My experience is that the men have been traumatized already, yet taught, usually implicitly, that their wound was not a wound; that their feelings of sadness or anger were not acceptable; or that they should have appreciated the wound as ‘love’. Worse yet, a world ignorant of the details of our lives tells us that everything’s the same as for straight men. These lessons filter how we see everything, and the result is many of these men earnestly believe nothing traumatic has happened to them – yet that belief is just a mask for the trauma, and the emotional pain WILL come out, sideways if it has to. Besides, the origin of the word “reparative” in association with “Reparative Therapy” (which is contrasted to reparative therapy) is not that the therapy repairs, but that the same-sex attractions are themselves a “reparative drive”. In other words eSSA is a subconscious attempt to “repair”, and therefore, we treat it as an indicator of an underlying situation, not our primary focus.