The first step towards healing is reading or listening to Richard Cohen’s breakthrough book, Gay Children, Straight Parents: A Plan for Family Healing. Out of his own experience and the experience of those he has served in his counseling practice, Mr. Cohen sets out a step-by-step plan that offers a path toward renewed family relationships grounded in love, faith and mutual respect. Over the past 17 years, Cohen has helped hundreds of parents, family members and friends who have loved ones dealing with SSA. This important book describes a powerful and effective 12-stage plan to create more loving and intimate relationships within the family and community. In this book, parents share wonderful stories of restored relationships and family healing as they help their SSA sons and daughters realize their heterosexual potential.

Excerpt:

But what if you don’t wish to accept or applaud your child’s chosen way of life?

What if you refuse to internalize the current sociopolitical definition of SSA [same-sex attraction]? How do you and your child live with two conflicting paradigms? Here’s the big question: Can you still love your child and yet completely disagree with his or her choice to adopt a “gay” identity?

The short answer is, Yes, you can. In the pages that follow you will discover how to unconditionally love your child. You will gain understanding about the dynamics that led her or him into SSA and beyond, into homosexual behavior. And you will find ways to create a strategic plan for bringing gifts of healing and loving attachment to your child.

Probably the most important thing to remember as you begin to reach out in love to your SSA child is that the love you offer must be unconditional. If you give the impression either directly or indirectly that you hope, by loving your child more, that he or she will “change,” leaving homosexuality behind, your best efforts will almost certainly be rejected. If you indicate that bringing about change is your intention, your efforts will look like cynical manipulation to your child. Please keep in mind that love must be offered
unconditionally. . . .

It may have taken your child years to accept his or her SSA as innate and immutable. If you were to say, “But you can change,” your child’s gut response would be, “No way. I have worked too hard to accept myself as gay/lesbian. I don’t want to go back and see if what you say is true.” Put yourself in your child’s shoes. Would you, after wrestling to accept your SSA, want to deconstruct the whole building? It is not an appealing proposition. And that is where you come in.

Our strategy is to love these children as God loves us—flaws and confusion and mistaken identities and all. As we love them, we reawaken the lost, hurt child within. Then, with great care and gentleness, we seek to reattach that hurt child to his or her same-sex parent and same-sex peers. As you think about reaching out to your child, remember that a web of lies has been spun around him or her. Now, with love and truth, you must try to reverse the damage and restore your child.

Author Bio:

Richard Cohen, former homosexual and psychotherapist, now married with 3 children, struggled for much of his life with unwanted same-sex attraction (SSA). He tried desperately to find professionals who understood his condition and help him heal. Because “it was so difficult to explain myself to therapists, who didn’t have a clue,” Cohen eventually became a psychotherapist and developed both a ground-breaking understanding of same-sex attractions and a comprehensive treatment plan for healing unwanted SSA. Coming Out Straight not only details Cohen’s personal journey out of homosexuality, but also recounts his experiences in helping men, women and adolescents heal their gender identity.