Why “change” doesn’t mean “change”

“Change” is a generic word; people project on it what they expect.  So what’s different in someone who seeks to “change” their “sexual orientation”?  It turns out it isn’t actually sexual “orientation”.  Why?  Well, simply put, the human erotic desire is always for the “other than self”, it’s never for the “like self”.  For someone to go from “gay” to “straight” they don’t need to change their sexual “orientation”, they need to get their legitimate needs for love met, and to heal their unrecognized and unprocessed traumatic emotional wounds.  Specifically, these needs for love are about the acceptance of healthy sexuality, and the emotional wounds are about both the self and the “other” (i.e. the opposite sex).

When these things happen, the internal emotional judgements about “sexual orientation” “change” by themselves.  The desire to find “self” is satiated, and the erotic attraction functions without interference.  In fact, not only do we not “hate” our same-sex attraction, and we do not seek to “suppress” them.  No, in fact we embrace same-sex attractions as a guide for finding the love needs and emotional wounds.  Far from “bouncing our eyes” off others we find attractive, we “bend each thought to the will of God” and learn about why we find that particular attribute attractive.  Each attraction is a message from our soul, and we know that filling it erotically is not healthy.  Trying to fulfill them erotically actually covers over the core need or wound and makes it more difficult to discern.

So “change” ends up meaning “feeling loved”, and “emotional healing”.  We don’t change into something different from what we were, as a word like “conversion” might imply.