translated from Spanish: HIV carriers reported shortages of medicines

“I want to be heterosexual, and why I am here”
I closed my eyes and squeezed his fists. Although we were sitting face to face, I avoided the gaze of the therapist.
But I concentrated hard on his words: “Then, did your mother work, you say?”.
I nodded.
Followed by: “you feel tense with men. Why?”
I squeezed the teeth and stayed silent.
Always it terrified me, before each session, as it was getting nervous the stairs to his office that someone could see me and realize why they were there.
I never entirely relaxed, my back was stiff and my body tense all the time.
He asked me to describe how I felt when I saw a girl I liked in the gym.
“I had butterflies in the stomach”, I said.
He nodded and then began to ask me that you analyse why you had that feeling of anxiety.
BBC ThreeEn many religions homosexuality is wrong because it is said that it is against the Scriptures. Maybe my inability to feel attracted to men was due to that I actually worried that not they liked, he suggested.
I sighed. I didn’t know what felt, except that it was numb and trapped.
No, this wasn’t a bad dream. I was in the middle of the therapy of conversion that would dominate my life when I was twenty and gay that marked me forever.
Then, I was convinced that it had to be heterosexual to be happy.
As a modern Orthodox Jewish, was desperate to take what I thought was a “normal” life: marry a “good Jewish man”, have a family and be accepted by my religious community.
Getty Images “Love is Love” (love is love) is one of the strongest community LGBTQ + beliefs. While many liberal Jews accept homosexuality today, some Orthodox Jews still oppose it because it is forbidden by religious teachings.
There, sitting in the office of the therapist, I had a grudging compromise me with your request to the root of the problem.
Naively, I thought that pain analyze my childhood and my parents worth the penalty because, he believed, was going to go through the process to become a heterosexual woman.
That was all he wanted to then.
BBC ThreeShulli believed that only being a heterosexual woman it would be happy. Despite advances in motion LGBTQ + we have seen over the past five decades, the gay conversion therapy, a pseudoscientific practice that attempts to change sexual orientation or reduce the sexual attraction to other people of the same sex, It still carries out in many countries.
United Kingdom is studying its ban after a report released on the internet last year.
It was based on an anonymous survey of people with LGBTQ carried out in the country from July to October of 2017.
It received more than 108,000 replies.
One of its main findings is that 2% of people who responded to the survey said that they had undergone a conversion therapy in an attempt to “cure”, and that 5% had offered to another.
Of those who said that they had received conversion therapy, more than half (51%) they had received it through a religious group, while 19% said that a health care professional recommended it.
Getty Images does religion and homosexuality? Although I grew up in London into a family of open mind, I didn’t know anyone who was identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual.
At age 11, I told my mother that I liked a girl of my age I knew.
But he told me that many people like people of the same sex when they go through puberty and that I was too young to know what I liked.
Not returned to talk about that for years.
In my first year of University, in 2010, I tried again to talk to my parents about my sexuality, but it wasn’t easy. I had all these feelings within me and I needed out.
When I started University, I set out to student life, and tried to put those thoughts about my sexuality in the back of my mind.
I got involved with one of the Jewish groups and, at the end of my first year, I enrolled in one of their summer trips to Israel.
The trip lasted two weeks and the boy who was dating at that time also came.
One night drunk me much and I told one of the adults of the trip that it not really attracted me, and that instead, I admitted, the girls I liked.
BBC Three do you think that homosexuality can be cured? The next morning, I woke up with panic.
She was terrified by the idea that the person who had confessed it all counted it is someone, but when I talked to him later, promised to keep my secret.
I felt relieved of that was not judging me. After the trip, I started to have meetings with him, since he was the only person that had committed.
I cried a lot, but I felt good to open up finally.
I told him that I wanted to be able to be sincere and that my life was less confusing.
During one of our conversations, said that there was a way to find “happiness”: someone who knew in Israel could help me with conversion therapy on gay.
The plan was to let one year my studies, and submit my application to live in Israel in a religious school.
I was excited and nervous at the same time. It was a drastic step, but I was determined to try everything.
I was desperate to find a way to feel better.
My parents volunteered to cover the cost of US$ 1,300 approximately because they knew that he was suffering internally and only wanted to help.
None of us knew anyone who had gone through this type of therapy and we had no idea of the damage that could be done.
In Israel, from 2019, physicians may be expelled from the Medical Association in the country if they carry out such therapies.
The organization banned him earlier this year, but by then I had already spent by my own experience.
Getty ImagesEn Israel, from 2019, physicians may be expelled from the Medical Association in the country if they carry out such therapies. My therapy lasted 18 months. I continued by video chat when I returned to the United Kingdom.
One of the methods that cost me to do, and that I found frankly sinister, was the regression to past lives, a controversial form of hypnotherapy that supposedly allows you to access memories of your past lives.
In my case, we were looking for a sin which had allegedly committed in a past life and that had “gone me gay”.
They made me close my eyes and asked me what he could see. I tried to say that it wasn’t working, but they told me to try again.
In the end, gave for an answer and told them that he had been the owner of a farm and that he had tried to kill someone, although, of course, I invented me all this.
Looking back, I know that it sounds crazy, but I just wanted that ended.
Another unpleasant process by which I was the eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) eye movements.
It is still relatively new, and scientists aren’t quite sure how it works, but it seems to reduce the symptoms of the disorder of posttraumatic stress disorder in some people.
In my case, I was asked to think of things that scared me or that did not seem to me attractive, like having sex with a man, while doing my eyes to follow the feather of the therapist’s side to side.
The idea was to get rid of any negative feelings that had to live sex, but, obviously, didn’t work and imagine myself in these situations really was a disaster.
Getty ImagesShulli got tired of living your life as if it were a lie. When I returned to London, it was clear that he was emotionally in a very dark place.
I felt increasingly worse, did not see any change in my sexuality and thats what made me think that things had gone too far.
In a moment of desperation, I asked the therapist a proof that his therapy had worked with someone.
I was contacted by a woman in Israel who had been doing the conversion therapy for six years but still it could not kissing or having sex with a guy.
Hear his story made me realize that already didn’t want to live my life as a lie.
I didn’t want to be without love and without sex and that he had to put an end to this.
Now, six years later, I am much more happy with who I am, although I find it difficult to trust people and tend to sobreanalizar things in relationships.
But got something positive from all this: my parents are now my greatest support.
My father, baffled by the guilt of what led me to therapy, was the first to tell me to stop and tried to see how things went in a gay environment.
You have your support gave me the strength to move forward with my life.
Getty ImagesLos scientists do not recognize the effectiveness or see the need for any treatment against homosexuality. Today, my parents organized gay pride dinner on Shabbat, help other parents of gay children, and are currently trying to find me a couple asking everyone you know, including rabbis, if you know any nice lesbian.
I think that many LGBTQ + religious people struggle to find a place where can feel fully accepted.
In a religious context it can say that their sexuality is unacceptable and in the gay world their faith may be seen as inappropriate.
Until this puzzle is resolved, young LGBTQ + scared will feel that they have to choose between religion and his true identity.
For years, the words of the therapist I pursued.
It took me to stop listening to his voice in my mind. But now I have finally come to accept who I am and am much happier for that.
You can read this article on original (in English) here.
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Original source in Spanish

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