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Living Waters.. What do you say?

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Anthony Venn-Brown
 
Joined in 2005
August 18, 2008, 19:34

I really wish that we could somehow distil and offer all the really GOOD things from a program like Living Waters, and repackage them, to communicate to young GLBTI Christians how they can live and grow within their sexuality, instead of being covered in shame.


Possibly its called F2B. πŸ˜€ πŸ˜€ πŸ˜€



lloydjones
 
Joined in 2006
August 18, 2008, 21:03

Great reply Orfeo. Good point, I am learning that there is a lot of good that comes out of Living waters… a safe space where people understand.


Anthony, hey I can only ask him if he would want to. Thankyou for offering, I will bring it up in conversation one time soon, see what he says on the thought.



orfeo
 
Joined in 2007
August 18, 2008, 22:38

I really wish that we could somehow distil and offer all the really GOOD things from a program like Living Waters, and repackage them, to communicate to young GLBTI Christians how they can live and grow within their sexuality, instead of being covered in shame.


Possibly its called F2B. πŸ˜€ πŸ˜€ πŸ˜€


Yeah, I was kind of going there actually! Just chose to leave the door open…



Anthony Venn-Brown
 
Joined in 2005
August 19, 2008, 00:00

it should be noted…..and I’ve said many times publicly…..the ex-gay ministry leaders who have stated that heterosexuality is not the goal of their ministry should be applauded for their honesty…and not creating a false hope in people who come to them. It has been this hope in the past that has contributed to the suicides and attempts. I have an email from one guy who attempted suicide 3 times whilst going through the living waters program and developed such mental health issues that he ended up on a pension. He actually got quite miraculously healed reading my book and is now a well adjusted gay christian who is back in the work force.


its been a common experience of most though that their sexual orientation caused then a lot of angst as it was how they experienced their sexual addiction and abuse. The addiction and abuse was unhealthy of course….the orientation doesn’t have to be……as so many of us have now found out.


If you view yourself as sick because you are attracted to the same sex instead of the opposite sex however……you will be sick….psychologically and emotionally.



wazzah
 
Joined in 2006
August 27, 2008, 02:08

Hi Lloyd,


My name is Warren, I very infrequently post on this but want to more often.


You mentioned in your post that you mum attended Choices. Is that programme still going in Sydney? I went through that myself in 1997/98 and know how confused that programme made me and I still feel the affects of some of it. I bought so many books while I was in the group but a few years ago bundled them all up and presented them to Anthony to help him in his research to refute the so called “teachings”.


That was a rather cathartic moment for me, I felt like I was shedding myself of some of the baggage I was holding on to from Choices and various experiences in the church.


Good luck in discussing things further with your Dad. I now live in England but I know a good Anglican church in Sydney that is very accepting and if your dad is from that tradition it may be able to help him understand more as well.


Take care.


Warren



Anthony Venn-Brown
 
Joined in 2005
August 27, 2008, 06:49

hi Warren……nice to hear from you.


thanks for the books……and there were a lot of them werent there. I didn’t realize it was such a cathartic moment…..and here I was thinking you were just getting rid of some junk before you took off for the UK. πŸ˜† πŸ˜† πŸ˜†


You wouldn’t recognise our Sydney group these days. We regularly get over 30 at our monthly chapter meeting and 10-12 at youth group.


We have lots that have come along……got sorted out…..and taken off as well…..such as yourself.



lloydjones
 
Joined in 2006
August 27, 2008, 10:04

Hey Warren


Thanks for your input!


I am unsure if it is still going, but I am sure it is, since I know a guy who has gone a fair few times recently. My Mum went through it in 2004/2005. She got very hurt from it, and her counsellor who she saw, ran it, and said some very damaging things to her that she struggles with to this day, telling her she will die a very lonely and unhappy woman if she makes the wrong choice. She still hears those voices in her head.


My Dad is from a Congregational background, like myself. I think he will get there one day, with understanding more. I just see it like… this is something that is totally making him challenge 50 years of his faith, so dont expect him to come around after 3 years of thinking about it. It took me 21 years to BEGIN to work through. So I just try approach it like that if it gets me down.

πŸ™‚


Good to hear you have come a long way, I can imagine shedding yourself of those books/past would have been very liberating.



Anthony Venn-Brown
 
Joined in 2005
August 27, 2008, 12:54

as far as I know the Choices program was closed down a couple of years ago when the Pink Broadsheet and Andrew Potts started to do some investigative journalism on it.


God I amaze myself sometimes at the wealth of info stored in this little head. πŸ˜† πŸ˜† πŸ˜†



Anthony Venn-Brown
 
Joined in 2005
August 28, 2008, 00:37

Andrew Potts…..now with SSO just sent me this article from the SMH


PRAISE BE (SMH “Stay in Touch” April 19 2006)


The website read as though Jack could have learnt how to give up Ennis – for just $200 and 15 weeks – right here in Sydney – curing his homosexuality and scrapping the entire thesis of Brokeback Mountain.


That is the price that gays who don’t want to be gay – or straights addicted to sex, who want a rest – can pay to enrol in Choices, a program run by Southern Community Welfare.


It’s designed to help “any person desiring to cease his or her same-sex behaviour”. It’s also for sexually addicted heterosexuals, transsexuals and “the emotionally dependent or over-attached person who may or may not be sexually active”. (We’re not sure if they can help those who exhibit more than one of those traits).


For 15 weeks, those who are to be fixed attend three-hour meetings on Thursday nights in the Sutherland Shire, for worship, discussion and a video (we’re not sure what kind).


“The two ingredients for success,” the website says, “are said to be tenacity and perseverance on the one hand, and the support of others who believe in the efforts [on] the other.”


The Caringbah Anglican Church helps run the course, and the organisation is supported by the Gymea Baptist Church.


Asked what he’d do if someone brought along $200 and asked to be made straight in 15 weeks, the managing director, Anthony Sell, said he’d send them away.


“I don’t think anyone can go out and say in 15 weeks we can knock this over.” But that’s exactly how its website read to us. “That’s really interesting feedback for us,” he said.


There were no guarantees, and some attendees may even decide to gaily carry on being gay. “We try and provide a place where they can openly talk about it,” he said.



Anthony Venn-Brown
 
Joined in 2005
August 28, 2008, 00:38

and also his article below.


Southerly change

By Andrew M. Potts (THE PINK BROAD – Issue 19, Tuesday 9 May, 2006)


A community counselling centre in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire that has strong links to the Anglican Church has come under fire from both politicians and representatives of the mental health field for running a program that attempts to ‘cure’ gay men and lesbians of their sexuality.


On 18 April the Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Stay In Touch’ section reported that Southern Community Welfare, a Sutherland area counselling centre, was running the program.


However, what the Herald failed to reveal at that time was that Southern Community Welfare intends to bring adult victims of child sexual abuse and heterosexual “sex addicts” into the same group sessions alongside people struggling to accept their sexuality.


Southern Community Welfare (SCW) states on its website http://www.scw.org.au that being a victim of sexual abuse as a child is a “related problem” to adult homosexuality.


SCW also lists Fuji Xerox Australia, the Cronulla Leagues Club, the Sutherland Districts Trade Union Club, Miranda Rotary Club, and the Suicide Safety Network amongst its past and present sponsors.


However, since some of these organisations had been contacted by The Pink Broad, SCW has taken down its website and updated it in order to distance its sponsors from its GLBTI focused activities, suggesting that some are already uncomfortable about the program.


The website also previously listed NSW Health as a sponsor but it has now been revealed that NSW Government funding was only ever provided to the organisation for a post suicide counselling program in 2003, which means that until the website was changed, SCW had effectively been falsely claiming a relationship with NSW Health, a period of over two years.


Participants in the program, called “Choices”, pay $200 for a 15 week course, meeting one night a week for three hours which includes a group discussion, prayer session and the screening of a video.


Whether participants who failed to see results from the program would have their fees refunded was not specified.


It is believed that one group is already underway, having begun in February and another is scheduled to start in July.


The program is operating with the assistance of the Caringbah Anglican Church and the Church’s Reverend Steven Fifer.


Southern Community Welfare has been in operation since 1995 and describes itself as “a private, non-profit, harm prevention organisation” providing “therapeutic services to families and individuals”, specialising in the areas of suicide prevention, eating disorders, depression, child abuse and family and parenting issues.


Though SCW employs a number of registered psychologists and psychiatrists, many of its senior staff and board are members of local Evangelical and Pentacostal churches and others have been active in para-religious groups such as Campus Crusade For Christ.


One board member, Karl Fasse, is the Senior Pastor at Gymea Baptist Church and the Director of the Christian Media Project.


Fasse was also the host of the Christian Television Australia produced Face To Face program which screened nationally on Channel 10 in 2003.


Despite including religious overtones in at least some of its therapeutic activities, SCW does not present itself as a Christian counselling centre and targets its services at the community at large, though many of its staff have qualifications in Christian Counseling from church affiliated institutions.


Programs which attempt to change a person’s sexuality, technically refered to as “reparative” or “conversion” therapies, are held to be unethical by the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Australian Association of Social Workers, and the Australian Psychological Society which recommends its members to refrain from such practices.


The Society authored a position paper in June 2000 which stated that “The validity, efficacy and ethics of clinical attempts to change an individual’s sexual orientation have been challenged… they are at odds with the scientific position of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which has maintained, since 1973, that homosexuality per se is not a mental disorder… Reparative therapists have not produced any rigorous scientific research to substantiate their claims of a cure.”


The APS position paper goes on to say that the literature used by such practicioners “ignores the social stigma in motivating efforts to cure homosexuality” and “actively stigmatises homosexuality as well …while neglecting any potential risk to patients.”


The American Psychiatric Association takes the position that “the potential risks of reparative therapy are great, including depression, anxiety and self destructive behaviour” and could “reinforce self hatred already experienced by the patient”.


The APA also makes the complaint that many patients in such programs “are inaccurately told that homosexuals are lonely, unhappy individuals who never achieve acceptance or satisfaction… nor are alternative approaches to dealing with the effects of societal stigmatization discussed.”


In light of this, the APA has for years opposed any therapy based on the assumption that people need to change their sexuality.


In regards to the intention of Southern Community Welfare to place adult victims of child sexual abuse and others in the same group sessions as gays and lesbians wanting to change their sexuality, a qualified social worker and trauma specialist The Pink Broad spoke to said, “In a professional sense, I could not think of a more dangerous combination. Having the adult survivors of child sexual abuse, so-called “sex addicts” and GLBT people in the same group is absolutely counter-therapeutic. Adult survivors, most particularly, have specific needs including safety, trust and containment that could be violated in such a setting… For many GLBT people who continue to be pressured to ‘straighten up’, the Choices program might seem as seductive as it is simplistic. However, trying to repress one’s sexuality can only cause immense psychological harm. Trying to deny your essential being often leads to self-loathing, which in turn aggravates the risk of self harm and suicidal behaviours. The exponentially higher suicide rate amongst young gay men, for example, is directly attributable to the issue of repression.”


There is also the issue that, as many of the GLBT persons who would attend such a program would still be in the closet, group counselling in front of heterosexual sex addicts would effectively force them to out themselves.


The trauma counsellor who spoke to The Pink Broad said that the sort of rhetoric being put forward by SCW relating sexual abuse as a child to adult homosexuality reminded him of the views of ex-gay proponents such as Dr David Kyle Foster, an American preacher currently touring churches across Australia who “lays claim to being sexually abused as his reason for becoming homosexual. His conversion back to ‘straightness’ has lead to a ministry that incorporates that aspect of Christianity which sadly demonises all forms of sexual behaviour. In that regard, and quite perversely, the sexual abuse of children is seen as indistinguishable from the consensual sex between two adult males.”


He also said this view wrongly infers that “homosexuality is a product of stunted psychosexual development.”


As for SCW down playing its religious affiliations, he said “there is nothing inherently wrong with religious organisations providing theraputic services. What they must do, if applicable, is make it abundantly clear when and if their religious beliefs will intrude into what should be non-discriminatory practice.”


NSW state politician and Greens Member of the Legislative Council, Lee Rhiannon (pictured), also had grave concerns about the “Choices” program operating in her home state.


“While the Greens acknowledge that some people struggle with their sexuality, that is where our agreement with the Southern Community Welfare (SWC) Group ends,” she told The Pink Broad.


“The SCW website implies that same sex attraction and transgender issues are wrong and that the solution is to steer the patient towards heterosexuality. Clearly the Greens believe that view is outdated and offensive. More broadly, counselling gays and lesbians who are said to want to “change” their sexuality is fraught with problems. This approach suggests that homosexuality is in some way “wrong”, when this is not the case. This type of counselling can also be used to coerce people to “change” their sexuality in the short term with terrible long term consequences. The religious right is on the rise and they clearly have a homophobic agenda so such pressure may well be happening.”


Rhiannon was also troubled by SCW’s apparent attempts to link child sexual abuse to adult homosexuality.


“This is an old agenda and one that is quite wrong,” she said. “Evidence shows that the vast majority of child sex abuse is heterosexual and occurs within families. It is not appropriate to provide counselling of adult victims of child sexual abuse at the same time as gays and lesbians are counselled.”, and feared that this could “add to the belief that (the two were) synonymous.”


When contacted by The Pink Broad, Southern Community Welfare’s Director, Anthony Sell, defended the Choices program but said it made up just one percent of its activities and SCW had sought no outside funding for the program. Additionally, he said the program attracted less than ten members a year.


“We are dismayed such a small enterprise would attract such attention”, he told The Pink Broad.


Mr Sell also denied that the service offered counselling or attempts to ‘cure’ gays and lesbians.


“We provide a service so that people with Christian and other religious faiths, who need an opportunity to speak confidentially about the conflicts they face, can do so,” he said.


“Their sexuality is their life and our aim is to provide an environment where any difficulty and/or confusion is explored to provide support and enable people to make their own life choices.”


Mr Sell refused to provide details as to who would be leading the Choices groups or what their professional qualifications might be.


The description of the Choices program on the SCW website does not mention Christianity or any other religion.


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