Defense Mechanisms and Distractions

In addition, outside this layer of counter emotions a man may unconsciously add another layer of defense mechanisms or distractions. These are beliefs, judgments and behaviors designed to protect the man from feeling anything at all -- even false emotions or inhibitory feelings. They may include sexual addiction, overeating, or drug or alcohol abuse. They may also include intellectualizing away emotional situations, defensive humor, rigidity and false piety, and compulsive behaviors.

Our challenge, then, was to get through the layers of defenses and false emotions in order to experience life from our core emotions. Usually, our most significant work was to get fully in touch with our grief and anger, to "hear" these feelings, honor them, and release the sadness and anger that has been bottled up, usually for many years. And when it was time, to forgive and let go.

Admittedly, this could be terrifying. But a courageous man is not one who has no fears; a courageous man is one who does what he fears. Without fear, there can be no courage.

Rejecting Shame -- and Accepting Ourselves As We Are

It's ironic but true: Until we could begin to love and accept ourselves just as we were, right then, unchanged, many of us found we could make little progress toward real change. Acceptance of our goodness, our value and our true potential as men was a critical early step out of homosexuality.

Thus, we came to understand these two essential truths about ourselves:

1. Guilt and shame can NEVER motivate real change. A change effort motivated primarily by guilt and shame will always fail; we found, in our case, that shame FUELED our homosexual feelings and compulsive behaviors, NOT recovery.

2. Our homosexual yearnings resulted, in part, from our problems relating to the world of men. And, relationship problems can NEVER heal in isolation, without relating..

These two principles are closely inter-related. We found we could never break free of shame while keeping such a monumental part of ourselves hidden from the people whose love and acceptance we most craved. We couldn't begin to trust others if we feared they would reject us if they knew our secret. We couldn't open our hearts to receive love from others when we couldn't love ourselves.

Does accepting ourselves as we are, with all our weaknesses and limitations, block us from change? No, just the opposite! Imagine a college freshman who desires to be a medical doctor one day. Does he berate himself for not being an M.D. already? Does he compare himself to experienced surgeons and criticize himself for not being one of them? Does he try to "pass" as something he isn't (yet)? No. Accepting himself as he is right now, without self criticism, will actually HELP him reach his goal by putting him on the right path to learn what he needs to learn and gain the experience he needs to gain, at the right time in the right way. Anything else would cause him to fail before he has even begun.

And so, through trial and error -- and usually some divine intervention! -- we came to accept ourselves as we were. We began to see that God and most other people held us in much higher esteem than we did ourselves! We discovered that people didn't always reject us; that many were in fact capable of seeing past our struggle to our inner worth.

What We Did to Effect Change

Here, then, are various changes that many of us had to make:

1. We began to love and accept ourselves just as we were, right then, unchanged. "

• We turned our hearts to God (however we understood God) and sought his help in simply being able to feel our worth to him. Some of us prayed the Serenity Prayer of the Twelve Step programs: "God, grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
  
  
• We read and learned about others who had been down this path before and discovered that we were not alone; our experience was not unique. We saw that, just as we would never see those men and women as vile and worthless, neither would we be considered vile and worthless in the eyes of others who truly understood our pain.
  
  
• We became more aware of the self-criticism "tapes" that played inside our heads and tried to identify their original source, as well as what kinds of feelings and events triggered them. We asked ourselves, "Who first told us we were worthless, before we came to believe it ourselves?" We worked to put the responsibility for the critical message back on whoever gave it to us in the first place. We replaced the critical messages with new "tapes" of our own choosing -- messages about our authentic worth and goodness.
  
  
• We accepted that having unwanted same-sex attractions -- even if we would never be able to change them -- was not the worst thing that could ever happen to us, and that simply carrying on every day, even with a painful burden we didn't choose and didn't want, was in itself a victory.

2. In order to really release ourselves from the grips of shame, we realized we had to come out of secrecy and isolation and share our true selves with selected others whom we believed had the compassion and discretion to hear our pain and still accept us.

• We discovered that as long as our first priority was hiding our secret lives and feelings, and our second priority was healing, we would never be able to come out of the guilt, self-hate and isolation that had held us bound.
  
  
• We took the calculated risk of possible rejection and faced the deep fear of others finding out about us. We started with those who seemed safest -- such as a therapist, a pastor, priest or rabbi -- and over time learned to take greater risks in what we told to whom and how we asked for help and support.

3. We identified the defense mechanisms and distractions we had been using as coping mechanisms to avoid feeling, and we began to work a program of removing them from our lives.

• Those of us who had become subject to addictions had to surrender and overcome them so that we could experience the underlying emotions that we had been "medicating" and covering up with the addictive cycles.
  
  
• We read recovery and self-help literature to help us overcome our particular defenses and distractions -- anything from excessive television watching to active drug addiction. If appropriate, we joined Twelve Step groups or other support groups to help reinforce our efforts and build our support network.
  
  
• We enlisted our emerging support networks for help, making ourselves accountable to selected others as we sought to overcome our defensive patterns.

4. Digging still deeper, we identified and worked through the counter emotions or inhibitory feelings that had shut us down -- whether shame, depression, anxiety, helplessness, or others.

• Through a combination of individual or group therapy, support groups, self-help literature, or our own personal support networks, we worked to understand the "pay off" for indulging these incapacitating feelings.

5. As we continued doing deep inner work, we ultimately were able to access long buried, authentic core emotions -- especially anger and grief -- at the root of so much of our pain. No longer willing to stifle or deny these authentic feelings, we had to express them fully, honor them, work through them and then, when the time was right, release them.

• This work was best done with a skilled therapist or a group or facilitator trained in deep emotional catharsis and release work. Depending on the depth of the pain and how long we had been carrying it, we typically had to express, work through and release this many times, until it was truly healed.

6. We began to live more authentically in our relationships with others.

• We learned to stop living our lives for others or trying to be what we thought they wanted us to be.
  
  
• We learned to speak up for ourselves and to speak our truth -- without malice, certainly, but directly, clearly and without apology.
  
  
• We learned to let others be responsible for their own emotional responses and refused to carry the burden of feeling responsible for how others felt or what they thought.
  
  
• We learned to be more genuine and authentic with others -- undefended and without detachment. We came to know that we were good enough to be fully seen and heard, just as we were.

7. When the time was right, we forgave unconditionally those we felt had wronged us, and thus freed ourselves of years of bottled-up hurt and resentment.

8. When we were strong enough, we conducted our own inventory of ways we may have hurt others -- or our part in rejecting and judging others and creating empty, meaningless or even destructive relationships.

• If we felt prompted to so, and if we could do it without hurting others, we acknowledged our own wrongs to those we had harmed and made appropriate amends, without expecting anything in return.

9. As we came to know who we were and gained the ability to ask for what we wanted, we were in a place of strength to enter into a relationship with a woman, or develop an existing relationship.

• We now could be with a woman without losing ourselves in her, and without transferring old "mother" projections onto her.
  
  
• We became strong enough to be authentic with her, and authentically with her. And that enabled us to welcome her own world of hurts and pain and joy and life experience without threatening us or taking them upon ourselves.

10. As we attained greater inner healing and came to feel more connection to feeling, we became more in touch with our joy. We became more capable of healthy, mature relationships. We became less easily hurt, less moody and less codependent. We became more authentically ourselves.

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