When Self-Disgust is Taught

The acidity in your stomach bubbles like a failed middle school science experiment. A headache settles in and won’t let go. Clothes pile up on the bedroom floor because everything you try on suddenly feels “wrong”… or worse, “gross.”

A thought slips into your mind when someone looks at you just a little too long, “If they really knew me… would they be disgusted?”

For many survivors of conversion therapy, this isn’t just low self-esteem. It’s conditioning. It’s the echo of religious-based psychological and sexual abuse that has taken root not just in thoughts but in the body itself.

How Disgust Gets Weaponized

Conversion therapy practitioners understand something very important about human psychology: disgust is powerful.

It’s fast. It’s visceral. And once it’s learned, it can stick around for a very long time to control a person’s behaviors.

Rather than helping people explore and understand themselves, conversion therapy uses behavioral conditioning to teach people disgust towards their own sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. Conversion Therapy practitioners will exploit methods from psychology to condition a disgust response from their victims (clients, parishioners, family members, etc.). Over time, that disgust becomes a familiar reflex that you never chose.

Photo by Yulia Petrovskaya on Unsplash

The Psychology Behind the Harm

Operant conditioning and classical conditioning create the unwanted reflex of disgust for conversion therapy survivors:

• Operant conditioning teaches behavior through consequences by rewarding what is considered acceptable and punishing what is not.

• Classical conditioning creates automatic emotional responses by pairing something neutral (like your identity) with something unpleasant.

One particularly harmful form of classical conditioning is aversion therapy, where a person is repeatedly exposed to something negative in connection with who they are.

What Behavioral Conditioning from Conversion Therapy Can Look Like

Conversion therapy practitioners lack boundaries so their practices are not contained to the environment where they are practicing. They look to outstretch their practices into every part of the conversion therapy survivor’s life. Behavioral conditioning of conversion therapy survivors show up in everyday interactions within environments that the conversion therapy practitioners are able to have either partial or full control of because of conversion therapy sympathizers’ enabling.

There may be a wide variety of how operant and classical conditioning are delivered by conversion therapy practitioners.

Operant conditioning examples:

• Being denied leadership roles because of your sexual orientation or gender identity

• Public humiliation, such as being forced to confess same-sex attraction in a non-affirming environment

• Being required to live a life of celibacy to not lose social, financial, occupational, and/or religious capital

Classical conditioning examples:

• Hearing “gross” or disgusted reactions when expressing your identity

• Mocking or shaming responses to gender expression

• Being forced to date the opposite-sex when only attracted to the same-sex

• Prescribing by the conversion therapy practitioner to masturbate while watching opposite-sex pornography to condition a physical arousal response to watching erotic material of the opposite-sex

Over time, these repeated experiences can train the brain and body to respond with shame, anxiety, panic, or disgust even in the absence of the original environment.

That’s not a personal failure. It’s conditioning doing exactly what it was designed to do. And these conversion therapy practitioners are fully aware of this.

Why It Feels So Hard to “Just Move On”

When disgust has been conditioned this way, it doesn’t simply disappear with insight or willpower.

It becomes automatic. It might be flinching away from someone you find attractive, but you do so because they’re the same-sex. Perhaps it’s a wave of nausea that comes over you when someone you’re attracted to of the same-sex tells you that they think you’re hot. Or maybe it’s a harsh, inner voice telling you that you’re destined to be alone forever that feels like the truth.

Many conversion therapy survivors were told that these responses were “the work of the Holy Spirit.” After having left these non-affirming religious environments, conversion therapy survivors may interpret the responses differently. They may call it their intuition. Even when conversion therapy survivors consciously reject the beliefs they were taught, they may still pull away from their authentic selves to avoid discomfort which originated from conversion therapy.

How Healing Happens: Reversing the Conditioning

The same principles that were used to create harm can also be used to heal once therapeutic rapport (client-therapist trust) has been well-established.

One of the most effective approaches is Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP).

ERP works by gently and repeatedly helping you face what you’ve been taught to fear or feel disgust toward all while not engaging in the old avoidance or self-punishing patterns of response.

For this context, it might mean:

• Going on a date with someone you find attraction (who’s the same sex) even though you feel like you’re going to vomit

• Starting PrEP to prepare for sexual activity with the same-sex

• Interrupting yourself when being self-deprecating and replacing the phrase with a positive, self-validating statement

Over repetition to exposing yourself to the discomfort of confronting conversion therapy, something powerful happens: your mind learns to stop rejecting parts of you that were once perceived as disgusting or threatening because of conversion therapy’s behavioral conditioning.

The disgust response dissipates. The anxiety fades. And the capacity to receive love from yourself and others opens up.

What Recovery Really Looks Like

ERP retrains your nervous system, one small step at a time.

It can feel uncomfortable, especially in the beginning. And that makes sense! You’re undoing patterns that may have been reinforced over months or years.

But those patterns are not permanent.

The marks left by conversion therapy can feel like tattoos, but even tattoos fade. And with social affirmation, positive dating and sexual experiences, and gentleness towards yourself during the healing process, your relationship with yourself can change in ways that once felt impossible.

A Final Thought

If you are a survivor of conversion therapy, the disgust you feel is not who you are.

It’s something that was conditioned in you by people who hadn’t learned to accept themselves.

And anything that was learned can be unlearned.