Tag Archives: True Directions

New Jersey Governor Christie Makes Himself Complicit in the Effects of Sexual Abuse onto Children

tumblr_mrs55oCcmv1qj5rqko1_500On Monday, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie joined a small but effective group of lawmakers by signing legislation into law that bans all types of therapies that seek to “reduce or eliminate homosexual feelings” for minors. Christie joined his own legislature and New Jersey became the second state to ensure that children who are sexually abused by adults and teenagers will be permanently damaged by molesters and pedophiles in their respective states.

The new law in New Jersey is virtually the same language as that of California’s, of which the constitutionality is still being decided by the 9th Circuit Federal Court of Appeals. As justification for the ban, Christie stated there was not enough evidence to support the use of Sexual Orientation Change Effort (SOCE) therapy to veto the law put forth by the partisan legislature.

He said this, despite a number of facts that have either been distorted or not reported.

Fact #1: The American Psychological Association (APA) stated in it’s 2009 Task Force Report on SOCE (pp. 82-83) that there is insufficient evidence that it is effective or ineffective and that there is no proof the intervention is harmful.

Fact#2: Christie said that be believes people are born with a homosexual predisposition, despite the scientific studies and countless testimonies that indicate homosexual feelings are not inborn and therefore changeable.

Fact #3: Despite the many letters written by therapists and clients alike who gave testimony of the significant and authentic change in homosexual feelings they have witnessed, Christie signed the law even though there is not one documented case filed with the New Jersey board that governs therapist’s licensure that complains about any child or adult undergoing the “horrors” of these kinds of therapies that’s been repeated over and over by gay activists.

Fact #4: The governor failed to challenge the false allegations of activists who said they were tortured by SOCE at “conversion therapy camps” but were unable to provide any evidence to support such claims. Most notably was Transgender Brielle Goldani’s fabrications of being sent the fictitious “True Directions” camp, that we now know only exists in the Hollywood production starring Drag Queen RuPaul, and the half-dozen additional “conversion therapy” camps Troy Stevenson of Garden State Equality said existed in Ohio and Oklahoma. Stevenson promised to provide the names of these camps, but failed to deliver after repeated requests.

Fact #5: Christie said he had to side with the “experts” on this issue, yet, these so-called “experts” could not produce one scientific study documenting that SOCE is ineffective or harmful for adolescents, despite their claims. Christie had to have known that the outcomes of adolescents undergoing SOCE have not been studied, and therefore, any decision to promote or reject such an intervention would be premature. In the case where solid evidence is lacking, the responsible action is to refrain from making any judgement until the science can be produced.

In short, Christie said these things because he is either grossly politically motivated, or completely ignorant of sound evidence. Either way, is this the type of man who New Jersey wants as a governor? Is this the type of man who America wants in the office of President of the United States?

No doubt, the appropriate lawsuits will follow any day now. In the meantime, take some time to think about the child who, God forbid, becomes sexually abused by a same-sex predator and who develops homosexual feelings resulting from this. God help your child if you ever live in New Jersey or California. You won’t get any help from their governors or legislatures. What you will get is propaganda from gay-affirming therapists who are more than happy to follow the law and refuse to help your child reduce or eliminate their homosexual feelings.

If you’re interested, see the letter I faxed to Governor Christie some time ago. Ah, but maybe it doesn’t matter? After all, it’s only about children, not about politics.

David H. Pickup, M.A., LMFT, is the Vice-President of Voice of the Voiceless and holds a masters degree in psychology. He is licensed in California and Texas as a Marriage and Family Therapist. He is pursuing his doctorate in psychology at California Southern University in Los Angeles. Note: Portions of this article were contributed by Christopher Doyle, President and Co-Founder of Voice of the Voiceless. For more information, visit: www.VoiceoftheVoiceless.info

 


08-10-13

Honorable Governor Christie,

I am writing you to urge you to veto A3371. As a psychotherapist who is licensed in California And Texas, I would like to draw your attention to how destructive this bill will be to certain groups of children if you do not exorcise your power of veto. I am going to give you scientific and anecdotal evidence, which I believe will show you how insidiously destructive this bill will be to certain minors and their parents. I will also show you the grave intolerant political agenda that is behind this bill.

I am also writing you because I was a child who experienced sexual abuse by a young man when I was 5 years old. I know the horrific experiences of this first hand. Only one of the abuses that I experienced was the rise of homosexual feelings as a result of what this man did to me. I was born a heterosexual, so when I reached puberty around 13, I was severely repressed and confused concerning these issues. I didn’t have a therapist to help me deal with these homosexual feelings. My sense of masculinity was severely shamed and underdeveloped. I suffered greatly for many years. Later in life I experienced the transformative power of authentic Reparative Therapy. I am now a Reparative Therapist who is helping children and adults from all over the country. See www.davidpickuplmft.com. I have an MA in psychology, and I am obtaining my doctorate at California Southern University. I have been a Reparative Therapist for 7 years. I was trained under the direction of Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, the creator of Reparative Therapy. After you read the evidence against A3371, I will tell you of specifically how Reparative Therapy helped me and how this kind of therapy is of extraordinary benefit to minors. I do realize this letter is lengthy. However, if you desire to truly look at the evidence, I believe it will be well worth your attention. By the way, every detail of the harmful things this bill calls SOCE is certainly not authentic Reparative Therapy.

Before I give you the evidence, I’d like to tell you that this letter is not being sent to demean, discriminate against, or mistreat Gay persons. It might surprise you to know that I have Gay minor clients, and I do not coerce them or treat them in any other way but with unconditional positive regard. They know what I do, and they trust me as we work on other issues besides sexuality.

(Next were many pages of reference scientific and anecdotal evidence.)

Finally…

Governor Christie, with all due respect, you and the New Jersey state legislature will become unintentionally complicit in the furtherance of sexual abuse of children if these minors can not receive sound, science-based, effective therapy for unwanted homosexual feelings that have arisen because of their same-sex sexual abuse. Can you imagine a wonderful little boy or adolescent coming into my therapy office in tears while telling me he’s hurt and confused because of the homosexual feelings he’s feeling because of his sexual abuse, and that all I can tell him is, “I can’t help you reduce or eliminate your homosexual feelings because it’s against the law, and you’ll just have to try your best in life.” Can you imagine?

SOCE therapists are on record acknowledging that there have been some incidents of coercive incidents in therapy sessions, and individual cases of harm done happen in the world in any form of therapy for any issue. However, since no one can be privy to everything that happens in all sessions, banning SOCE as a whole would actually be harmful to minor clients and their parents. I would highly recommend instead that before a bill be proposed or signed into law that further study be done first to represent sound, effective research in order to develop more specific controls. I believe the state owes this to minor clients and their parents who truly benefit by sound therapy and SOCE.

Additionally, the harmful coercive therapies the bills mention are interventions that were practiced 40-100 years ago. They are no longer used because they are indeed ineffective or outright harmful, and no therapist I know of would ever use this in today’s world. If there are abuses of any kind now, they should be handled on a case-by-case basis, not by banning therapy that truly works for minors. In fact, licensing boards are already fully prepared to do just this since their ethics codes and related laws for this are already in place.

In my opinion, based on my years of experience, there will be no question that if you let this bill pass  into law by trying to help one group of children, another group of children will be irreparably harmed if they are not allowed the kind of SOCE that helps this particular population.

I can tell you first hand that I greatly benefited from authentic Reparative Therapy and so have my clients, some of whom are minors. I’ve been using the term “authentic” because there is clearly a difference between the real thing and the many forms of other therapies that do not work, and/or are facilitated by shaming and coercive therapists as individuals. Reparative Therapy (created by Dr. Joseph Nicolosi) truly accomplishes the following:

It eliminates any and all shame for having homosexual feelings no matter how they arose. It allows boys and men to experience a decrease in depression and anxiety. It allows them to grow into great self-confidence in their own genders. It raises self-esteem. It demonstrates how boys and men can get their emotional need for affirmation, approval and affection from other males; needs that they simply didn’t experience in their early lives. And…this results in a spontaneous, automatic lessening or dissipation of their homosexual feelings. In short, they maximize their heterosexual potential. Please look at www.voices-of-change.org for testimonials of authentic, therapeutic change that the media, the APA and Gay therapists are trying to keep from you at all costs. The political agenda of these persons and associations is to force all of America into only one view of homosexuality for all people. This is not really about helping children, especially when you consider there has not been one ethical complaint taken before any licensing board in the past few decades about Reparative Therapy. I’m sure there have been individual incidents of wrongdoing. However, this is a problem that is not germane to Reparative Therapy per se. Why now are people coming forward? Because this is actually about a political agenda.

Thank you for your consideration. I would be honored to answer any questions you may have about these issues. I hope that you and your assistants will read this evidence with an open mind, and at least consider both sides of this historic issue. Professionals, children, parents, legislatures and politicians are certainly aware of the historical significance of bill A3371. I humbly ask you to please regard your own legacy in history when making your decision regarding this bill.

David H. Pickup, M.A., LMFT

New Jersey Senate Committee Advances ‘Conversion’ Therapy Ban Based on False Testimony

On Monday, March 18, 2013, the New Jersey Senate Health, Human Services, and Senior Citizens Committee held a three-hour hearing on a bill that would take away the rights of minors who experience unwanted same-sex attraction (SSA) to receive therapy from licensed mental health professionals.

Representatives from gay rights organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign, Equality New Jersey, and the Trevor Project, as well as several mental health associations, testified at length about the so-called dangers of “conversion therapy” (this is a pejorative term coined by activists to demean therapies that assist individuals who experience unwanted SSA).

When Brielle Goldani, a transgendered woman from Toms River, New Jersey, stated she was tortured at an Ohio-based conversion therapy camp in 1997, the hearing turned very serious.

“Twice a week I was hooked up to electrodes on my hands,” she said. “I, a child, was shocked repeatedly by people who had my parent’s permission to torture me.” Goldani, now 29, claims that she had no rights when her parents sent her away as a teenager. She claims that the torture occurred at conversion camp called True Directions. “This is nothing more than legalized child abuse,” claimed Goldani at the hearing.

Having attended and testified at the hearing myself, I was shocked and horrified to hear about such abuse. As a former homosexual and practitioner of Sexual Orientation Change Effort (SOCE) therapy, I had never heard of such inhumane treatment, except from anti-ex-gay activists who often claim that SOCE employs such barbaric methods. So I tracked down Goldani and talked to her on the phone to find out more information.

Goldani claims that an Assemblies of God Church in Columbus, Ohio ran the True Directions conversion therapy camp:

“There were 12 boys, and 12 girls. The first Sunday I was there, I was forced to sit in their church service, which was nothing but hate speech. Then, on Monday, the heavier therapy began. We were forced to masturbate to heterosexual images and soft-core pornography, such as Sport Illustrated swimsuit models. Twice a week, my hands were hooked up to electrodes for two hours at a time while we were shown positive images such as a nuclear family, a female with children, a male construction worker, and a female receptionist. I was also subjected to forced IV injections twice a week for two hours each while being made to watch negative images of what they didn’t approve of…the injections made me vomit uncontrollably. Every Friday and Saturday evening, we were forced to go on ‘flirting dates’ where a camp counselor coached us on how to talk to the opposite sex romantically…we were also given uniforms to wear, black pants and white shirts for boys, black skirts and white blouses for girls.”

Sounds pretty horrible, right? What ‘Christian’ church or therapist would use such barbaric, violent treatments? In a phone interview, Rev. John Wooton, Superintendent of the Ohio Council of Assembly of God Churches, denied that any such program exists or has ever existed in their church, as Goldani claimed. But if such an abusive camp did exist, surely a participant or parent would have filed ethics complaints long ago. Surely, the Ohio legal authorities would have put an end to this abuse!

According to the office of the Ohio Secretary of State and Attorney General, no such camp called True Directions has ever existed. In fact, the only trace of this camp is from a 1999 film titled But I’m a Cheerleader, starring RuPaul. In the film, the main character is suspected of being a lesbian by her family, who then proceeds to send her to a “conversion therapy” camp called True Directions. Throughout the course of the film, two disgruntled gay men encourage the campers to rebel against the program and discover their true identities as gays and lesbians. The final scene of the film shows the main character’s parents attending a Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG) meeting to accept their daughter’s homosexuality.

Dr. Elton Moose, a licensed counselor who has been working in Springfield, Ohio said in a written statement: “I have been in this business for 24 years and have not heard of this camp . . . these types of shock therapy accusations have been around for many years, but I have not actually known a practice that has used this therapy.”

Goldani, who works as a peer specialist and mental health counselor, claims that the church she attended as a teenager in New Jersey, The Church in Brielle, paid for her to attend the camp, which lasted a month and-a-half. Goldani also claims to have been counseled by the pastor of the church on staff at the time, which included talking, reading Bible verses, and listening to statistics about HIV/AIDS.

Their current leader, Pastor Lou LaFauzia, whose church is affiliated with the Reformed Church of America said in a phone interview, “We love everyone regardless of sexual orientation . . . I can say that this would have never happened at this church, and I can’t imagine any church members in 1997 who would do this. It’s outlandish!”

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie stated this week that he wasn’t sure if he would sign such a bill should it pass the legislature. “I’m of two minds just on this stuff in general. Number one, I think there should be lots of deference given to parents on raising their children. I don’t — this is a general philosophy, not to his bill — generally philosophically, on bills that restrict parents’ ability to make decisions on how to care for their children, I’m generally a skeptic of those bills. Now, there can always be exceptions to those rules and this bill may be one of them,” commented Governor Christie.

But what if the governor heard witnesses such as Goldani, who claimed to be tortured at the hands of SOCE? Wouldn’t that tend to sway his decision? When I informed the office of Sen. Joseph Vitale, who chaired Monday’s committee, of this fabricated testimony, they gave no immediate comment but said they would investigate the matter. The office of New Jersey Republican Senator Diane Allen, who also sits on the committee, appeared more concerned, but explained that the Senator was out of the office today and no official comment would be given on her behalf.

While it’s not immediately clear whether the proposed bill, which passed out of committee with a vote of 7-1 (with two abstentions), will be held up due to this fabricated testimony, the New Jersey Legislature and Governor Christie should be very cautious about the testimony of every witness that testified in support of the proposed ban.

A version of this article was originally published at: http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/transgendered-woman-lies-about-therapy-torture/

Christopher Doyle, M.A., is the director of the International Healing Foundation and founder of Voice of the Voiceless, which defends the rights of clients with unwanted SSA, former homosexuals and their families. For more information, visit: www.voiceofthevoiceless.info