My eight years in conversion therapy

WHEN I FIRST STARTED CONVERSION THERAPY AT AGE 19, I thought I was pursuing healing for what I was led to believe was broken in me. I didn’t want to erase myself. I wanted peace. I wanted to stop feeling like my faith and my sexuality were at war with one another. I sought it out of my own accord. My parents and pastors didn’t force me into therapy, but everything in the culture around me convinced me it was my only option.

- BY TIMOTHY SCHRAEDER RODRIGUEZ

The author outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 7 as it heard oral arguments

Conversion therapy sells a promise of transformation, but what it really delivers is a slow disintegration of the soul. You learn to measure your worth by how well you can pretend. You learn to call shame devotion. And you learn that love has conditions.

I was in conversion therapy for nearly eight years. I was taught to artificially deepen my voice, second-guess my every action, and replace my hobbies and interests with more “masculine” ones. My life became all about being faithful and doing everything I could to become like the man I was told God wanted me to be. Ministry leaders, therapists, and pastors prayed over me. They said I was brave. And when nothing changed, they said I was the problem. So I prayed harder and tried to fake it until I made it.

The irony was that this performance followed me into my career. I worked for some of evangelical Christianity’s largest megachurches, like Hillsong, Willow Creek, and Elevation Church, where I helped craft messages of belonging for millions. But my presence in these spaces operated by unspoken rules: I was useful in the shadows, but unacceptable in the light. I was selling the idea of love and acceptance while practicing self-exclusion.

For almost a decade, I did individual therapy, attended conferences, joined support groups, and listened to testimonies from people who claimed they had changed their sexuality with God’s help. I told myself I could too, if I just had enough faith. I was told repeatedly that the opposite of homosexuality wasn’t heterosexuality, it was holiness, and I strove to meet that impossible standard.

But the truth was that the more I tried to heal, the further I drifted from myself. My prayers became bargains. My faith became a performance. I started to believe that peace might exist only if I ceased to.