What Is Conversion Therapy?

Conversion therapy is any practice, counseling, ministry, program, or spiritual intervention that begins with the assumption that being LGBTQ is wrong, broken, sinful, disordered, evil, demonic, or unacceptable, and then seeks to change, suppress, “heal,” or “deliver” someone from their sexual orientation or gender identity.

It can take many forms. Some of it is extreme: aversion therapy, where pain, nausea, or other negative conditioning is used in response to sexual stimuli; group ridicule and humiliation; forced public confessions where absolution is withheld until change can be “verified”; identity deconstruction where participants are required to say things like “I am an abomination” or other self-condemning statements; enforced isolation from supportive friends or communities; exorcism rituals involving prayer and the laying on of hands; threats of expulsion from church or family; and, in some cases, physical abuse.

Those are the more extreme methods, and not all of them are always openly used. Some forms of abuse are covert. And while I do not believe most conversion therapy organizations would openly condone a parent physically harming or killing a child because they are gay, the teachings themselves can create a dangerous emotional and spiritual climate. When parents are told that their child’s identity is evil, demonic, shameful, or caused by family failure — especially by the father or mother — that can contribute to devastating responses.

But conversion therapy is not always that obvious. Sometimes it looks like mild “biblical counseling” or prayer ministries, where “praying the gay away” is its focus. Accountability groups, studies in “family dynamics,” and other “reparative therapy” processes like “gender appropriate activities.” Retreats and Bible studies, where asking questions, disagreeing with the teachers, or “thinking for yourself” is highly discouraged. The language may be softer, but the goal is still the same: make the person straight, make them cisgender, or make them suppress who they are.

That is very different from ethical counseling. Ethical counseling helps a person process their life, faith, trauma, relationships, and identity with an eye toward wholeness and without a predetermined outcome or coercive means to achieve that outcome. Conversion therapy begins with the outcome already decided: LGBTQ people must change, be changed, or suppress themselves in order to be faithful, acceptable, or saved.

That is where the harm begins. The harm comes from teaching people to hate or fear a core part of themselves. It can produce shame, anxiety, depression, self-hatred, loss of faith, family rupture, spiritual trauma, and suicidal despair. Many of us were told that if we didn’t change, it meant we didn’t have enough faith, didn’t pray hard enough, weren’t truly repentant, or were rejecting God.

In my case, conversion therapy didn’t heal me. It brainwashed me. It taught me to believe I was broken, disgusting, filthy, vile, and unacceptable to God unless I became something — or someone — I was not. It took years to untangle that from my faith.

So when we talk about conversion therapy, we’re not talking about someone freely exploring faith, asking hard questions, or seeking pastoral support. We’re talking about deliberate efforts to change or suppress LGBTQ identity because that identity has already been judged defective, harmful, evil, and in need of eradication.