Richard sat quiet with tears streaming down his cheeks.
“I’ve carried this pain throughout my entire life, and I feel free of it for the first time in my life.”
Richard struggled with same-sex attraction since he was young. “I've acted out with men for the last 30 years, trying to ease this pain. All it did was create more and destroy my relationships with my wife and kids.”
“Richard, what do you believe is the origin of your same-sex attraction?” I asked.
“Well, I was sexually abused by a neighbor man when I was a child. I had a father who didn’t know what to do with me because he was very interested in sports, and I was more artistic. I felt rejected by him.”
When we feel pain, the mind wants to alleviate that pain. It reacts like a man who is starving to death, hyper vigilant for any morsel that could ease that hunger. Richard's pain being rejected by his father triggered his mind to look for ways to feel accepted by him, or by a stand-in.
“In every sexual encounter that I had with men, I was always kind of looking for that love and attention that I wanted from my father. It was never enough though.”
—
Our minds hold onto things, painful things, in an attempt to try to make sense of them. Many times, these things are illusions. Kids, for example, believe about themselves what they think their parents think about them, not what their parents actually think about them.
The child’s mind holds onto the parent’s attitude and internalizes it as a self-statement. Using a simple mental exercise, we release the mind’s hold on “dad’s attitude toward you” and “your attitude toward dad” (the former is the foundation for the latter). “I feel real love from my dad for the first time since I was little, and he’s been gone for ten years. The attitude I held onto from him, wasn’t actually his attitude at all. He really genuinely cared for me, and I feel that now,” Richard explained.
Once the emotional clutter is cleared from the mind, the authentic self arises.
“These aren’t coping skills. You don’t have to go home and repeat these exercises any time you feel this way. This is healing, and it’s telling the mind that it doesn’t need to hold on to this clutter anymore. It sticks.”
