digesting this info. not endorsing this 100% but it's thought provoking info for sure.
Discussion
some things that stood out to me
1. boy has to detach from mother and attach to father at some age between 2-5
2. what the boy is attracted to is who he wants to be
3. narcissism/compulsive behavior play a part
4. no such thing as a stable monogamous gay relationship
I find much of what he says to be spot-on in my situation. where I am still trying to figure out is why did I fail to attach to father, and did I really fail to attach to my father.
after all, i had a dad that most kids could only dream of. he built an entire model train set that I loved, and he expanded it when he saw that I enjoyed it so much. He also helped me build a model boat, a model airplane. and he gave me precious basement space to build my own train set. if anything I was spoiled.
my older brothers were not bullies either. apparently the father has to make sure that he stands up for the younger son to make sure he is "affirmed" and "one of the guys" as i understand it.
i did get tickled a lot as a kid and it was like torture to me bc i would laugh uncontrollably but I don't think this had anything to do with it.
It's a pill to swallow to be called narcissistic. But why else do I tend to care so much about what other people think about me. being a people-pleaser at some point leads right around to being narcissistic manipulator of people's emotions so I can avoid the pain of confrontation.
being authentic and being a "disagreeable" male is going to result in conflicts. The idea of straight young men plopping down in a chair and being unconcerned of how they are perceived versus a gay guy being completely aware of how they look and what the impression they are giving off is.
I have met one man who throws himself around without appearing to care, but it does jive with my general experience of straight versus gay males. "Why can't i just stop caring about what people think", but then being repulsed in turn by a dude who clearly doesn't care what people think .
This is kinda a stereotype. there are plenty of very sensitive straight men and I'm friends with a few. they are absolute treasures as there's no sexual trickery.
this therapist also mentioned that 30% of his patience probably suffer from OCD symptoms, even though it's 1-3% in general population. THis is a very interesting statistic to me because it's something that I'm confronting.
when i step back and observe my own behavior relating to my self-identification of "being gay"
1. it's an appetite which i can either indulge or deny.
2. indulging tends to look like an "obsession"
3. denying takes work but it has a silver lining of restoring a part of my self that wants to connect to men in a deeper friend way. "wait, i don't have to objectify a man sexually? really, this is so freeing"
according to therapist part of this excessive objectifying and "acting-out" is a counter-balance of the "good little boy" that gay men frequently hide behind. this is something i started recognizing as "not normal". there are plenty of straight men that objectify women, however this is also not good or desirable.
his theory about how a trauma or attachment to mother can cause a guy to be gay is intriguing. So i could be straight if i could just find where it all went wrong. in my case my mother was not anxious or attached. she did however complain to me about my father frequently. I have always excused this as my role in the family because I understood my father's obsessive tendencies with his work and emotional neglect of my mother through my own personality.
I was also the 3rd son in the family and 5 son in the broader structure. my mom was surrounded by athletic, hard-working men who were not to be found when child-care, housework was to be done. i was the "kitchen window son" looking out at the guys playing soccer in the yard. but someone had to help mom.
I don't think this is the cause of sexual preference as my sexual preference started probably around 4-5 with my earliest memories.
can a disney movie influence a kid at a young age? i have an early probably 4 year old memory of Disney's little mermaid confronting her studly merman father. this scene stuck in my memory as something I would pretend with friends at school. I was conflicted as I wanted to be the mermaid and I was attracted to the merman father.
Could it be that all the princess disney movies could be confusing to male children trying to detach from mothers and attach to fathers?
if this is true, it would be doubly unlucky because I was not allowed to see Disney movies as a kid. I must have seen this scene at someone else's house or at school.
when i was 4 or 5 I had a "girlfriend" at school that I was always holding her hand. we would walk down the lane together between the school buildings. I loved her with all my little 4 year old heart and called her my girlfriend.
and it wasn't just at school, i have a picture of holding hands walking down the driveway with my little red-haired girl cousin who i absolutely loved.
so part of me wonders what happened between the little "girlfriends" that I had at 4 or 5 and then 2nd, 3rd grade desire to Only play Make-Believe with girls and avoid playing kickball/soccer with the boys my age (they were boring, unimaginative, dirty). only Will in the next grade up was amazing.
The compulsive piece stuck out to me because logically speaking, we have many compulsions and intrusive thoughts that we don't act on.
1. i may have compulsion to drink every day, but I don't do that
2. intrusive thoughts come along from time-to-time but we recognize them for what they are and continue along.
i say this because part of "becoming gay" revolved around my dreams as a kid. If one is attracted to the same sex in a dream, does this mean one is gay and it's dishonest to try to have sex with a woman.
the obsessive part would be "ok i dreamed of having sex with a man, so i should not trick a woman into having sex with me because I'm not 100% sure. and there are plenty of men who will have sex so i don't have to confront this worry about telling a woman that I also have dreams of men."
I definitely had dreams of deer (hey bambi) and I'm not out here trying to have sex with one of those.
lots of mentions sex in here to fill the time before 100k bitcoin
no seriously, the quickest person in my life to understand Bitcoin was someone who has OCD.
so all of us that are going to have bitcoin kids, the only purpose of writing all this stuff here is to help us figure out the best practice for future humans.
just like understanding what diet does to body, it's good to know what trickeries OCD might do.
and my "not financial advice" piece.
I love gays, i am/was gay. I love the freedom in this country to be "sexually liberated". i also love the freedom to question that "sexual liberation" from a spiritual perspective.
any change must be a heart change. i have 0 desire for someone to live a certain way because they are forced to. they have to listen to their heart. i love the freedom to follow the heart.
and I pray every day that my heart follows christ.
