SIX STAGES OF HOMOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT

As I put together the thinking of many experts whom I have consulted in the area of homosexual development, and as I examine my own clinical experience with the many people I have personally counseled in Christian psychotherapy, worked with and consulted with through our group ministry, I have been able to identify six stages of homosexual development.

SIX STAGES OF HOMOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT



Homosexual Identity (HI)

Homosexual Re-enforcement (HR)

Sexual Attraction (SA)

Gender Attraction (GA)

Gender Emptiness (GE)

Low Self-Esteem (LSE)






In counseling the overcomer it is important that you understand your overcomer in relation to these stages. It is going to help him come to an important awareness and insight about himself as a person as well as shed light about the family in which he grew up. I believe that it will bless him richly.

Low Self-Esteem (LSE) is the first stage. It arises from some form of dysfunctional family upbringing. It has to do with an inability to accept oneself (one's SELF) emotionally. Having one's emotions and feelings acknowledged, understood, accepted, and responded to gives the young child an adequate and acceptable SELF or Self-Esteem. It is a sense of how I feel about myself, my worth, my significance, my lovableness, adequacy, etc. This is for every child a major emotional integration or achievement in the life-cycle of the sense of SELF, self-love, self-worth, or self- esteem. When an adequate sense of SELF is not achieved, low self-esteem results. Renewing an intimacy with and acceptance of one's emotional life is a major step in the healing of homosexuality. Acceptance of one's inner self or feelings is fundamental to all emotional healing and growth for a person who has experienced a dysfunctional family background.

Gender Emptiness (GE) is the second stage. When there is a foundation of LSE, the child is emotionally vulnerable in many ways. If a father calls his son a sissy, rejects him, and refuses to associate with him; when male peers tease or make fun of the LSE boy, or he fails at male- related activities and develops a fear of male aggressiveness, GE results. GE is a gender identity insecurity.

The young child begins to develop an inner insecurity and uncertainty that he is male or masculine enough. Because he experienced humiliation, intimidation, fear, anxiety, embarrassment, shame, criticism, poor modeling or insufficient modeling, lack of opportunity to experience success, acceptance, belonging with his same gender parent and peers, gender identity security is arrested. All of these and other factors conspire to produce an inner complex of feelings which causes a self-rejection or lack of intimacy with oneself as a male person.

Gender self-acceptance as a unique male or female, with all his or her limitations and assets, is a major step in the healing of homosexuality.

Gender Attraction (GA) is the third stage in the development of homosexuality. Because the young preadolescent is GE or gender identity insecure, he experiences an emotional deprivation which makes him very needy or hungry for other males to accept, approve, and be close to him. While he may feel quite comfortable and even secure with the opposite sex in a social sense, he continues to feel somewhat hyperinterested in the same gender. The young male overcomer looks to other males for his identity since his own is insecure. He forms an attraction and an attachment to other same gender persons in an intense way.

What most boys take for granted and assimilate as a matter of ordinary development through affiliation and friendships with other peers, becomes a full-time preoccupation for the GE boy. Instead of companions, associations, and friendships with other boys, peers become objects of intense interest in terms of physical attraction (male features, build, aggressiveness, confidence, anatomy, etc.), and emotional attachment.

The GE boy has intense emotional feelings about other boys. He feels an emotional dependency characterized by jealousy, hurt, comparisons, intense closeness, falling in love, and emotional excitement. He wants another boy to love him, single him out, and make him the object of his exclusive attention and affection. This need for emotional intimacy and attachment becomes a major underlying dynamic of the homosexual preoccupation.

Sexual Attraction (SA) is the fourth stage. LSE led to GE and GE led to GA. Now in adolescence GA easily becomes SA.

All those attractive features with which the GE-GA boy identifies and seeks for himself now become sexualized and eroticized.

Sexual attraction involves the arousal of sexual feelings concerning what is highly desirable and with which he wants intimacy and contact. Because same gender emotional intimacy and identification were arrested, deprived, denied, unachieved with the same gender parent and peer, the GE-GA boy finds himself sexually attracted to the same gender.

Homosexual Reinforcement (HR) is the next stage. The LSE-GE-GA-SA young overcomer begins to engage in those sexual activities which reinforce and habituate his homosexual disorientation. He begins to masturbate with continuous homosexual or male fantasies; he buys pornography, goes to erotic bookstores, watches erotic videos, and reads erotic literature. He begins seeking other same gender people with whom he forms emotional attachments and becomes sexually involved; he begins to become a compulsive visual addict, looking for handsome and attractive males wherever he goes.

Homosexual Identity (HI) is the final stage in the development of the homosexual disorientation. Because he must come to some peace about his sexual identity and orientation, he begins to justify his lifestyle of homosexual behavior and forms an identity as a homosexual or "gay" person. Once this identity is consolidated and he begins to associate with a gay community and companions, he becomes very defensive about his choice and will not allow anyone (family, pastors, friends) to convince him of a change in his identity. That change will only come about for compelling personal reasons and the work of the Holy Spirit in his life.

Helping your overcomer understand himself in terms of this six-stage development produces an important awareness and insight about the causes of his homosexual disorientation. It helps him come to grips with the reality that homosexuality is a disorientation (as unpleasant as that may be) and that the gay world is a delusion of self-deception and lies, fabricated and supported by society in order to support a carnal and sinful lifestyle.

By Dr. William E. Consiglio LCSW Mdiv DMin
Manuscript Copy
From the Book Homosexual No More, published by Regeneration Books.
This citation reprinted with permission of the author 9/17/02 feast of St. Robert Bellarmine, S.J.
Hit the back button on your browser to return to the previous page