Counsel Like the Savior: Sexual Identity Matthew 19:4-6 Part 1

What do you say when your kid says, “I’m wondering if I could be bi-sexual?”

Whether you are a parent or a counselor, we’ll discuss some remarkable mental health scriptures which prepare you to say the things Jesus would say and help the way Jesus would help.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Dr. Tracy Hogan McMillan. If you are listening to this as part of your Come Follow Me study, today I’m going to apply Matthew chapter 19.

 You may have noticed that the last five podcasts in the happiness ladder were about “How to Counsel Like the Savior.” This was a skill I felt inspired to develop this year on my pastoral counseling mission in Chile, South America. Whether you are a parent or a counselor, we’ll discuss some remarkable mental health scriptures which prepare you to say the things Jesus would say and help the way Jesus would help.

.What do you say when your kid says, “I’m wondering if I could be bi-sexual?”

Today we are going to describe one young woman's experience with pressure from her high school friends to be bi-sexual. In my previous podcast you met Peyton, my 15-year-old client in Florida. Now, her personal identity is disguised so just the important bits are true. Last podcast, she was worried about her ability to make the volleyball team called the Falcons. Good news: after all her hard work and effort she made the team. Bad news, the team captain told her that everyone on the team was bisexual, and if she wanted to really make the team, she had to date girls. So we started on the 4Ws. That stands for worries, wisdom, word, and why. The first W is Worries or the pain, the problem, the loss. I like to write these down as a list. Then I am showing her I care about what she's going through. You might not agree with what she’s saying, that’s okay. Get her top three or four areas of anguish written down. 

#1: Worries: She said, “When I heard the team captain say I had to be bi, I felt anxious and confused. I’ve always pictured getting married to a Timothée Chalamet doppelganger (and he’s an actor from Dune, Willy Wonka) in the temple (of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) and having three kids and a horse. I always tend my little nephew, and he’s so adorable, I just want to eat him up. I’d love to be a mom. I watch my mom and my dad, and they are so happy. I want to be like them. I want to wait to have sex, so not now and not with a girl or a guy. 

“But you know how much I need friends, so I need this volleyball team. A lot of the popular girls are bisexual at our school. Their emoji flags and instagram bios or facebook posts are bi- or transgender. It seems like they get more attention from being bisexual than straight. Girls date girls and then they switch and date guys. Sometimes I think ‘What would it hurt to just try it? Just make out with a girl so I could stay on the team? Besides,  It’s so much easier to talk to girls.  It’s so much easier to feel close to girls.’

“When my step-brother molested me, it was so sick. I felt so helpless. I felt terrible, and now I don’t even like guys, and some days I think I never want to see another joystick as long as I live. I got so depressed I was suicidal. I ended up in the hospital for 2 weeks. Maybe I don’t want to be with a guy. Maybe I’m broke and I can’t ever love a guy. Boys my age are idiots and say really stupid things to me. In 7th grade, I heard a guy telling his friend I was flat as a pancake. I cried for 3 days. In 8th grade I finally got boobs and now these stupid boys won’t stop teasing me. They think it’s really funny to grab my butt in the hall at school, and I get  embarrassed then I get mad and I start to feel that same creepy sick feeling.”

So I let her know that I was really listening and I summarized for her:

“There’s part of you that wants to experiment with being bi-sexual. 1) It’s super trendy for young women to identify as bi-sexual or transgender. 2) It could help have the benefits of the Falcon Volleyball team. 

“Did I get that right?”

“Yes, but you forgot about the boys being jerks so I feel so confused about ever being able to love a guy.”

I said, “Oh yes, that boys range from idiots to monsters so it's hard to picture marriage to one.”  

She nodded.

I continued with my summary. “You said you were confused about who to love. I’m wondering if your confusion means that because your testosterone won’t kick in till your late twenties, relationships are not really a sexual thing for you at this time. Perhaps like most women your age, relationships are built on an emotional connection, and boys objectify you, so with girls that’s so much easier. Part of you still remembers how awful you felt when your step-brother put you through that trauma. Part of you wonders if you could ever be attracted to a guy again. But there’s another side that has these goals: to love a man and get married in the temple and have beautiful babies.This sounds like a tremendous battle inside.”

  Now you may wonder as her parent or her counselor, “What can I do to help her fight this battle?” and the answer is help her move from the midbrain where the emotions are spinning to the frontal cortex, the executive control center. You do this with facts and wisdom. You will feel when the time is right, you’ve summarized and reflected, and she’s taking a breath in this chunk of her loss and pain and worries, and you say, “Let’s slow this down and come up with some logic on the worries you’ve just told me.”

. #2: Wisdom: “Let’s throw some wisdom at this problem..  What logic comes to your mind about your situation?  

She said, “Well the first wisdom I think of is bi-sexual is the popular thing to do.  Sometimes popular is fun, other times the popular thing to do is a disaster. Then popular usually means ‘not okay with God’.”

I said, “So true. In a Gallup poll in 2012 it was found that 3.5% of adults identified as LGBTQ+ but now this year the rate is 7.6% or double.”  

She said, “Hmmm. Well last time I looked I can’t marry a girl in the temple. So kissing them might not be a part of God’s plan.”

I said, “Good logic. Here's an actual quote on that one: ‘...the experience of same-sex attraction is a complex reality for many people. The attraction itself is not a sin but acting on it is. Even though individuals do not choose to have such attractions, they do choose how to respond to them. With love and understanding, the Church reaches out to all God’s children, including [those with same-sex attraction].’”  (Ballard, M Russell, quoting from “Love One Another: A Discussion on Same-Sex Attraction,” from mormonsandgays.org in “The Lord Needs You Now!” Ensign, Sept. 2015, 29).

“So how does that quote apply to you?”

She said, “He loves me, even if I choose to be attracted to girls, but I shouldn’t have sex.”

I said, “Yes and there are women who feel bi-sexual or same-gender attracted in this church and choose to follow the Savior by not acting on their attraction. Wow, what a sacrifice. If they wanted marriage and family, that sounds extremely lonely, difficult and painful.” 

She said, “But I don’t think that will happen to me. I think maybe I could go back and be attracted to guys someday, get married, have a family, it’s just a thing in high school, you know.  Oh, I don’t know if I am even attracted to girls that much. It’s so confusing.”  

I said, “Okay, yes, you sound perplexed and bewildered because it’s part of you that is attracted to girls. A fact is that more than half of LGBT+ people are bi and women are the biggest part of that. Let's talk about why many girls your age might feel more confused about their gender identity than boys do.

“Fact: Men have 7-8 times more testosterone. Men have a sexual peak at 19. Women have a sexual peak between 27 and 45.  

“This would mean a lot of 19-year-old men walk around strongly knowing who they are attracted to and wanting to be sexually active. You, at age 15, have 12 years to wait until you feel some of that desire. It’s easy for 15-year-old girls to feel confused, and wonder who they are attracted to, because their testosterone hasn’t kicked in. When we see a 19-year-old man who is having 7-8 times more testosterone and desire than a girl will ever have in her entire life, it can be such a baffling contrast. All that testosterone doesn’t give them the right to touch your butt. That’s so wrong, and it’s actually a form of sexual assault. But you can start to understand how a 17-year-old boy is a walking ball of testosterone while many young women are a walking ball of confusion.

“Fact: Many people in the world think it’s okay to just follow your feelings. They say, don’t deny your feelings! Find your authentic self! If you have a feeling of attraction for someone, anyone, just follow it. And that could be because many bi- and transgender people feel it might be genetic. I’ve had people who are strongly transgender tell me that they felt different from when they were very young. That they started feeling ‘something was different’ about age 5. So we wonder if there is something in their genes, nature, or biology. But, other researchers point to kind of a different reason, a social reason that LGBTQ+ has doubled in the last 12 years.

“Fact: I’m going to read this by Joe Carter (Carter, Joe, Why are young adults increasingly identifying as bisexual? The Gospel Coalition,org 2/2021) ‘Social contagion is the thesis that attitudes, beliefs, and behavior can spread through populations as if they were somehow infectious.’ ‘Simple exposure sometimes appears to be a sufficient condition for social transmission to occur,’ research psychologist Paul Marsden says. ‘This is the social contagion thesis; that sociocultural phenomena can spread through, and leap between, populations more like outbreaks of measles or chickenpox than through a process of rational choice.

Social contagion is the only adequate explanation for why so many younger people—especially women—claim to be bisexual or “bi-curious” in such a short time. The ubiquitous promotion by the mass media of bisexual female relationships has promoted the idea that such “experimentation” is a natural part of growing up female.’”

I asked her, “Peyton, how does that wisdom that bi-sexual might be a contagion apply to you?”

Peyton said “Like Covid, fer sure. Think of our role models. Can you name the bisexual actresses?”

“Umm,” I said, “I remember the scandal when Miley Cyrus, who starred on the Disney Channel, talked about it.”

Peyton said, “Oh, now there's so many: Dove Cameron, Renee Rapp, Megan Fox, Kristen Stewart, Lady Gaga, Halsey, Cardi B, Drew Barrymore, shall I keep going? It’s like a virus, they have to come out as trans in order to be a real star and for us to consider them friends of the LGBTQ+.”

 I said, “Fact: there are people who you can point to events in their life that experience in their life that change them from straight to something else. For instance, girls who start kissing girls and find they really like it. We call it conditioning. They learn same gender attraction from their experiences. For instance, a client I had suffered with a very critical and mean military dad who just yelled at him, ordered him around and didn't give him appropriate attention. He grew up with a desperate craving for love from his dad or male love. When he was 15, he started having this huge surge of testosterone. His hormones sexualized that craving for male love, and he found himself much more sexually attracted to men than women. He would lie in bed every night, and it may have started with thinking about women and masturbating, but eventually he only pictured sex with a man. Remember Elder Ballard said, that individuals do not choose to have such attractions…. It’s true he didn’t choose to have such a mean dad, but it could be argued, he did make a choice about masturbating and who he thought about. He followed his feelings and made a choice to go down that path. Each time he had that dopamine rush he was changing his brain just a little bit, until he said it would make him throw up to have to kiss a girl. Now he is completely gay. How might any of this fit with you?”

Peyton said, “I think I really wanted to be with a boy until I was molested. Kind of ruined it for me. I think I hate boys, at my age they are an ugly bunch. I can't trust them. They might act nice to start with, but that may be a trick to hurt me. Use me.”  

I said, “So sad that you’ve had these painful and miserable experiences with boys. It’s like we’ve talked before, kind of like being robbed. I’m so sorry.” 

She said, “Well, I get the don’t touch yourself speech in church  So I don’t. ”

I said, “Why might God ask everyone to wait until marriage? To be sexually abstinent?”

She said, “Gives you more time to think. Mature. Make good decisions.”

I said, “Yes, it’s so hard to make good decisions with hormones and dopamine raging.    Remember in science how you learned that dopamine is your feel good chemical. You will tend to want to repeat whatever gave you that dopamine high.  So if you got dopamine from vaping, you want more vaping. If you got dopamine from kissing someone of the same sex, you’ll seek more of those dopamine highs. If  you choose that path. The longer you are on the path, the more experiences with dopamine highs, the more permanent the change in your brain. Like someone who’s been vaping for 10 years.She always thought, I can stop whenever I want, I’m not addicted.1 in 10 adults can stop,or repent but her cravings will be so intense for years.                      

“Now it sounds like you are considering this bi-sexual path because 1) it’s trendy and 2) guys your age are gross. You had a traumatic experience with your step brother. You were conditioned to fear and dread sex because you were molested by your step-brother. He made it unhealthy.”

I said, “Okay, let's slow this way down. First, tell me what continuing to be attracted to girls looks like.”

She said, “Be comfortable on the Falcons team. More sexual experiences with girls. I donno know. Maybe after high school , a relationship with a woman, might even marry a woman and adopt kids.”

I said, “Okay, so what might the path of temple marriage look like?”

She said, “A lot of pain and agony now waiting for guys to grow up.”

I said, “Yes, a lot of abstinence for now but maybe,possibly, eventually, a psychologist would call it being conditioned. That means what is learned can be unlearned. You learned to hate boys, but does it make sense that it might be possible to have some healthy sexual and positive emotional experiences in your mind first, like communicating and laughing, then physically like hugging and kissing with a guy in order to trust him and feel attracted to them again? Does it make sense that the guys you’ve known at your age are idiots, and you might have to wait for guys to mature….like in their 20s. Returned missionary age. This is why our Prophet has asked everyone not to have sex until marriage. He’s really asking us to wait, wait, wait. The world says, ‘You are free to choose, happiness is found in following your feelings of attraction for whoever.’  God says, ‘You are free to choose, happiness is found in following the Savior.’ How does that wisdom apply to you?”

Peyton said, “Whoever I have dopamine experiences with, guys or girls, my brain will get addicted to that. I think I could like guys again, if I found one as hot as Timothee.”

“And he’d have to be unselfish to be attractive to you, mentally, spiritually, emotionally in order for you to get the dopamine highs to change your brain and be attracted.  So let's cover a few facts about identity. Fact: What does the world have planned for your sexual identity?”  

She said, “I need to experiment and find it.”

I said, “Yes: What has God planned for your sexual identity?”  

She said, “Eternal marriage and a family.”

I said, “It’s time for W#3, Word or words of God. Can you read Matthew 19 and apply it to yourself?”

She read “4 And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,

“5 And said, For this cause shall Peyton leave father and mother, and shall cleave to her husband: and they twain shall be one flesh?

“6 Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.”

 I asked her, “How does that apply to you?”

She said, “God has asked me to leave my home and cleave to my spouse.” 

I said, “Cleaving sounds like a spiritual, mental, emotional, not just a physical bonding. Does it make sense that if your number one identity is child of God and disciple of Jesus Christ that you would want to do whatever you need to do, seek whatever dopamine experience, and avoid others in order to feel comfortable with that plan?    

“Fact: There are many things that ruin the ability to cleave or bond. Bonding in marriage makes it beautifully intimate and happy. One bond killer is a pornography addiction. Another bond-killer is childhood abuse. I’ve seen marriages explode because one of the spouses had deep wounds from a terribly critical parent and could not love, could not develop secure attachment.” 

End of Part 1

Thank you all my dear friends for listening to Counsel like the Savior. Counsel like His Son. Help others on their way.