Hostility and anger grew in me toward all men. They just want their own gratification, regardless of how I feel. , I thought. No one could satisfy my insatiable need for love.

My inclination toward homosexuality began in the early years of my life. As a toddler, I remember sleeping in the attic on the third floor, alone and separated from the rest of the family. I felt terrified as I lay there screaming in the dark. I felt rejected, unloved and unwanted.

Most of the time my parents were out with their friends or traveling out of town. I was cared for by loving maids, but they did not gratify my insatiable need for the love and affection of my father and mother.

Starting about age nine, I experienced sexual harassment and abuse from several neighborhood boys. Hostility and anger grew in me towards all men. Sex is all men want from me, I thought. They just want their own gratification, regardless of how I feel.

When I was 18, my father committed suicide. His death dashed my hopes for closeness with him. I felt responsible for his death, but did not know why. My obsessive eating habits expanded to include smoking, alcohol abuse, sexual affairs with men, and continual partying.

At home I was forbidden to share my feelings or talk about painful matters. I could never tell my mother about my emotional needs: the turmoil I felt over my father's suicide, my fear when I was almost raped at age 19, my repulsion while witnessing a homosexual act that same year.

When I was 26, someone told me, "We try to do good things in order to please God, when all He wants to do is love us." I was overwhelmed with the realization of God's unconditional love. I turned the control of my life over to Jesus, and fell deeply in love with Him.

Two years later, I entered a convent to begin life as a nun. But as the superiors attempted to purge me of pride, vanity and worldly ways, I was stripped of my self-worth. I felt only conditional love from them, just as I'd felt when growing up. I retreated deeply into myself and began to hate those women intensely. Bitterness grew deeply inside me, and my distrust of other people grew.

During my year at the convent, I became good friends with one of the lay women who lived there. We kept in contact after I left and I quickly responded to her when she reached out to me emotionally and sexually, expressing concern for the confusion I was feeling. I had been shocked by the nuns' lack of love; I was confused about God and His ways. I teetered on the verge of a nervous breakdown. In addition to all this, I felt like I was going insane because I had responded to this woman's attention and entered into my first homosexual relationship.

I knew this kind of sexual involvement was not pleasing to God. With the help of a psychologist, I broke off the relationship. But his human insights could not effect the inward healing I needed.

Fourteen years later, I was in a church where the strong, controlling male leaders considered women to be inferior. Some of the married women were so passive that their own individuality was totally lost in their husband's identity. I was terrified to think this might be God's plan for marriage. I eventually left the church, enraged and seething with hatred for all men. My root of bitterness continued to grow. Soon I was again homosexually involved with another woman.

When that relationship eventually ended in turmoil, I felt ravaged, hopeless and alone. I tried to commit suicide but God miraculously intervened to save my life. He changed my heart in the weeks that followed. I received counseling from a husband and wife and repented of my homosexual behavior. I gradually understood that I struggled with wrong sexual desires because of the bitterness, rage and anger I carried towards my parents, significant peers and those in church leadership.

In order to break the control of these negative attitudes, I needed to forgive the people who had offended me. With my counselors, I gradually identified the foundational events in my life that affected my personality. These events I took to Jesus in prayer.

In prayer, I pictured the person who had offended me, the scene of the offense, and asked Jesus to come into the scene with us. I described what I saw and heard to my counselors. I allowed myself to feel what I would have felt at the age of the offense, and then poured out all my feelings and pain to Jesus.

Sometimes I had to acknowledge my own sinful responses to the rejections and hurts I had received, and ask Jesus to forgive me.

Even though I had forgiven my father at the time of my conversion 21 years before, during counseling I recognized there remained in me a deep, hidden hatred towards him. In prayer, I forgave him for being absent from my life and for deserting me through death. This act of forgiveness effected such a dramatic change that today, I can accept without fear men who are in authority over me.

It was not until I went through prayer counseling, where Jesus came and healed my attitudes towards early painful experiences, that I was set free from homosexual desires and fantasies. I had struggled on my own during the 14-year interval between my two homosexual relationships, between secular psychotherapy and prayer counseling. I also cried out to God in desperation many times to set me free from the homosexual desires.

I did not meet anyone during those years who knew how to pray for someone harboring bitterness. I did not know there was a connection between my bitterness and homosexual desires. My prayer counselors told me that Jesus could change my attitudes and set me free from the negative effects of my bitterness. They prayed continually, and Jesus has healed me, by removing all of the bitterness from my heart and replacing it with His peace and love and joy.

Studying the Bible has helped me discover who I am in Christ. I realize my identity comes from Him, not from another person. I was stripped of my identity by brokenness in my family and friendships as I grew up. I tried desperately to recover it from other women, to take on their feminine qualities, their identities. I tried to lose myself totally in the other women so I would feel a sense of completion.

As I have allowed myself to take on the character of Jesus Christ, I am discovering a beautiful, unique person emerging from deep within me. I can love myself as I accept God's unconditional love for me. My personality and attitudes are continually changing. I realize and accept more each day that other people love me too, that I am beautiful, and that I am fully a woman.

As my heart softens, I am better able to trust men and accept them as they are. I've started "connecting" with men again, opening up my inner person and feelings to them, allowing myself to be vulnerable. I've discovered that men can support me when I need them emotionally and they really can care about me personally. As I trust men, I am realizing they can and will interact with me as a person, rather than view me only as an object for their sexual gratification.

I'm discovering other aspects of my feminine identity through my relationships with men as they accept me the way I am, imperfect. I am comfortable with both men and women and I'm learning how to have "intimacy" without sexuality. I relate to women as friends and no longer need to cling to them for my emotional needs to be satisfied. And, most of all, I am comfortable with my womanhood.

When I let go of the bitterness, rage and anger in my life, my attractions began to change. I look forward to what lies ahead for me and I believe God has indicated that I will be married. I look to Him and trust Him to bring me and my future husband together, to meet each other at the appropriate time for each of us. My story does not have a final ending, because it is still in process.

"I rejoice that, at long last, I am fulfilling the character meaning of my name: Carrie-woman of God, strong and womanly."

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Updated: 13 July 2002