Newsletter #27: praying again
In this newsletter: a prayer podcast, from philosophy to business, reintegrative therapy, and more
Happy Tuesday! Here’s what’s in the newsletter today:
A season of piety (there’s an app for that)
A philosophy major in middle management
“Is he orthodox?”
What is “reintegrative therapy”?
Brief thoughts
What I’m reading: lots of psychology
A season of piety (there’s an app for that)
A few months ago, I was struck with an inclination towards piety. This happens from time to time. I find it embarrassing embarrassing, finding myself with friends how experiences of suffering draw my mind to the Cross. I tend to find pious types kind of annoying. And so I feel annoyance at myself when I start to become one of them. But here we are, with me trying to find a pathway to more prayer that won’t make me too intolerable to myself. If you, like me, find piety slightly embarrassing (and also usually annoying), I apologize for what will follow.
Part of the challenge for me at this stage of life is trying to find spiritual reading or meditations that won’t trigger my distrust of Christian celebrity and its tendency towards politicization, or my concerns about coming upon some unexpected manifestation of homophobia tucked into a reflection. Part of why I have loved the work of Sarah Ruden, and especially her translation of The Gospels, is that she comes from a very different faith tradition, the Quaker Movement. I don’t feel the same pressures to move towards one Catholic faction or another (or towards either liberal or conservative Christianity). And her expertise as a classicist tends to bring her focus towards questions and issues far away from today’s hottest controversies, even if she does consider biblical texts in light of contemporary concerns at times (such as in her great book Paul Among the Peoples). Through Ruden, I have been able to re-engage The Gospels more openly and with less fear and defensiveness.
I’ve recently felt a desire to engage daily in a practice of prayer and meditation. But I need space from opinions and commentary. One option is certainly the Liturgy of the Hours, but I also wanted more empty space. Fortunately, I found the Daily Lectio Divina podcast. It will feel familiar to anyone who has engaged in the practice of Lectio Divina, but it takes makes use of the sort of commentary one might find in a secular meditation. The speaker won’t comment on the text, but after a reading might invite the listener to reflect on a word that “jumps out in bold print or shimmers,” or to let go of any preconceived notions and just receive the text. The meditation is markedly open-ended, with lots of space for silence and reflection. (Of course, it’s also nicely compacted into 15 minutes or less, which is great for me in the morning before I start working.)
Anyways, if you’re looking for a practice of prayer but don’t want to run into unsavory commentary or need to give yourself space to become whatever kind of Christian you feel God is calling you to be, regardless of what others may think or say, this might be helpful for you too.
A philosophy major in middle management
Like many philosophy majors, I intended to pursue the life of the mind (professionally). Like many philosophy majors, I now work in tech. (More specifically, I’m in middle management at a tech company.)
At times, I have tried to justify this to myself by saying quietly, “At least I don’t work in finance. Or, even worse, ‘financial services.’” And then I hop on a call with my financial planner.
I sometimes wonder about my fellow philosophy majors, and if they feel haunted in the way that I sometimes do. If they too made their way into middle management and occasionally have private conversations with coworkers who studied Russian literature in college about how everyone in management thinks they’re so important, but maybe the truth is that what we are doing isn’t nearly as important as we think it is (in the grand scheme of things), and one day it will be forgotten, because maybe it should be.
Even so, I love my job.
“Is he orthodox?”
As many of you have probably noticed, I’m once again in a season of re-processing my relationship to various aspects of Catholicism, and especially my relationship to how “Church teaching” is presented in many Catholic communities. Last week’s post discussed the significance of the question, “Is he orthodox?”
If you want to take a look at some of my other writings on “orthodoxy,” Christian doctrine, and “Church teaching”:
Concerns about “orthodoxy” and about being a “good Catholic” have often played highly toxic roles in my life. My failures to recognize this have led to various personal disasters. At this point, I’m less interested in being a “good Catholic” and am more interested in becoming a better Catholic.
Actually, I think that in the past my concerns about being a “good Catholic” often prevented me from becoming better. At times, my intense focus on not doing “the bad thing” kept me from recognize things that were actually worse. Maybe I would have been better off caring less about “the bad thing” and giving myself space to make mistakes, to make new kinds of mistakes, so that I could somehow move past old ones.
What is “reintegrative therapy”?
Several months ago a journalist reached out for comment on “reintegrative therapy,” a psychological practice founded by Joseph Nicolosi, Jr. that uses a methodology to “resolve traumatic memories,” which can cause “significant increases in heterosexual attractions” and “significant decreases in homosexual attractions.” Joseph Nicolosi, Jr. is the founder and director of the Reintegrative Therapy Alliance, which seeks to promote this practice. (Nicolosi, Jr. is the son of Joseph Nicolosi, Sr., the founder of “reparative therapy” who is often viewed as the “father of conversion therapy.”)
It seeks to distinguish itself from “so-called ‘conversion therapy’” by having the clients “set their own therapy goals” and utilizing “evidence-based trauma methods which have been shown to trigger spontaneous sexuality changes as a byproduct.” But is it really that different from “conversion therapy”? And what do we make of its “evidence-backed” methodology?
When one digs into the materials promoted by the Reintegrative Therapy Alliance, the distinction between reintegrative therapy and conversion therapy starts to break down. On the RTA’s “Science” page, one can scroll down to and click a link to “learn more.” The link takes one to a 2009 paper by James E. Phelan, Neil Whitehead, and Philip M. Sutton published in the Journal of Human Sexuality. The paper is a report of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), an organization founded by Joseph Nicolosi, Jr. to promote “reparative therapy.” (A former officer and scientific officer of NARTH, George Rekers, was caught employing a male prostitute as a travel companion the year after the paper was published.) In fact, the Journal of Human Sexuality is not an independent academic journal, but was the publishing arm of NARTH until NARTH was rebranded as the Alliance for Therapeutic Choice and Scientific Integrity (ATCSI). Multiple ATCSI board members work under the supervision of Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, Jr.
To put in succinctly: the professional and academic credibility of Nicolosi’s reintegrative therapy methodology rests in the official publication of his father’s ex-gay organization. In this instance, “peer review” by the journal means: “I peered over the cubicle and gave a thumbs up.” The majority of the papers cited by the Reintegrative Therapy Alliance were also published in The Journal of Human Sexuality, a journal dedicated to promoting sexual orientation change efforts. And not only this. That 2009 paper was co-authored by Neil Whitehead, an earth scientist who held no qualifications in psychology. At that time, Whitehead’s only published article on homosexuality ended up being retracted because of issues with its methodology.
The Reintegrative Therapy Alliance states that its methodology is based in “peer-reviewed” research, but it’s important to understand what exactly “peer-reviewed” means. “Peer-reviewed” primarily means that the journal editors will send the paper manuscript to an identified “expert” to evaluate the quality of the paper’s research, writing, and conclusions. The actual quality of “peer review” varies significantly from journal to journal, however. For example, last year I was invited by a “peer reviewed” journal to review a manuscript on Aquinas and mid-twentieth century German law, something for which I am incredibly unqualified. I lack both the knowledge and the credentials to assess the academic quality of such a paper. The “peer review” process has been criticized in both academic and popular publications. To assess the quality of a scholarly journal or academic publication, one needs more than simply to know whether the journal was “peer-reviewed.”
Consider, for example, another publication promoted on the Reintegrative Therapy Alliance website, a “new peer-reviewed pilot study [that] documents Reintegrative Therapy’s effect on binge eating disorder.” The paper was published in the Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy (not to be confused with the journal Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice of the British Psychological Society). The Journal of Psychology & Psychotherapy is not affiliated with any academic or professional body. And the quality of the publication can be seen in the speed of review: review takes only 21 days. The time from processing a submission to actual publication is 45 days. By contrast, the average review of the publication which published my first academic article is three months, and publication of my article occurred almost a year after my submission. It’s also worth noting that the binge eating disorder “study,” by Nicolosi and a colleague involved only six participants over a course of twelve weeks.
Several factors indicate that the “research” cited and utilized by Nicolosi and other reparative and reintegration therapists lacks in quality. Many of them are questionable because:
Not all their citations reflect good research.
The authors in these networks tend to cite each other heavily.
They tend to be and cite review articles, rather than original research articles.
Reviewer selection criteria is not available on the publication’s website.
The publication is not affiliated with academic or professional institutions.
Acceptance/rejection rates are not available on its website.
The publication and article are not cited by other scholars (except for the tight networks of the publication’s community).
Of course, the reparative and reintegrative therapists may respond to some of the above criteria and respond: “We don’t meet these criteria, because the scholarly community has a political vendetta against us.” Even if this were true, such a statement simply underscores the lack of general scholarly credibility of the publication.
I have written previously on the need to move away from a focus on “conversion therapy” and to focus instead on the theories behind it. Behind sexual orientation change efforts, including both reparative therapy and reintegrative therapy, is a neo-Freudian theory holding that same-sex desires arise because of a wound or unmet need from childhood. This unproven (and unprovable) theory has become the basis of a myriad sexual orientation change efforts, which hold that resolving that wound or unmet need can result in a diminishment of same-sex desires and a development of opposite-sex desires. It has also become the basis of gaslighting clients, as I have discussed with former reparative therapy clients of both Bob Schuchts and Joseph Nicolosi, Sr. My issue is first and foremost with the theory that is hoisted upon vulnerable clients, and is only secondarily with the practices which arise out of that theory.
The Reintegrative Therapy Alliance distinguishes its practice from “conversion therapy” in the following way:
“It should be noted that APA’s Ethical Principle E protects clients’ rights to self-determination [11] and aims to enhance client autonomy. Limiting or interfering with client autonomy violates this basic principle. Reintegrative Therapists respect clients’ right to set their own therapy goals, and to have access to evidence-based trauma resolution methods which have been shown to trigger spontaneous sexuality changes as a byproduct— this distinction (among others) is another reason why Reintegrative Therapy cannot be categorized as so-called ‘conversion therapy.’”
It should be noted, however, that this distinction appears to be invented. Most of the men I know who went to “conversion therapy” went there willingly. What characterized “conversion therapy” was not coercion, but was the theory and practices behind it.
Brief thoughts
In lieu of tweeting, here are some brief thoughts I’ve collected recently…
I’m open to protesting events that sexualize children. For example, purity balls.
A confession: I haven’t been to confession in years. I think I’m ready to try going back, but I think I’ll need to develop a renewed relationship to the sacrament.
What I’m reading: lots of psychology
My current reads include “Us” by Terrence Real and “Wanting” by Luke Burgis. You can follow along with my current reads at Goodreads.
Now accepting submissions!
If you like what I’m doing here and want to join in this developing project, I’d love for you to submit an essay, poems, or a short story for consideration. You can learn more here.
Follow Along
And that’s all I have for you today. If you’re on social media, you’re welcome to also follow me at Twitter and on my Facebook page.