I WAS 24 YEARS OLD. It was 1989, and I had just moved from my hometown in Canada. I had come out to my Catholic family two years earlier, and since then our relationship had escalated from constant criticism to outright rejection. Isolated and confused, I sought professional help in the person of psychiatrist “Dr. Alfonzo.” In turmoil, I asked this doctor how I could best come to terms with my homosexuality as well as with the psychological effects of the sexual abuse I had endured as a child.
Alfonzo seemed to offer hope in a form of treatment based on Primal Therapy, the goal of which was to erase the mental imprints of my biological parents via intense, primal sessions, and then to replace these with the “healthy imprints” of surrogate parents.
Within the first few months, Alfonzo told me that I would never be happy as a homosexual, presented me with conflicting causation theories, and directed me to release my anger and to feel my pain in an effort to “unlearn the error” of my homosexuality. If I dared say that I really was gay, Alfonzo became enraged and threatened to throw me out of therapy. If I persisted in arguing with him, his loud, accented voice would overshadow my own. He would point his finger down at me in a menacing and condescending manner, cocking his head to one side. I would know enough to stop talking immediately—or else. No one had the last word when it came to Alfonzo. The end result was that my already low self-esteem plummeted.
