Interestingly, I've written quite a lot about Living Waters Ministries over the years. They first came to my attention after they partnered with several Catholic dioceses around the United States to train clergy and lay leaders in their form of reparative therapy or whatever they wish to call it.

After one of my articles appeared in an LGBTQ publication with national reach, a Living Waters press representative contacted my editor with a "correction," insisting Living Waters does not do conversion therapy because they do not promise to remove same-sex attraction from people.

But from everything I can find in their published material, I don't believe that's true. Sure, they don't explicitly promise it in every case, but it seems to me that the entire underpinning of their operation is that they can turn gay people straight or mostly straight.

I don't know how to characterize that other than as conversion therapy. It saddens me that even in states like Colorado that have outlawed conversion therapy for youth, Living Waters gets a pass. Because they position themselves as a religious organization doing religious counseling, the laws generally do not apply to them.

Your experiences seem to demonstrate the harm that their "counseling" does. Treating healthy sexual attraction and loving relationships like addiction is, in my opinion, a harmful perversion of data-driven mental-health counseling techniques.

I won't go into details, but I could cite several examples of young people who committed suicide after or while participating in Living Waters conversion-therapy programs. This is not surprising. Data indicates that the more a person sincerely wishes to change their sexual attractions in conversion therapy, the more likely they are to suffer serious mental-health consequences.