CALGARY—Wesley Jensen says the four years following his conversion therapy were the lowest point of his life.

After several sessions with a Mormon church-sponsored counsellor in southern Alberta, Jensen dated women and did everything he could to be “straight” in his early adult years.

He became intensely depressed and borderline suicidal, and started taking antidepressants and anxiety medication.

“I always felt like there was something wrong with me,” Jensen said. “I felt very depressed, very anxious, very upset with myself for not being able to be what my parents and my religion told me I should be.”

Conversion therapy is a controversial pseudo-scientific practice adopted by some religions that aims to change a person’s sexual orientation from gay or bisexual to heterosexual. Men, women and children who have been subjected to it have called conversion therapy damaging, demeaning and insidious.

The Canadian Psychological Association and the College of Alberta Psychologists (CAP) oppose the practice, with CAP deputy registrar Troy Janzen saying scientific research “generally does not support that there is any efficacy in conversion or reparative therapy” and some cases have shown “negative outcomes.”

Read more:

Psychiatrist who treated patients for their homosexuality had sex with male patients in his office

Alberta LGBTQ group launches federal petition to ban conversion therapy

‘Critical’ legislation being drawn up to ban conversion therapy in Alberta, advocate says

In September, NDP MLA Nicole Goehring announced she will introduce a bill during the fall legislative sitting that seeks to ban conversion therapy in the province. Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia, several U.S. states have outlawed the practice.

But one former conversion therapy group leader-in-training worries the plan will hardly make a difference.

“The ban is obviously needed, but just banning conversion therapy is like a small drop in a very large puddle,” said Jonathan Brower, a 33-year-old gay man who said he went through conversion therapy in Calgary’s evangelical church system.

The problem starts with the language describing the practice, Brower said.

Journey Canada, the Protestant Christian organization that runs the groups Brower participated in (formerly called Living Waters), never refers to its work as conversion therapy or reparative therapy.

During three separate courses as a Living Waters participant and one as a leader-in-training, Brower said the group would use phrases like sexual healing, reaching sexual wholeness, and repairing sexual brokenness.

Journey Calgary program co-ordinator Graeme Lauber said in an email that the group does not try to change anyone’s sexual orientation, describing Journey as a community of people who “submit our lives and behaviour to what we believe the Bible has to say to us.” Lauber said he experiences homosexual desires, but chooses not to act on them because his commitment to his faith is more important to him.

Brower said the proposed ban in its current form could make it all too easy for Journey Canada to continue its practices, simply by declaring it doesn’t do conversion therapy.

“The teachers (group leaders) aren’t counsellors, but they’re counselling people with their ideas, like ‘This is what worked for me, this is a way to approach that struggle, here are some Bible verses,’” he said.

Program literature that Brower used as far back as 2005 doesn’t reference conversion therapy (though a 2005-06 binder of course instructions does refer to the “ex-gay movement”).

In an email, Goehring said she met with Alberta’s Health Minister Sarah Hoffman about what she might include in the bill before it’s introduced, and is still gathering feedback to determine the precise wording. “It’s important that we get this right,” she said.

Brower first volunteered to join a Living Waters therapy group, held at First Alliance Church in Calgary, in 2005, when he was 20 years old. It was a year-long program where a group of participants met every Thursday.

In 2009, he enrolled in a five-month condensed version of the course, and in 2010, Living Waters tapped Brower for a week-long intensive course at the Entheos Retreat Centre west of Calgary because group leaders told him he had leadership potential, he said.

Brower called the process “insidious.”

He said it felt like a support group made up Christians desperately trying to have a better relationship with God.

But they are told by Journey Canada group leaders that their sexuality is getting in the way of that relationship, Brower said.

In Brower’s case, he was 12 years old when he first began hearing church leaders and pastors preach that, as a gay boy, he’d be excluded from a relationship with God if he gave in to his desires and attractions.

“What’s interesting about the whole system of damage that’s set up is you start going to church as a kid, and if you’re queer, you hear from the pulpit and you hear from Sunday school that gay is not OK,” he said.

“You’re programmed from a very young age to try to heal that or get help with that.”

That’s why he sought out Living Waters, believing the more he knew and used its course material, “the more chance there is I’ll be able to have some healing.”

Looking back, Brower said he was “fairly deluded” to hold that belief.

In January 2011, he began training to become a group leader, shadowing a Living Waters senior director as he led a group therapy class in Calgary. Most of the participants were young adults, he said.

By April that year, he’d had enough.

“That’s when I was like, ‘I can’t do this. It’s just so damaging,’” he said.

Pam Rocker, a gay Christian woman who works as a consultant with Calgary churches to help them be inclusive and affirming for LGBTQ congregants, described the sessions as “psychological brainwashing” because Journey frames same-sex attraction and being gay only as sexual behaviours, not as one’s identity.

Her work has brought her in direct contact with queer youth and young adults who have gone through and have left Journey’s programs damaged, she said.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“In an environment where you already feel different and the concept of hell and all those things are being used against you, it’s really easy to villainize yourself,” she said.

Rocker said that when Journey frames a person’s gay identity as only about sexual acts, “they totally invalidate romance or feelings of partnership or any other sort of intimacy, which is strategic because it feeds into your shame … you think, ‘This isn’t a valid thing, it’s just a behaviour I have to modify,’ not only to be accepted by the group, but to be accepted by God.”

Jensen said he fully supports the ban on conversion therapy.

He didn’t dare come out to his strict Mormon family in Taber until he was 18, when he took what little money he had and moved to Calgary with his boyfriend.

When they broke up, he had no choice but to go back home. His parents told him he could move back only if he was celibate and went through the church’s “repentance process.”

“I didn’t have anywhere to go. So I bit the bullet and dealt with it,” Jensen said.

Questions to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were referred to head office in Salt Lake City, Utah. Spokesperson Eric Hawkins said in an emailed statement that the church denounces “any therapy that subjects an individual to abusive practices.”

“We hope those who experience same-sex attraction find compassion and understanding from family members, professional counsellors and church members,” Hawkins said.

Jensen said his counsellor taught him cognitive and behaviour modification therapy strategies for intervening when he had homosexual thoughts over several months.

He said the counsellor told him he was not gay but had become “infatuated with strong male influences” and sexualized them in his mind because he had a weak relationship with his father.

After the sessions, he had to tell the bishop in detail about his sexual thoughts and behaviours.

“It was a very demeaning, very humiliating process,” he said.

Jensen’s counsellor, Dave Shirley, has worked for LDS Family Services in Alberta since 1991.

When reached by StarMetro, Shirley maintained he did not know what conversion therapy was and could not recall specific cases, including Jensen’s.

“When people are out of my mind, out of sight and the case is closed, my mind goes blank,” Shirley said. “I can’t recall the case. I can’t recall what I did. I can’t recall anything of that nature.”

The College of Alberta Psychologists confirmed Shirley is not registered with them. Counsellors are not required to have any formal accreditation in Alberta.

Jensen eventually told his parents he could “no longer live a lie,” and moved away and legally removed himself from the church.

He said he still knows men in the LDS church who are gay or bisexual, but hide it publicly, in some cases marrying women and adopting children but having same-sex affairs on the side.

“There are people who will deny themselves their true personality their whole life because of the influence of the church,” he said.

Today, he works as an educational assistant in Lethbridge, where he spent two years supervising a Gay-Straight Alliance club and has heard from kids whose parents and churches are still trying to force them into conversion therapy.

“I believe it is incredibly harmful psychologically and emotionally to people. I believe in the separation of church and state, but I believe the government has an obligation to prevent religions from doing harmful things to their congregations,” he said.

Taber Equality Alliance co-chair Jayce Wilson, who left the Mormon church after coming out as transgender at age 32 and receiving little support, also backs the ban.

Wilson said one of her friends was “run out of town” by co-workers in the church and other queer friends have been mistreated.

“I know what it’s like to be queer — or, I’m trans — and feel completely hopeless or helpless to do anything about it, and then to have people turn around and say, ‘You don’t exist, you’re not valid, here go pray some more, go read your Scriptures, go do this, this, and this and God will make you better,’” Wilson said.

“I tried that for the first 32 years of my life and it didn’t help. It didn’t fix anything. I’m still the way I am.”

Correction - November 7, 2018 - This story has been corrected from an earlier version which mischaracterized the participants of a January 2011 Living Waters group therapy class. The students were in fact young adults, not teenagers.

Read more about: