Why Should You Avoid Reality Shows Based On Children?

Why You Should Avoid Reality Shows Based On Children?

Let’s admit, most kids are cute and they are entertaining. Their entertainment value is almost directly proportional to their cuteness, which is more than a workable currency in the prime time television industry.  The other fact, which the industry is not quite concerned about, is that kids are not fit to give informed consent.

It has almost been a month since I angrily stormed out of the sets of a kids reality show based on the age group of 12 or so. I was hired by the production house (I had not signed the contract yet, I was to sign it the next day) to be the psychological counselor for the kids and their parents facing elimination and other hardships of competition.

This morning when I answered an unknown number from Delhi, I was reminded of that day once again. On the other side of the phone was the same mother of a participant whom I had to placate and pacify after she saw the way her son who had just been eliminated from the reality show was being treated compared to the kids who were still part of the game. The other eliminated kids and their parents had the same beef with the production house.

She told me that the reason she’s calling me is because her son has still not been able to get over the trauma he suffered at the hands of both, the production house and her own. She felt really guilty of having put her son through such an unnecessarily excruciating experience regardless of her good intentions of giving her son, an experience she thought would enrich him and make him worldly. Since then a few other parents of the kids who participated in the show have also spoken to me.

Their fears were common, that now the show will soon be aired, as the promotional teasers have started coming on television, and they and their children will go through the same trauma they underwent during the shooting of the show.

I have chosen to write about this topic for two major reasons. The first being that for quite some time now, we’ve been watching an onslaught of reality shows featuring really young kids and it cannot be stressed enough the kind of serious effects that participation in shows like these can have on a child’s psychology. This is not an over protective parent in me that “thinks” this, it is a concern shared by psychologists worldwide. The second major reason being the personal experience I had on the sets of this reality show. Hence I want to distance myself from them because of the ethical conflict I would have continued to have working there.

A child’s mind is very different from that of an adult in a way that the higher faculties of understanding and judgment, that we take for granted, have yet not fully developed in a child’s brain when he or she is thrust into an extremely competitive environment. A child by himself does not understand failure at a task as failure of self; it’s a social learning. A child’s natural tendency is to try things and then move on to other things if he is not able to do what he first chose. However in settings like that of a reality show where they are taught the meaning of national success and hence failure as a corollary, the child cannot make the distinction between his failure at a task and his failure as a person.

In shows like these the child is caught between the expectations of the parents and the production house and the pressure of having to meet both. And if the child fails he is made aware of the fact even in its denial. The worst part of many bad aspects of the show was, the staff that was handling the kids; young college interns (read cheap labor) who had no training leave alone formal grooming, around how to deal with kids. Shouting at the kids was a commonplace thing, with their parents sitting right across them. The interns and even some senior production people from the team, did not seem to have any skills other than raising their voice and widening their eyes to scare the child shut.

Many parents who allow their kids or sometimes even encourage their kids to participate in such shows believe that it is their child’s wish to participate. They fail to realize that a child’s consent cannot be construed as informed consent.

Would you allow your child to burst firecrackers without supervision? Or play with electrical sockets simply because he wanted to? A child sitting at home watching the show on television does not see the amount of pressure that he will be put through, the long hours of shooting that he will endure and the harsh judgment that they will undergo. I am talking shooting till 10:30 or 11’o clock in the night and getting back to the show at 8:45 a.m. to the shooting location that is almost an hour or two, given the traffic in Mumbai.

The tragedy starts when the child realizes that he has bitten off more than he can chew and wants to leave, he is treated like a soldier off to fight a war and is told to be brave and fight the good fight. He is told that if he does not suck it up and face the pressure, which ideally a regular child at his age should not be subjected to anyway, he is going to be labeled a ‘quitter.’

And sticking around becomes increasingly difficult when they see their parents who were supposed to be their support structure and morale boosters get involved with the competition themselves, when they see that judges play favorites with the “cuter” kids with “sadder” stories from back home, get away with half-baked acts. Blatant favoritism in the form of judges helping some kids behind camera was not even an issue to the production house, it seemed. Obviously as you can imagine it was big issue for the parents.

The indifference towards the eliminated kids was the most astoundingly glaring, as soon as they were done recording their last video bites about, ‘how are they feeling about making it till here and now they have to go home?’

Almost all the parents I spoke to on the sets said that they regretted having brought their children for the show. An intern on the sets even mentioned that she would never let her child participate in this kind of a show.

I realized my position there soon enough, when I knew that the only thing I have been employed for is to put emotional band-aids once the harm was done on the stage and in the green room to the kids psychological states.

One parent even said that the production house is merely treating this 36 kids as 36 rungs of a ladder leading them to their millions and crores of rupees.

The pressure to entertain the nation, which is put on the kids’ shoulder with the enormous pressure to win, is not what would enrich the kids in anyway. We are wired to see babies, even animal babies, cute, so that we can love and protect them and give them skills enough to deal with life. Let’s not, for our enterntainments sake, make them into a freak show that is cute and get our ‘awwws and oooohs.’

Our kids should mean more to us.

One parent, in hindsight, wisely put it, “The only thing that’s real in these reality shows, is the suffering of the kids.”

Dysfunctional Romance And What Can One Do?

Dysfunctional Romance And What Can One Do?

The feeling of romance just like any other emotion, even though it is the strongest known to us, is just another feeling in the compendium of human emotions. In and of itself, it cannot be judged as good or bad, all we can say is that it is a powerful feeling indeed. The way we experience life as humans is complex and intricate. No emotion by itself can guide courses of healthy actions and almost no logical suggestions to live life seems appealing if it doesn’t take into account our emotions.

 

This age old fight between logic and emotions, the heart and the mind is one of the most tragically false dichotomies that prevail in our culture today. You are presented with a choice of either being exclusively emotional or ruthlessly ‘practical.’ And of course every choice will be judged according to the people you meet and the side they chose in their lives. The combination of logic and emotions, especially in the subject of romance, is really hard to find in the dominant discourse around the matter and its far-reaching consequences. Generally it is not even considered a possibility.

 

Trying to empathetically understand and explain the choices people make is not the same as saying “I agree with them,” but to say “because I don’t agree with a choice you make I will not try to understand it,” is a position that will hinder in gathering crucial knowledge about human behaviour and rectify the choices in question.

 

Recent extremely tragic loss of a talented and budding actor like Jiah Khan, as made public by her alleged suicide note, points at the same problematic and potentially fatal understanding of romance in our culture and its place in our lives. The moment we loose the sight of the idea that ‘emotions are for me, I am not for emotions,’ we loose the whole context and undermine the importance of out lives themselves. Perhaps I understand why Jiah felt the way she did and lost all hopes of any future happiness. Just a read though some of the lines from her suicide note may reveal how it is all too easy to loose the perspective when one is hit by a strong sway of one of the most intense emotions known to human beings; love.

 

“I’ve already lost everything.

I feel dead inside. I’ve never given so much of myself to someone or cared so much. 

I can’t eat or sleep or think or function. I am running away from everything. The career is not even worth it anymore.

I have no confidence or self-esteem left,

I wish you had loved me like I loved you.

I am nothing. I had everything. I felt so alone even while with you. You made me feel alone and vulnerable. I am so much more than this.”

 

It is easy to negatively judge Jiah as an ‘extremely sensitive’ person, after reading the above excerpt, however I would like to add that we sometimes become completely different people when we are in love and thick  of unrequited romance. I say that not only as a psychologist, but also a person who can largely be categorized ‘overly’ sensitive, by most standards and who seem to be struggling in mostly just one area of his life; romance.

 

However, my fascination with studying romance; its nature, its causes and its effects, never just stopped at the problems I personally faced, even though they got me interested in the subject in the first place. Relationship counselling, an important part of my work with people, requires me to understand romance as a human phenomenon and not just an individual one. The experiential understanding and text book knowledge that I have applied as a professional in helping couples ensure their emotional health with or without each other, has helped me understand a lot about my own romantic self.  

 

Identity and Self Esteem Crisis

 

Individuals are required to change or merge their names (mostly women) with their spouse after marriage. With names we sometimes psychologically merge or completely give up our identities as individuals when we find ourselves in the throes of passion, marriage or no marriage. Everything our partner says or does, affects us ten folds more compared to most people around us. Their opinion of us suddenly becomes our opinions of ourselves.

 

This ritual of this unnecessary conflation of; who we are and what we want from life as an individual person with another individual’s identity and dreams in life, is performed under the name of love and approval of the society. However, the dysfunctional side of it is when one is unable to find happiness in and through the relationship, one experience a complete loss of sense of who they are or were before they were romantic partners to their lovers. I guess something similar was felt by Jiah when she wrote “I am broken inside. You may not have known this but you affected me deeply to a point where I lost myself in loving you.”

 

When one goes through identity crisis in the negative phases of a relationship one seems to loose faith in their capabilities to deal with the basic challenges of life, they would have easily dealt with before they got into the relationship. This is a textbook marker of low self-esteem. I was very saddened but not surprised when I read Jiah write this line in the alleged suicide note “I have no confidence or self esteem left,”

 

A sense of helplessness builds in, when one tells oneself that they can’t deal with this failure in romance and if they did not make it with their lover or if my love was never returned by him/her in the way I want, life is not worth living. Because life was essentially thought to serve the feeling of romance and not the other way round wherein romance was to be enjoyed by me and in my life as one of the many forms of feelings that I am capable of experiencing.

 

Even though I may claim to have some understanding of the source of Jiah’s immense pain, I am deeply saddened by the choices she made to deal with that pain. I wish she chose differently.

 

I was also equally, if not more, shocked by how some people reacted to the situation. I also wish that people, who were condemning her decisions in vile and angry words as a cowardly act on social networking websites, also made different choices and first attempted to understand the source of her suffering even though we all wish that the realty were different. This understanding is necessary for our society and for us as individuals who sometimes find themselves as failures in life when they fail in love. Hate and disgust for an action do not motivate you to understand that action and learn about it. I wish we could learn to love ourselves a little bit more from this incident, or enough to know that when we face a conflict between the heart and the mind, we have the skills and the will to make the choice to work with both, so that even in the face of potentially crippling effects of love, we find ourselves capable to come out on the other side of the adversity as stronger and wiser versions of ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Facebook, Human Fear and Corporate Management

Facebook, Human Fear and Corporate Management

What can we learn from Facebook about human fears that can help us run better companies and improve interpersonal relationships?

With more than 1 billion users world wide, Facebook is like its own virtual nation. A nation, that promises its citizens an almost unconditional citizenship, with a perceivably elaborate scheme and regulations to protect the rights of its citizens. This article, however, is not about how great Facebook is as a social networking website, it is about discussing one of the most important of many reasons why Facebook is more successful at connecting with you at an individual level and have a relationship to the point, that you don’t remember what you did with your free time, before Facebook came along.

Facebook team, wittingly or unwittingly, have understood the way we as humans are wired for fear and how it drives our lives, and might I add, have found the most ingeniously innocuous ways to address some of those fears. Many world religions and psychologists have talked about those fears in different ways and have worked with them or used them to control or care, depending upon their motives and intentions.

Just like most animals, we are wired to fear scarcity of material resources that make our physical lives possible, and to fear predators that might steal from us or hurt us in more ways than just physical. However the story gets interesting when we talk about the third unique fear that we have as human beings.

The Third Fear: Fear of Lack of Meaning and Significance in and of life itself (FLMSL).

 I call it unique because it requires imagination and we are the only species that have the apparatus that makes imagination and higher level thinking possible; the prefrontal cortex. FLMSL is important to be understood before we can talk and explore and connect it to our virtual relationship with Facebook.

 Let’s do a thought experiment: Think what will happen if you die right now and somehow even though you can not interact with the world you are able to observe it. What you observe is this, after brief moments of grieving even your loved ones move on in life. Some early some slightly later, but eventually everyone’s resilience kicks in and they start going about life as they did when you were there.

 This thought that ‘I don’t mean much in the long and large scheme of things,’ and ‘I am quite dispensable,’ is a rather unpleasant and unsettling thought. To a few it drives them to the famously known ‘existential crisis.’ Let me repeat, it is important for human beings to have Meaning and Significance in and of life itself. We are the only species that advocates pursuit of contentment, however, even in that pursuit we are not satisfied with the amount of contentment we ‘should have’ had to avoid FLMSL.

 The extent of FLMSL can of course vary and manifests itself in many different ways in different people according to their personality types and their past and present choices they have made to deal with it.

 FLMSL shows itself in many ways in our lives: our desire to be loved, our desire to be listened to, our desire to achieve professionally to feel ‘worth it’ to ourselves or showcase the same to others, our desire to excel, our desire to have friends and so on; basically our desire to be visible to others and to ourselves. May be not human mind so much, but human brain understands the evolutionary importance of being liked and talked about and not forgotten and cared for and shared with.

 There are myriad ways in which people can choose to deal with FLMSL. These choices can decide whether the expression and manifestation of this unique fear/desire is healthy for us or not.

 I will constrict the scope of this article to only exploring the more benign expression of this fear/desire. Other expressions like our need to insult others, our need to not just shine but also out-shine others, our habit of talking over others, our ways of being ‘liked’ by association with other ‘liked’ people, our easily offended ways of interacting with the world, our need to control others either through domination or submission, our need to desperately hold on to a relationship that is obviously not good for us and many other ways in which FLMSL can run amok. That’s a topic for another post.

 That noted, let’s get back to how Facebook addresses FLMSL. Facebook addresses our need/desire of having a meaning and meaning something to ourselves and others, in different ways and intensity in our lives. It not only let’s you express through your postings what’s important to you it gives the avenue for it to be ‘liked,’ ‘shared’ and ‘commented’ upon.  The classical textbook ways of making people feel important.

 Facebook gives you visibility, albeit virtual but a strong psychological perception of visibility and importance nonetheless. It lets you gauge the extent of your importance through the visibility of your posts, pictures and your videos. Thereby implicitly answering the question, do I matter? Do I have meaning?

 Is it not the same thing that we are looking for in our relationship with other human beings? And feel disillusioned and dis-interested when we don’t feel welcomed and important in their lives? Is that why Facebook starts to be a more real relationship tool, through which we achieve a non-judgmental and yet a reassuring platform to present and showcase ourselves?

 It is almost like we use Facebook as an impact-assessing tool. How much do I mean and affect the world around me, sometimes also counted through the number of people and/or achievements I can showcase on my wall. The way when Hulk in the movies, hits the floor with his fist the impact fades out as the distance from his fist increases, the same way for us the greater our impact travels the better we feel.

We can imagine what we would feel like if these numbers matched our Facebook posts.

It then doesn’t come as a surprise that the most preferred professions or positions are the ones that provides us with the most visibility, which puts us front and center of public admiration, a movie star or Queen of England. One important way we also measure the net worth of a star is, with the impact and reach he or she has on a global scale.

Some individuals need the stage of an Academy Awards Ceremony to feel like they have never felt before, some just need that psychological stage being provided to them by their loved ones, but we all desire it.

 Objectively speaking, when outside triggers like friends, family and bosses & team members at work address FLMSL by giving our humanness a holistic visibility and importance, the happiness quotient of the individual goes up and it stays up (with minimum fluctuations) when the FLMSL is addressed from within the individual. When the individual has converted his need for meaning and significance in life to a flexible desire. From “I need people to listen to me, and if they don’t, either I am bad or they are horrible” to “It’s highly desirable that people listen to me, but if they don’t, I can still manage to be happy.’

 Corporations understand this today more then ever before that a happy person is a more productive person. In leadership training, we need to see if the team leaders, managers and even team members are able to make each other feel visible and important in real, relevant and meaningful ways.

 Do people in your team and department feel they are ‘Liked’ and appreciated or corrected in ways that are likeable? Are they being ‘Commented’ upon in ways that are genuine and holistic view of them? Are their success stories or challenges being ‘Shared’ in ways that are learning and problem solving and not blaming?

 So if we want to slow down the attrition rate of good people in our companies and in our private lives, especially because of preventative reasons, we might want to look at the way Facebook addresses a uniquely human need of wanting to matter.

Psychology of Rape in India

In all my experience as a psychologist, I can safely say that the one key to comprehend human nature is to understand that there is never a ‘one key explanation’ for any human behavior. It’s always a combination of several keys. Our challenge is to find the largely functional master key of explanation of an issue.

 Largely, it’s because of three main reasons:

1. The biological make-up (predispositions, temperament, etc.),
2. Present and Past environment and individual experiences;
3. And most importantly our own thinking patterns which govern our behavior choices. (That’s why we hold people accountable for their actions.)

The above factors can have varying degrees of influence depending upon what we are talking about.

Since there are no reliable ways to check and correct certain rape fantasies, neurological collapse in empathy and regret, relationship with aggression, we have very limited scope of change in the persons biology and past experiences.

However, we are not slaves to our anatomies. Biological understanding of a problem just helps us maintain a problem-solving perspective.

In the context of rape, analyzing Delhi’s culture, even on the face of it, gives you an understanding that it is a precarious soup of the four strongly male chauvinistic cultures of Punjab, Rajasthan, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh.

Now, the first tenet of male chauvinism is that men are superior to women. This ideology gives rise to an entitlement and privileged mentality: men deserve better and more in terms of pleasure and prosperity than a woman. Women are merely the instruments through which to achieve those desires. When this claim to power is thwarted, men believe they have the right to express their frustration and anger by forcefully asserting their dominance in a violent sexual act.

Now add to this mixture the warped traditional and religious projections of a proper woman: a non-ambitious, non-adventurous, non-assertive, non-person. Woman having been created from a man’s rib and the promises of virgins in heaven as reward and skies full of seducing apsaras like Menaka and Rambha, who have no apparently real purpose in life but to entertain and distract men.  Then there is also that bromide of what acche ghar ki ladkiya (women of good character) should do.

In fact, this purposeless and chattel-like status of women is clear in the old understanding of the word ‘rape’ itself, which in its Latin roots, “rapere” means ‘to steal or seize’ property.

Yet another ingredient to this poisonous soup is the lack of a rational education in sex and emotions. This results in a woefully underdeveloped regulatory mechanism in individuals, which is essential for personal and societal development. Our faulty understanding of what it means to be a “masculine” man also can make us look at this deficiency of a human regulation on an animal brain, as a good thing, as a real “male” thing.

Asli Mard toh (aisa) hi hota hai. Real men are supposed to be like this. Substitute “this” with whatever comes to mind and you will identify a dominant belief of a culture. We might get several answers from the chai stalls to board rooms to movies like DEV D and Rowdy Rathore, where its okay to pinch a woman’s waist because the character of Akshay Kumar had no regulatory mechanism over his animal instincts.

Emotional and sexual education is very important for us to know that a girl’s dress is not a ‘yes,’ that the time of the night and your mood (in or outside the influence of alcohol) are no licenses to violate another person’s body, and that an iron rod cannot compensate for the self-worth you have attached to your penis size and that a woman’s moans and cries under you are no mark of your greatness as a male-bodied person.

Low self-esteem and the entitlement mind-set among men who are sexually repressed and immature and who live with misogynistic ideas are crucibles of explosive mixtures of beliefs that lead to undesirable behaviors.

Patriarchy is not restricted only to the mind-set of men; most often, we find that women are willing subscribers to the patriarchy of society. Many Indian women not only believe in such ideas, they also have warped the idea of what it means to be feminine—to the point that women are complicit in the impoverished state they hold in society.

What should we do as a society?

From a psychological perspective, stop telling the girl that her life is over, that her victimhood is her shame. Yes, rape is horrible, but it is simply not the end of his or her life. An attitude of shame only instills guilt and responsibility further into the already struggling victim. The shame and the dishonor, properly, belongs to the rapist—the man who deigned to become animal.

As a nation we really need to improve our understanding of sex. Our relationship with sexuality is very immature and unhealthy. A healthy and safe society cannot be created without having an open and frank conversation and understanding about human sexuality. Given the fact that there is no innate knowledge about the facts of the universe: even though we feel the effects of gravity throughout our lives, but for gravity to be understood and used for our benefit needs to be studied extensively.

The basic goals that sex education in India need to fulfill, is not just to be a class on anatomy of humans reproductive system; while the information is important it doesn’t solve even the most basic of our questions about our sex lives leave alone addressing the issue of rape and other forms of violence against women and sexual minorities. What sex education needs to achieve, as larger umbrella goal is to ensure that our youth understands the importance of their own bodies and establish a healthy and respectful relationship with it, the present religio-cultural understanding of body and mind dualism has done much harm to us for too long. Our understanding of body being somewhat squalid and not to be understood and our mind always being in an adversarial relationship with it, as opposed to, the more rational and scientific one of body and mind working in tandem with each other. Understanding and respecting our body is the pre-requisite of doing the same with other people.

One also recognizes that parenting has the major role to play in any young and adolescent. Parenting has to undergo a sea change. Modeling is the best way forward. Children learn from the way the mothers and sisters are treated in the house, more than most things. Honest and frank conversations about sex and sexuality without guilt and shame attached to the matter, is another unavoidable change we have to bring in to bring about desired change. Sex might be very dangerous in bedroom when its not discussed in the living room.

All in all, the responsibility of a society that is safe for women and other sexual minorities, the responsibility lies with each one of us, to model the change we wish to see in others around us. As parents, teachers, media and politicians will have to recognize the urgency and importance of the change. Laws don’t change the cultures, but change in culture can definitely pave the way for reformed laws. It is important to know that social struggles like these are not won one half as much in the court rooms, but in the hearts and minds of the people we live with.

Deepak Kashyap is Counselling Psychologist with a private practice in Mumbai, who deals with the issues of trauma, gender sensitivity and sexuality and relationships. He can be reached at Deepak.j.kashyap@gamil.com

The Joys of Being Interested in Yourself

The Joys of Being Interested in Yourself

Interest is the prerequisite for achieving meaningful awareness about anything and anyone and its place in the world. The same principle applies to us in relation to our ‘selves’ and our place in the world around us.

When I say take interest in yourself I don’t mean it in a narcissistic way, where you cannot see the world beyond your nose. What I mean is that you should be extremely interested in the functioning of your own mind. Imagine if we spent even half of the energy in thinking about our own views of ourselves, others and life, than what people think of us, others and life. I am certain that when the focus of our study is our ‘selves,’ we’ll be able to tap into the most exquisite and beautiful layers and complexities of our minds.

“Why do I do this?” “Why do I do it this way?” “Are my reactions to the unpleasant realities, equally unpleasant for me?” “What are the ideas behind my emotional responses to people and things and events?” “Do I ask for enough evidence before I say, I ‘believe’…?” It’s important to ask these questions without an unkind word or a phrase for oneself. Sentences like “I am so stupid/dumb/f*%&$/helpless” are counterproductive.

Try resisting the pull to moralize and concentrate to analyze.

This enquiry into the inner world is successful only when it’s compassionate and accepting of our ‘selves’. When you turn the light of awareness about the ‘self’ brighter, you’ll discover all sorts of things about yourselves; some amazing, some not so amazing and some areas which need immediate and loving attention and fixing. Most people would avoid self-awareness because of the dangers of knowing things they have been actively avoiding about themselves and of facing the thoughts they won’t even admit to themselves. However, the other powerful side of self-awareness that is not understood is that, it comes with the realization of the tremendous power one has, to alter aspects of oneself.

Even if one finds out major areas of disappointments and “disgrace,” one should accept them and work towards changing them. Acceptance of negative aspects of oneself or one’s behavior is not the same as appreciating them. Acceptance is the first sympathetic and kind step to changing the undesirable attitudes and habits one might have developed as a case of neglect and abandonment of one’s ‘self.’ Once these ineffective and undesirable facets are brought in the light then changing them is only a matter of time and practice, sometimes even with the assistance of professional help of a psychological counselor.

I reiterate that kindness, self-acceptance and compassion are the only tools that will truly make this journey of being interested and aware in oneself joyful.

Homosexuality, Science and Present Myth of Ex-Gay Movement

Homosexuality, Science and Present Myth of Ex-Gay Movement

Why is the scientific method more valid a tool to find out truths about our world, both internal and external, as opposed to purely emotional reasoning? As rhetorical as this question might sound to many, it still remains a valid and confusing question in the minds of many others. All most all of us go through the phases of emotional reasoning, especially when we encounter something counter-intuitive or plain contradictory to our most cherished and strongly held beliefs.

In the interest of my article I would very briefly explain the difference between science and interpretation of science via emotional reasoning. The major difference is that in scientific approach, regardless of the emotions accompanying a hypothesis, an individual constantly tries to challenge and falsify his own theories as opposed to primarily an emotional approach to reasoning, where the individual insists on maintaining the old theories (sometimes even to a level of prejudices) regardless of the contrary evidence being provided to his rational faculties, largely because of the following reasons; they don’t “feel” right or it goes against everything else they have “believed” in or  “that” had been “taught” to be right in social contexts or, the classic, it has been believed to be true by “so many people for so long.”

Emotional reasoning on the face of it seems to have a logical process, but it merely is a way of rehearsing one’s prejudices and strengthening them over time, sometimes by gaining support from other similar minded individuals.

Why would we rather maintain our old ideas even in the face of new ones that are supported by evidence?

Accepting a new idea requires us to leave the familiarity of the old one and whenever we encounter something new, be it an idea, a person or a situation, we require new mental skills to deal with it. Acquiring new skills is mentally a harder and more inconvenient thing to do as opposed to just staying with the familiarity of events, ideas and people.  Since with humans, thinking is automatic but critical thinking is a chosen skill, subconsciously we end up choosing the easier path and show resistance to change and to new ideas and different people, more often then we would like to admit.

As a gay man, I too can succumb to emotional reasoning when I am out there defending my political and social rights. I may, too, accept a scientific theory that supports my instincts or my political agenda despite the lack of conclusive evidence. The same is possible to those with contrary views, when they encounter overwhelmingly conclusive evidence regarding homosexuality being natural and normal variation of human sexuality, because it doesn’t agree with their religious or social views.

Since in scientific approach the beliefs follow from reason and not the other way round, scientific method always give room for assessing and reassessing the present theories and hypothesis. However, for the one who places the emotional cart before the horse of reason, no evidence is ever enough or substantial to even rethink their position on homosexuality.

Whether or not homosexual orientation can be changed is perhaps one of the most burning questions of our time, the answer to which appears in the affirmative only in the minds of the ex-gay evangelists.  These ministers have made it their sole purpose to “change and reorient” homosexuals, because they see it as a disorder of mental and social nature. Even though the question of possible reorientation therapies has a social implication, the answer to it largely falls under the domain of the medical and biological sciences.

Exodus international and NARTH (National Association for the Reparative Therapy for Homosexuality) are the two fat cats in the business of sexual reorientation “therapies”. Even though neither have been able to come out with a consistent form of therapy or revealed the name(s) of any particular drug that they might have come across which can be tested for the validity of its claim.

Before discussing anything more about the Exodus International and NARTH, I would like to talk about the curious case of Robert Spitzer, a former Columbia Professor and eminent psychiatrist. Spitzer was among the pioneers who spearheaded the declassifying of homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973. It was seen as a welcome change, especially by the homosexual community and its social impact was larger then the ripples it created in the world of psychologists and psychiatrists, because just four years before the declassification, the LGBT community had kick started their political rights from revolutionary Stonewall movement.

Spitzer being a true scientist again conducted a study, almost three decades after the de-pathologizing of homosexuality, about whether change in an individual’s sexual orientation is possible; and the study confirmed the hypothesis. Even though the sample size of 200 telephonic interviewees was large enough, the study did not make any claims about the rates of success of any kind of “reparative or reorientation” therapy. 43% + 23% of the participants were provided by ex-gay ministries and NARTH respectively and most of the data was in the form of self-report.

The study stated that for a group of highly motivated individuals the efforts at changing sexual orientation worked. There was no substantial data regarding the time period the “change” lasted in the tiny number of individuals that it occurred in the first place.

The way the above results were interpreted in the larger socio-religious environments was: Spitzer, the man behind the de-pathologizing of homosexuality, a man who could not have been biased against the gays and lesbians, has validated ex-gay therapies.

What was actually biased was the understanding and interpretations of the results. Claiming that change might be possible is one thing and claiming that I have found out the therapeutic way to do it is quite another. Especially when there are no researches available and no objective way of testing how long the changes lasted, if there were any at all, in the sexual orientation and no clear distinction between behavior (what you do?) and orientation (what you desire?).

Spitzer himself concluded that change might be possible but it is probably very rare. He also was skeptic about the participant telling the truth.

The problem is that ex-gay associations and therapy clinics still cite Spritzer’s study on sexual orientation change, even thought the study itself was criticized and disavowed by APA (American Psychological Association).

So coming back to NARTH and Exodus International; the problems that occurs with their claims to changing people’s orientation are the following

1. Almost all of these instances of changes are self-reports and not objectively testable data, so a client there is almost no protection against a client lying about the alleged change (such data is generally extremely hard to get in similar research anyway)
2. The fact of clients’ “past” bisexuality and its percentage is seldom highlighted.
3. No clear and prominent distinction made between behavior (what you do?) and orientation (what you desire). So one might be successfully having intercourse with the opposite sex and have developed friendly feelings for them, but still deep down may desire the touch and romantic company of the same sex partner.
4. Kinsey scale existence of sexual orientation is almost neglected; which consistently shows that human sexuality exists on a spectrum.
5. Based on researches, which have no substantial evidential backing.

So it’s not surprising that the drop out rates of their clients with no apparent change is way above 90 percent.

In a recently published article called My So-Called Ex-Gay Life in The American Prospect, excerpts of the interview with Robert Spitzer were published, referring to the supplying of sample for his 2001 study, he said,  “In all the years of doing ex-gay therapy, you’d think Nicolosi (the then President of NARTH) would have been able to provide more success stories. He only sent me nine patients.”

In the interview Spitzer made it very clear that he never wanted anyone to go for “reorientation” therapies. His goal was only to figure out the truth of the negative hypothesis that no one has ever changed his or her sexual orientation. Note he nowhere claim to have found out any means through which one could change their sexual orientation.

Now octogenarian Spitzer expresses his worries, which he shares with the APA official paper  about the present efforts to changing sexual orientation of people and says that they “can be quite harmful.”

It turns out that in this particular case, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence against them, the ex-gay movement seem to not pay heed to it and more often then not, completely deny it. They seemed to be mired so much in their hatred towards homosexuality, regardless of how they express it, that they fall prey to emotional reasoning and blind themselves to the obvious biological facts.

I quote some astonishing excerpts from the above-mentioned article regarding the on goings within some of these ex-gay organizations  “John Paulk, Love Won Out founder, chair of the board of Exodus International, and husband of Anne Paulk, was spotted and photographed at a Washington, D.C., gay bar. Richard Cohen, the founder of PFOX (Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays)—intended as the ex-gay counterpart to PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays)—was expelled from the American Counseling Association for ethics violations. Michael Johnston, the founder of “National Coming Out of Homosexuality Day,” was revealed to have infected men he’d met on the Internet with HIV through unprotected sex.”

All of that would have been still been less incriminating and no focus of public interest, if in the process of their sometimes well intentioned efforts to change sexual orientation these organizations did not end up instilling guilt, shame and self-hatred among its clients. These programs run the risk of increased danger of pushing the client into clinical neuroses like anxiety, depression and recurrent suicidal thoughts.

APA in their longitudinally conducted review noted the following about the ex-gay movement. “It provided false hope, which can be devastating,” it also said. “It harmed self-esteem and self-regard by focusing on the psychopathology of homosexuality.” APA strongly desists people from going for such therapies and hormone treatments for changing their sexual reorientation.

LGBT people do not require an absence of a reparative therapy for their political rights to be ensured, what they require to fight for their political rights is the basis of self-ownership. The philosophy that says, I and not the government owns my body and my heart, so they don’t get the right to tell me whom I can have sex with or/and love and marry.

If tomorrow we do discover the most unnecessary methods to change sexual orientations then too, no body can be forced to take the therapy or stay away from the therapy. People would still be and always should be left with a choice, to do what they want to do with their bodies and minds. This would ensure the human rights of all, gay and straight alike, cause I know a lot my straight male friends who’d rather be gay but are not, I am sure they too would quite happily opt for a “reorientation” and become gay if they could.

Up until then, let’s all know that there no therapy or method which we know of that has produced any results that are lasting or worth considering.

So I guess the only two choices we have now is to accept and enjoy who we are or sit and moan about what you can’t be. Pick your choice.

The article was written by Deepak Kashyap

He is a practicing counselling psychologist and a life skills trainer in Mumbai

deepak.j.kashyap@gmail.com

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. After you read this, you should delete and write your own post, with a new title above. Or hit Add New on the left (of the admin dashboard) to start a fresh post.

Here are some suggestions for your first post.

1. You can find new ideas for what to blog about by reading the Daily Post.
2. Add PressThis to your browser. It creates a new blog post for you about any interesting  page you read on the web.
3. Make some changes to this page, and then hit preview on the right. You can always preview any post or edit it before you share it to the world.