i went to a psychologyst to help me resolve my feelings cause i didnt understand why i was in love with women in a honest form, of course it was denial and i hated the psychologist for not being confrontational with me, even after i gave her a discourse on please be open with what you think and dont hide for me anything that you are thinking. She asked me a lot about my family, i told her that when i was little my father beated me and i hated him, meanwhile my grandmother was extremely free and i did lots of disorder and stupid things and she and my aunts never set boundaries for me. I know im special in a creative or abstract sort of way, im also left handed, but i want to know about the realities of the oedipus complex, about the negative oedipus, only for my thirst of truth, cause if im gay because of the structure of my family, i dont want that to happen to other kids. i suffered and didnt love my dad when i was a kid, i knew that wasnt normal because my friends idolized their dads. I always have thought that the bad relationship that i had with my dad when i was a baby and a little boy was the cause for me being gay, even before i knew what psychoanalysis means. For me, being gay is a product of my sociocultural condition, how can i discard that for sure, why did the biology escentialist hypotesis won? maybe because being gay from birth is more polliticaly correct?
Idk dude, i never had a father figure, even though i have a dad and step dad, i never look up to them, my role model is my mom, i live in a broken home currently, parents don't communicate well, and it's like i feel constrained by their force. It could be, but as i recall, i was never into women in the first place. I feel like i have to look to myself as a role model, so maybe nfs. I have had my share of family problems, but i dont know if it affects sexual orientation
I had asked a psychologist once if she thought being gay was a product of one's childhood (i.e. absent father, sexual/physical abuse, etc), her opinion was that people are born gay. I tend to agree with her. Something for thought - there are plenty of gay couples out there with straight children. I think it's really just a natural attraction that someone is born with, not one's childhood.
I know all the research on this issue. It's not the case at all that your family made you gay. Because many boys who grow up to be gay are different as young children, ( they may not fall into the typical stereotype of acting like a boy) fathers frequently withdraw their attention and affection from these boys. Even if the rejection is subtle, it has a huge impact on boys as they grow up. If the fathers rejection is extreme, as in the case of abuse, the effects on the developing boy can be serious; in particular, these kids will feel great shame and self-hatred, which is result of how they have been treated. There is also extremely strong research that shows that people's sexuality is determined from birth, although social factors affect how it develops. It's not just because of being politically correct that people say sexuality is determined biologically; there is hard evidence over decades of research to back this up. I'm not sure what you know about psychoanalysis. Freud founded this field in the late 1890s. One of his principal theories was called the Oedipus Complex; simply stated, he believed that young children had unconscious sexual feelings towards their mothers and as they progressed in age toward 5-6 years, this feelings caused them to feel guilt and to be in conflict with their fathers, who they saw as a rival. According to Freud, how one resolves his Oedipus Complex is significant to the development of his individual personality. The negative Oedipus complex, was a theory that was an alternative track hypothesized for gay boys; instead of the mother, they fixate sexually on the father as a young boy. Over time, how these feelings, which become deeply unconscious, are managed will affect the development of ones sense of self ---------- Post added 8th Jun 2013 at 06:04 PM ---------- Not sure what that psychologist actually said to you.
I don't think your upbringing can make you gay but it can leave you so confused about your sexuality that you can think you are. Generally these are people that hate the opposite sex and were brought up being forced to believe the opposite sex is who they would need to be.. to be valued by their parents. Many times who were are is buried under a lot of nonsense we have to peel away to get to the truth.
No one really knows, OP. I know straight guys, who are married and have kids, who had violent fathers. It's not a 100% predictor of a boy's/man's sexual preference. Like arturoenrico said, what happens when someone is growing up shapes their sexual functioning too. I think it is largely an inherited personality trait/temperament that then, when combined with life experience, determines the spectrum of sexuality. About therapists, I don't know what to say. I've gone to therapy and I've had some ones I didn't like. I found a list on the internet that listed signs of questionable therapy. Some of them definitely trespassed some of these boundaries. Finding the right one who knows how to deal with sexual identity expertly and with empathy is hard. And, you can get someone who is good at this, and have no chemistry with them. It's a real tough search. For me, personally, I've stopped going because of this. Mostly, they don't know how to deal with the sexuality issues. I had a friend who went through sexual abuse and has PTSD, and feels the same way about continuing with therapy. This person hasn't had much luck with therapists and hasn't seen much improvement over many sessions with several different therapists.
I'll just throw this into the mix: essentially all of Freud's ideas have been proven wrong. Especially the Oedipus Complex. Don't trust anything the man wrote - he wasn't doing science. For example, the Oedipus Complex basically says that boys are naturally sexually attracted to their moms. Now, today we know that: The human psychology is the result of evolution via natural selection. Incest is a universal taboo (it's not cultural, it's evolved) because it causes bad genetic issues in offspring. Therefore, the Oedipus Complex goes against tons of evidence about human evolution and sexuality. The more you know! (Yes, I go on similar diatribes every time anyone mentions Freud and Oedipus.)
I don't think that your parents determine if you are gay, and I don't think it is genetic related. I think it is your own opinion and your own decisions that make you gay or straight. For example, I have been presumably straight all my life until this year, and I had a good upbringing, stable father figure and mother. It's one's choice between sexuality , and parents don't decide whether you are straight or gay.
thanks everyone for the answers, as for my therapy, i actually went to the shrink first when i still couldnt get rid of the girl attractions and felt them to be real, he wanted me to take a roschar test but i ended up reading the answers online and a paper that dismissed it because of it interpretativeness. the psychologist that was supposed to take the test that day was the one that i ended up in therapy, because i asked her. The first question from her was if i was sure that i was confortable with a female therapist, because i could change to a male one because of my "project of life" i said no, therapist sex is not important but absolute honesty is. i said to her that I wanted that the therapist gave me full disclosure on what was thinking and what was the basis for the answers, what was the theoric background and the reasoning. she only mentioned the word oedipus, asked me a lot about early stuff, my father there was appearing as an important factor, but when i confronted her with the question about if she was asking about my father because that was the cause of my homosexuality therefore she was with the sociocultural hypothesis and not the biological one, She said anything could be, that she wasnt orthodox in the theorical aspect, but she never mentioned anything concrete, always deflecting the answers to me like a mirror. I felt that she wanted to grab money every week as i was traveling the world to finally arrive in the same place, to realize the obvious, like a movie where i was the protagonist and she was only supporting me but not telling me what to do. Stupid bitch i was better off by myself if she didnt have the balls to be open about everything. Im not saying EVERY gay man has the oedipus background (dont take the want to have sex with mom part so literally because its something that is not expressed in language, its a pure feeling) but because i fit perfectly with the classic oedipus model, perhaps my family didnt know as a system how to handle me while i was growing, extreme autoritarism (hit me hard) and extreme permisiviness (extreme love) mixed with a rebelious intellectual inborn with a tendecy to drift into my own imaginary worlds that took me far from social reality, and the possibility of real male bonding with my dad in a cultural normal way, because i always had to do the untypical thing and my father hates being anormal (all before 5 years). Im just saying, what if my father had not engaged in a confrontation with me, what if the women in my family would have been capable of setting boundaries could i be straight? it doesnt matter for me, but it makes me think if parents should know how to handle the important process of the child mind so there is more chance that the kid ends up straight. I dont know of any story of a normal dad, normal mom, normal family which has a masculine boy as a son, that has normal friends, participates in sports, watches sports, doesnt have queer interests and turns out to be gay. if it was genetic, we should see more gay guys that look normal and have normal interests and normal backgrounds. but typically, something went wrong with the caregiving when the boy was little, in a boy who the drive to always do normal stuff never existed or it was replaced by oposition and imagination because of the pain of authority. but because a man always want to be respected by other men, eroticism turns out to be the answer to the boy problem of feeling left out in the manhood context. And gay parents having straight kids is totally possible, but again with this train of thought ,it could be argued that because they treated the boy well he gained confidence/masculinty so he wasnt worried and eroticism went to the other side, to the dark side that for a normal boy, are the girls.
Me and my brother were both raised by the same loving father, in the exact same kind of way. My brother is 100% straight, I am at the very least bi (not sure if gay yet). The ONLY thing possible with me growing up to lean this way was I was always told by my dad that girls would lead to trouble if I wasn't smart about it. Meaning, at the age of 13, I really didn't need a gf yet. My brother was raised the same way, he's had several gf in his life, I've had 2....maybe 3 but one was a stupid high school thing lol. Point is, if I was straight but confused by my dad, I would have said "fuck you" to him and went out and got a gf, but truth of the matter is, during this time, I was always more attracted to the guys, although I do like girls in some capacity as well. And don't kid yourself, I spent a lot of time blaming my dad for me turning out bi/gay cause of him telling me to stay away from girls. But when I sit and evaluate it honestly, that had no bearing on it at all.
Most probably - yes, cause your story is very common, and I have the same exact background, and a lot of gays do too. It's just a very hush hush kind of subject amongst gays who are politically savvy. The thing is they don't like advertising that, because that encourages people to blame you for the situation, and imply you can do something about it, and promotes stigma, and the gay movement is built around the premise that there is nothing that needs to be rectified about sexuality, kind of like what some deaf people are going for right now. "Special", not "disabled". It is a very uncomfortable thing to face the idea that your parents fucked you up that way, most parents do not want to be held responsible, and there is no clear way to rectify the situation anyways, so it would be hard forgiving your parents, when they probably will blame you for being gay when it was their fault. It's like having fetal alcohol syndrome, except unlike the syndrome, the reasons are a lot less solidified and as simple as abstaining from a substance while pregnant (and even then people still do it). As for therapists, it is a very difficult job because telling someone you are crazy is not that simple unfortunately, modern people prefer labels that require pills, that is what makes a more lucrative industry, so psycho-analyzing changing your habits is not 'in' economically, having a pill for everything is. Behavioral change is EXTREMELY difficult. They have to keep the money rolling, so they are sales people first..medical professionals second. Look the simple fact is...there is a lot of extreme and quite variable sexualities that never see the day of light on modern television, and I find it difficult seeing people try to make genetics a sole explanation for these sexualities. Besides...even if it is 'biology' (I am confident it is not)...it does not matter...pedophilia is vilified as the most evil thing in existence when it has the same exact 'immutability' of homosexuality, would it matter if it was genetic or not? I do wish the LGBT would stop vilifying people investigating changing sexuality, because in my opinion more control/technology/defying 'nature's will/fuckups', makes life a LOT more convenient, than trying to come up with ideologies that justifies nature's haphazardness.
