[.ca] Coming Out Straight: Understanding and Healing Homosexuality (ISBN 1886939772)

Good NOT Great:
There was a lot of information that was very good, but I had gone through some of the "holding therapy", with a therapist several years ago, which is discribed in this book. This type of therapy proved to be extremely damaging to my healing and only solidified distrust in other people. This book is good, but not great. I would recommend this book, but would also recommend an open mind and other reading. I also found that telling of other men's sexual adventures was not congruant with the authors insistance that we not read about other men's sexual behaviors. I wanted more info about how to heal. I felt very confortable with some of the healing processes the book suggested and finally put it down in favor of other readings on the subject.

Extreme Makeovers:
This would be a great book if it eliminated the negativity about gayness and lesbianism. There is nothing wrong with an individual who is homosexual and decides not to live their life in an affirmative gay or lesbian way. However, the author makes global and generalized negative and patronizing judgments about gays and lesbians saying there is "nothing affirmative" about it. That is his judgment only. The truth is that millions of openly gay men and lesbians are leading out and proud lives in successful relationships and healthy self-esteem about their gender, sexuality and overall psychology. The author, and those doing the type of work, should stick to only those individuals who are of homosexual orientation and do not want to live as gays and lesbians. Leave those who are of homosexual orientation and DO want to be out of this work. This does not apply to them. There is nothing wrong with an individual who decides not to "live" outwardly their inner orientation. They deserve a chance at living heterosexually if that is what they want. But to say that "all" of those with a homosexual orientation "should" not fulfill it is about hate, not about hope. Most appalling is Dr. Laura Schlessinger's forward written during the same time she was denying her negativity about gays and lesbians in her attempts to keep her talk show on television. This book lacks integrity from the beginning.

Aversion Therapy... righttt:
This book is a sham\o.\c ... Sure people can be confused about their sexuality and then decide they're not hetero, but not for most gay people. Cohen is part of the reason many gay people aren't happy and feel shunned by society and church. He's doing a diservice to the community in general by publishing such blatently biased material. I wish there were an option for 0 stars. I would have picked it.

Adding despair to an already broken life:
Please readers, if you are confused about your sexuality and especially if driven by your faith (I am, Catholic here), then do yourself a favor and do not read this book. My wife recently discovered the depth of my homosexuality and has been desperate to find something to confirm her belief that homosexuality is disordered and therefore must be healed. Richard Cohen can only offer pain and despair. I know, I have it. Try attempting to find a therapist even familiar with this process. Unless you happen to live in the Washington DC area and can afford Mr. Cohen's fees for his medicine, you are out of luck. Otherwise, he does offer "group telephone" therapy sessions, if you'd like. For those of us in the hinterlands of the planet Earth that's about all you're going to be able to find. So you find yourself a hetero straight male, tell him your sorry tales of your orientation and your desires, he then wants to hang with you and be your best friend for the next three years and help you 'discover you God-given' heterosexuality. Really. First off I'd like to see how many hetero males would really truely like to have a friendship with a gay man, oh and on occasion, hold him in his arms on a sofa like a little boy, cuddling him, loving him, and allowing the gay man to cry in his arms. Please. Where do I sign up for that one?

ABUSED CONFUSED ANXIETY RIDDEN AND SELF-DESTRUCTIVE:
I strongly recommend this book for anyone seeking to find help with mood disorders, feelings of emptiness or loneliness, self-esteem issues, identity issues, reoccurring unresolved anger, any type of addiction, troubling relationship, boundary or trust issues. Excellent compliments to this book are: The Angry Heart: Overcoming Borderline and Addictive Disorders by Joseph Santoro and Ronald Cohen; The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman and Robert Pressman; Emotional Blackmail: When People in Your Life Use Fear, Obligation and Guilt to Manipulate You by Susan Forward and Donna Frazier; Understanding the Borderline Mother: Helping Her Children Transcend the Intense, Unpredictable and Volatile Relationship by Christine Ann Lawson; Living with the Passive-Aggressive Man by Scott Wetzler; Why Is It Always About You?: The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism by Sandy Hotchkiss and James Masterson; Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited by Sam Vaknin and Lidija Rangelovska (Editor); Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown-Up's Guide to Getting Over Narcissistic Parents by Nina Brown; Treating Attachment Disorders: From Theory to Therapy by Karl Heinz Brisch and Kenneth Kronenberg; Toxic Coworkers: How to Deal with Dysfunctional People on the Job by Alan Cavaiola and Neil Lavender. And if you want to pursue the subject even further, you may be interested in reading The Narcissistic / Borderline Couple: A Psychoanalytic Perspective On Marital Treatment