“I Am an Abomination”

The Harm of Conversion Therapy

By: Dr. Gregory S. Neal

When people hear the words conversion therapy, they often picture counseling sessions, Bible studies, prayer meetings, public confessions, or accountability groups. In its more extreme forms, they may think of aversion techniques, exorcisms, and other explicitly abusive practices. And yes, conversion therapy often includes precisely these things. But none of them captures what conversion therapy feels like from the inside. It isn’t simply a program designed to change what you believe or what you do. It isn’t about unlearning a belief system external to yourself, nor is it about adopting a new set of propositions or principles to live by. Rather, conversion therapy is a form of psychological and spiritual programming intended to deconstruct your sense of self, break down your identity at its deepest level, and eradicate the parts of you the program has declared evil.

Imagine waking up every morning believing that something at the deepest level of your being is offensive to God. It’s not just something you’ve done, or a bad decision you’ve made, or even a temptation that keeps crossing your mind. It’s something rooted in your soul; something that an authority figure had told you is dirty and disgusting, horrible and evil—an abomination that must be eradicated. Once that belief takes hold, every thought becomes suspect, every friendship is analyzed, and every glance, feeling, dream, or moment of affection has to be inspected for evidence of the thing you’re desperately trying not to be. You begin policing your own mind because you’ve been taught that your heart can’t be trusted. After a while, you begin asking: “How do I stop feeling this?” And, if enough time passes, you eventually find yourself asking: “How do I stop feeling anything at all?” That’s what people often fail to understand about conversion therapy: it doesn’t merely teach you to suppress your sexuality; it teaches you to suppress yourself.

Unsurprisingly, suppressing the real you quickly invades your relationship with God. You’ve been repeatedly warned how much God hates what you are, and so you begin pretending to be someone or something you’re not. You lie to yourself, and you try to lie to God, hiding your feelings, fears, desires, and needs because you’ve been taught that honesty itself is dangerous. As the real you is pushed further down, prayer stops being a time of peace and contemplation and becomes instead a source of fear, shaped by the desperate attempt to hide from God. It’s difficult to carry on an honest inner conversation with your Creator when you’re terrified of what might happen if you tell the truth. Before long, the game of spiritual hide-and-seek gives way to an endless spiral of desperate prayer in which you beg to be fixed, transformed, healed, or made into someone else. You pray harder, confess more, search yourself for hidden sins, return again and again to the same few verses of Scripture, recommit your life, surrender once more, and repeatedly ask God to take away the attractions and desires that are part of who you are but which you’ve been told are corrupt.

And after a while, when nothing changes, conversion therapy has a ready explanation: the problem can’t possibly be with its premise; the problem must be somewhere within you. Perhaps you haven’t prayed hard enough, surrendered completely enough, confessed honestly enough, or trusted God deeply enough. Maybe you secretly don’t want to change, haven’t studied the Bible in the “right” way, or are still hiding from God and lying to yourself about what you really want. Perhaps your faith is weak or, worse, not really faith at all. Surely there must be some hidden part of your soul that you’re stubbornly refusing to yield to God’s sovereignty. Or, most devastatingly, perhaps God is withholding transformation because your homosexual “sins” have been so grievous that you need to suffer longer before forgiveness will mean anything to you. During my time in conversion therapy, every one of these explanations was laid on me more than once, and because I had already been taught to distrust myself rather than question the program, I believed them all at one time or another.

In that environment, every unanswered prayer becomes evidence against you, and every same-sex attraction becomes proof of spiritual failure. Indeed, you’re told that your stubborn refusal to refocus your desires upon people of the opposite sex is yet another reason to feel ashamed. Guilt says, “I’ve done something wrong,” while shame says, “I amsomething wrong,” and conversion therapy speaks the language of both with devastating fluency. You’re not merely taught that certain thoughts, desires, or actions are sinful; you’re told that there is something fundamentally wrong with you, and that your very existence is the problem that must be solved.

For me, that movement from guilt into shame became chillingly explicit. In our group sessions, we were taught a litany of self-condemnation centered on one terrible sentence: “I am an abomination.” We repeated it again and again, prayerfully and confessionally, until the words took on the rhythm of a chant: “I am an abomination.” Even now, I find it difficult to remember those moments, because there’s something hideous about recalling how we were taught to turn prayer itself into an act of self-rejection. We weren’t simply confessing that we had done something sinful; we were being taught to identify the sin with ourselves, repeating the condemnation until it became part of the language with which we understood who we were. Once you’ve prayed “I am an abomination” often enough, the distinction between believing that an act is condemned and believing that you are condemned doesn’t simply blur; eventually, it disappears.

The shame that follows is crippling. You feel guilty all the time; you’re ashamed that you’re even alive; you’re convinced that you’ve disappointed God so profoundly that your very existence is unacceptable. Once honesty itself has become dangerous, the persistence of your attractions and desires creates another problem: the dishonesty that began internally starts to turn outward. Early in the program you were lying to yourself and to God, trying to suppress or deny what you actually felt, because you’d been taught that the truth was terrifying. Now you begin concealing it from your therapists, from other participants in the program, and from your pastors, friends, and family. After you’ve prayed until there are no prayers left, confessed everything you know to confess, surrendered and recommitted yourself again and again, and done everything they’ve told you to do, what are you supposed to say when you’re still gay?

By then, admitting the truth threatens the entire logic of the program. “Jesus never fails,” we were taught to sing, yet the stubborn fact that you remain gay inevitably raises the question of what, exactly, has failed. You quickly learn that even asking the question is dangerous, because within the world of conversion therapy Jesus can’t have failed, the program can’t have failed, and the theology can’t have failed. If you’re still gay, there’s only one acceptable conclusion: you have failed. And so you learn to play the role expected of you, reporting progress you don’t feel, exaggerating victories, minimizing setbacks, and concealing anything that threatens the promised narrative of transformation. You become an actor, constructing a version of yourself that everyone around you can believe is getting better while the real you retreats further underground. The mask isn’t crafted because you enjoy deception; it’s crafted because you’ve learned that honesty carries consequences, while “faking it” has become a means of self-preservation.

Sometimes the performance becomes so practiced that even you can’t tell where it ends and the real you begins. Worse, rejecting the claims of conversion therapy doesn’t necessarily silence the instincts it has conditioned into you. You may know intellectually that its theology was wrong and still discover that your emotions haven’t caught up with what you now believe. Self-suspicion has become habitual; shame has become reflexive. Affection can still make you anxious, loving another person can awaken an old fear that you’re doing something evil, and moments of happiness, intimacy, or even ecstasy can suddenly be interrupted by the familiar stab of guilt. Long after you’ve stopped believing that these feelings are sinful, some part of you may still react as though they are. Perhaps most tragically, the same conditioning can linger in your spiritual life, making condemnation easier to recognize than grace and leaving you uncertain whether the accusing voice in your head belongs to God or is merely an echo of those who once taught you to fear God.

That’s one of the deepest spiritual injuries conversion therapy can inflict: God becomes associated not with grace and love, but with fear and shame. God becomes the One who is watching, the One who is keeping score, the One who is waiting for you to change, and the One whose love always seems to come with an unspoken qualification: I love you, but I need you to become someone else. That was the message that sank deepest into me, and it took me a very long time to recognize that it wasn’t the voice of God.

More recently, conversion therapy has learned to change its clothes. Some of its present-day practitioners reject some of the old terminology, distance themselves from the most notorious abuses of earlier programs, and recast what they offer as “discipleship,” “healing,” “sexual integrity,” or some other gentler form of spiritual guidance. They may insist that they aren’t trying to “change” anyone at all, and many of them may sincerely believe that distinction matters. But a new name and softer methods do not change the underlying purpose. A rose by any other name still has thorns, and conversion therapy remains conversion therapy whenever the goal is to convince LGBTQ+ people that something essential and indelible about who they are must be suppressed, surrendered, or eradicated in order for them to become acceptable to God. That’s what makes these newer incarnations particularly dangerous, especially for people already wounded by earlier forms of the practice: they can reproduce the same shame while presenting themselves as the cure for the damage their predecessors helped create. Cruelty doesn’t have to shout. It can speak softly, smile warmly, surround you with prayer and promises of healing, and still lead you back to the same destructive conclusion: you must banish yourself from yourself before you can become the person God wants you to be.

For many of us, healing begins only when that premise finally collapses. And yet, healing can be frightening at first. When you’ve spent years being taught that your feelings can’t be trusted, learning to trust yourself again feels almost sinful. When you’ve been trained to associate honesty with rebellion, telling the truth about yourself can feel dangerous, and when you’ve been taught that accepting yourself means rejecting God, self-acceptance can initially feel like apostasy. By then, the cacophony of condemning voices around you and within you has become so familiar, so persistent, and so thoroughly reinforced that their accusations can seem more believable than the voice of Jesus speaking grace. Shame has been shouted at you in a hundred different ways, and so grace may sound almost too good to be true. Learning to trust that grace can itself become part of the long work of healing.

For me, recovery began when I finally realized, after years of begging and pleading, that Jesus wasn’t concerned about me being gay. It was certainly a problem for my family, my church, and for other Christians, but somewhere along the way I began to understand that it had never been a problem for God. It took a while, but I eventually came to see that this wasn’t because my prayers were insufficient, my faith was defective, or I had failed to surrender some hidden corner of my soul. There was simply nothing about my sexual orientation that needed to be changed. Being gay wasn’t the sin I’d been taught it was; it was an indelible part of the person God had made me to be. My capacity to love another man was not evidence of my alienation from God, but part of my God-given capacity to give and receive love.

That realization changed the Gospel for me because the grace I had spent years preaching to others had finally become true for me as well. I had long preached that we aren’t saved by good works or moral perfection, and that grace isn’t earned but freely given even before we come to faith in Jesus Christ. Yet for years I had secretly exempted myself from the very Gospel I had proclaimed; deep down inside I had concluded that everyone else could come to Christ as they were, but that I had to change who I was before God would grant me even just his prevenient grace, much less justification and sanctification.

Eventually, I began to hear Paul’s words about the thorn in his flesh in a new and deeply personal way. Paul had begged for his torment, the “messenger of Satan,” to be taken away, but Christ answered his plea with these words: “My grace is sufficient for you” (2 Corinthians 12:9). I had also spent years begging God to take away what I had been taught was my affliction, but I eventually realized that being gay was not my thorn. The real torment was the inner voice of shame that conversion therapy had planted within me; I had come to call that inner voice my “shame monster,” constantly telling me that I was broken, sinful, an abomination, and unacceptable to God. What I needed was not liberation from being gay, but liberation from the lie that I had to become heterosexual in order to be whole before God. I didn’t need God to change me into someone else; I needed to hear Christ’s promise for myself and discover that his grace had been sufficient for me all along.

That’s where grace finally found me: not in becoming straight or succeeding at celibacy, and not in learning to hate myself more effectively or discovering some spiritual discipline that conversion therapy had somehow missed. Grace found me when I began to accept that God’s love had been present with me, and sufficient for me, all along. There I discovered a wholeness I had never found through self-hatred, a peace with Christ that fear could never produce, and a faith restored not by erasing who I was, but by finally believing that the God who created me had never demanded my erasure in the first place.

Recovery hasn’t meant pretending those years never happened, nor has it meant that every reflex of shame simply disappeared. The scars remain, and from time to time I can still feel them. What has changed is their authority. They no longer get to tell me who I am, what my capacity to love means, or what God thinks of me. I can’t recover the years I spent trying to suppress myself, nor can I undo all the prayers in which I begged God to make me someone else. But I can refuse to let those years have the last word, while recognizing those old accusations for what they are: echoes of a theology that taught me to fear myself and mistake that fear for the voice of God.

Today, I can come before God without hiding. I can love my husband without believing that our love separates me from Christ, and I can stand in a pulpit and proclaim a Gospel of grace that I once believed applied to everyone but me. I no longer have to approach God as a problem waiting to be solved, because I have finally learned to come as myself: known, loved, forgiven, called, held by grace. Conversion therapy promised me freedom if I could somehow become someone else. The Gospel gave me something infinitely better—the freedom to stand before God as the person I actually am, without disguise, without apology, and without fear.