My Experience With Aversion Therapy

Navigating Sex-Offender Therapy

If you could take a “pedophilia-be-gone” pill, would you do it? What if it had potentially severe and unknown side-effects? How far would you go to change yourself? How far do you think someone else ought to be willing to go?

For nearly five years, I attended weekly, court-ordered group therapy for sex offenders. During that time, I participated in three different private-practice counseling programs. The second of these programs focused heavily on forcibly altering the sexual arousal patterns of its clients – essentially attempting to eliminate pedophilia or any other problematic sexual desires or interests. The lead therapist in that program claimed that if clients strictly adhered to certain practices, they could control and eliminate all “deviant arousal”, and so avoid re-offending – an otherwise purportedly inevitable fate. I was only in that particular therapy program for six months, but those months completely changed my life.

As I’ve written about before, when I was 18, I voluntarily confessed to sexually abusing my younger brother during my teens. The court appropriately charged and convicted me of the crime and sentenced me to five years of probation. For those who don’t know, probation essentially places someone under close supervision and restriction by the state, in lieu of a suspended prison sentence of the same length. If I had violated the conditions of my probation, I would have been sent back to the court, and a judge would have reinstated my five-year prison sentence. The state imposed numerous explicit restrictions on me as conditions of probation, but five of them are relevant here:

• “Have no contact with any female or male under the age of 18, unless authorized by probation officer.”
• “Consent to and cooperate with polygraphic examinations and penile plethysmographic assessments when deemed necessary by therapist and/or probation officer.”
• “Not possess or use at any time any type of pornography including, but not limited to written, telephonic, computer-based pictures, video tapes or audio tapes, or frequent establishments associated with the sex industry.”
• “Enter and complete a sex offender treatment program as directed by probation officer.”
• “Consent to, and cooperate with, any plan deemed necessary by probation officer and/or therapists to maintain and monitor offense-free behavior for the duration of the probation.”

Shortly after I started my five-year probation term, I also started attending a local sex-offender therapy program that my probation officer assigned to me. States in the U.S. contract these programs to work with clients who are on legal supervision, such as parole or probation. Like most sex-offender therapy programs, the first one I was in (which I will call Enterprise) structured its program around weekly group-sessions for the men involved. Although sometimes challenging, this was relatively good and helpful. I learned a great deal about the choices I had made over the years that brought me to the point of initiating sexual activities with my brother, the harm and trauma that sexual abuse can cause, and how to better recognize and control sexual impulsivity. I also started coming to terms with the distressing awareness that I had, for unknown reasons, experienced sexual attraction to children for much of my life. This attraction existed alongside my attraction to adult women, and, to a lesser extent, adult men. The coinciding fact that I never desired to dominate or sexually force myself on anyone, adult or child, somewhat softened the shame of this awareness. The very thought of doing so was revolting and horrifying.

After 16 months at Enterprise, my probation officer decided it was not adequately meeting my needs, and transferred me to a different program. With that, in August of 2015, I began my time as a client at a therapy program called The Center for Behavioral Intervention, or CBI. CBI was run by a man named Marshall Kirkpatrick, who was both the clinical director of the program, and the lead therapist. Although a few other therapists worked under him, he was unquestionably in charge. Like the first program I was in, being a client at CBI mainly consisted of weekly therapist-led group-sessions with eight to eleven other men, sitting in a circle of chairs together. Virtually all of us were on parole or probation for various sexual crimes.

For the first three months I attended CBI, Kirkpatrick placed me in an orientation and introduction group that he led. CBI routinely followed this practice, typically transferring clients to longer-term groups of the same size after two or three months. Kirkpatrick led a few of these longer-term groups as well, although the other therapists he employed led the majority of them. Notably, he did not appreciate when people questioned or criticized his perspective, which created an authoritarian atmosphere at CBI. He tolerated no resistance or deviation from his expectations, and swiftly shut down any clients who challenged him. I remember Kirkpatrick being impeccably calm and business-focused, sometimes soft-spoken, and occasionally warm. But there was also a hard edge to him, and he routinely treated his clients as though they were of a lesser social class, and generally untrustworthy. On several occasions I witnessed him bully clients who expressed even minor disagreement with him.

Minimal Arousal Conditioning

CBI structured its therapy program around a workbook titled The Road to Freedom[1] by John W. Morin, Ph.D., and Jill S. Levenson, MSW (now Ph.D). Central to this book was a practice called Minimal Arousal Conditioning (MAC). In short, MAC was a form of odor-based aversion therapy. It was intended to reduce targeted behaviors and desires through repeated experiences of pain and strong discomfort paired with thoughts of those behaviors. Morin and Levenson claimed that certain unhealthy desires and behaviors never arose organically; rather, various experiences had “conditioned” clients into finding them pleasurable. As I understand it, Minimal Arousal Conditioning in the form it was used in The Road to Freedom was originally developed by a man named Steve Jensen, MA[2]. Jensen was the founding director at The Center for Behavioral Intervention, and had been the lead therapist before retiring and passing the position onto his protege, Marshall Kirkpatrick. Both the authors of The Road to Freedom and Kirkpatrick were devout believers in the infallible efficacy of Minimal Arousal Conditioning to minimize deviant arousal / attraction, which The Road to Freedom defines in this way:

“Another way to talk about sex offending is with the words ‘sexual deviance.’ The word ‘deviance’ means ‘not normal.’ All of the thoughts, fantasies, plans, feelings and behaviors that surround your sex offending are sexually deviant. Anyone who is aroused by sexual assault is a sexually deviant person. If you are sexually turned on by children or by any other form of sexual assault you have a sexually deviant attraction. Like all sexual attractions, deviant attractions are a part of who you are. They have probably been with you for a long time and they will remain with you after you have stopped offending. This is why people say sex offending can not be ‘cured.’ You will learn, however, that your treatment will have a lot to do with how weak or strong your deviant attractions will be in the future.” (page 4)

The guiding principle at CBI was that clients had committed sexual crimes primarily because they had deviant arousal. Accordingly, attacking and eliminating deviant arousal was the most critical factor in preventing them from committing future sexual crimes. But rather than describe MAC at length myself, I think it will be most effective here to simply include photocopies of The Road to Freedom, chapter 3, describing what it was and how clients were intended to use it.

So, that’s what Minimal Arousal Conditioning is. Kirkpatrick knew the details of my case, and knew that I experienced pedophilia[3]. I want to emphasize again that my probation conditions explicitly required me to follow my therapist’s instructions. If I had refused to participate in this central aspect of the therapy program, my probation officer could have had me arrested for violating probation and petitioned the court to reinstate my suspended prison sentence. If I had attempted to cut corners, the polygraph tests I took every six months would have presumably picked up on it. I had previously spent most of three weeks in county jail after the state initially charged me with abusing my brother, and the experience was so wretched that I could not imagine enduring it for another five years. In other words, Kirkpatrick had me over a barrel. As a further condition of being a client at CBI, Kirkpatrick also required me to sign a statement saying I would not hold CBI or any therapist employed there liable for anything and would not file a lawsuit against them for any reason whatsoever.

I still remember the day I sat down and wrote out my initial scenario in preparation for doing MAC, although I have tried to forget. Kirkpatrick specified that the conditioning would be most effective if I tailored it specifically to my previous crimes. I don’t know what to say about writing it, except that it was utterly shameful. To write down in graphic, lewd detail, how I had molested my own brother. How I groomed him, what I saw, what we did together, and the exciting pleasure I had felt in the moment. I was writing child-abuse erotica about what I had done as a 15-year-old boy. I recall that Kirkpatrick told the introductory group that if law enforcement ever questioned us about why we possessed these potentially incriminating pieces of erotica, we should say we used them for our therapy and that our therapists had instructed us to write them. However, no one ever gave us written permission or instructions to possess child-abuse erotica, and hearsay doesn’t count for much in court. (I must also note here that my brother was still a minor at the time and never consented to having the graphic details of the abuse he experienced used to create erotica. Apparently, Kirkpatrick either never considered this or chose to dismiss it.)

The day after I reviewed my scenario script with Kirkpatrick, I bought some ammonia (diluted in water to a standard 5% solution), grabbed a small glass jar from a kitchen cabinet at home to pour some ammonia into, and went to my room to do the MAC procedure. Although The Road to Freedom instructed clients to “inhale deeply” with the ammonia fumes, Kirkpatrick had sensibly told the group to only inhale a little bit, just enough so that the fumes filled our nasal cavities. Even so, it was still intensely painful. Another change from the book that Kirkpatrick instructed was that we should not read all the way through the scenario, even if we could do so without feeling arousal. Instead, he instructed us to read only up to the point when it started to feel arousing during our first time doing the exercise, even later on after many repetitions.

This became my daily routine. Read through a small portion of the scenario, then sniff the ammonia fumes while focusing simultaneously on how arousing it felt (or had felt years ago when I abused my brother), and the pain I was feeling in the present. Then wait a moment, and repeat. Of course, I wasn’t only thinking about the combination of past arousal and present pain; there was inevitably much more to the picture. Every time I did the MAC exercise, both during it and for some time afterward, I was also thinking about how deeply I regretted what I had done years ago. The pain and shame I had caused for my brother and family were frequently on my mind, as well the possibility that I might commit another sexual crime in the future. My past selfishness and choices had led me to this point. Between doing Minimal Arousal Conditioning every day, and what I was learning each week in therapy as we progressed through The Road to Freedom, I increasingly saw it as my responsibility to do anything I had to in order to fix myself – to rid myself of deviant arousal.

With that in mind, I focused each day on making MAC as painful as I could withstand, by carefully maximizing the ratio of ammonia fumes to air that I was inhaling. On some occasions I had to pause the exercise when I became lightheaded and dizzy. While the authors of The Road to Freedom did advise clients not to make themselves sick, I also felt motivated to push myself as far as I could. With every repetition, I reminded myself that I needed this in order to eliminate my deviant arousal, make progress in the therapy program, and be a safer person. I had molested a child, and so I believed I deserved to feel this pain, as a constant reminder of the pain that sexual abuse causes. As The Road to Freedom stated on page 34, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself because you went to jail, had to register as a sex offender, have probation, or have community notification. You’re not the victim here. The person you sexually assaulted will face lifelong consequences for YOUR behavior. Why shouldn’t you?” These and similar messages were hammered home each week in my therapy group, and in page after page of The Road to Freedom:

“If you aren’t committed to protecting yourself from the power of your deviant fantasies you will find excuses not to use the techniques. You will convince yourself you don’t need them. You will deny that you have a dangerous weakness that can appear at any time. But if you have decided that nothing is more important than living a non-deviant lifestyle, you will value these tools and use them.” (page 79)

“Right now, we are simply stating that somehow, deviant ideas become associated in your mind with sexual arousal. You learned this association, you weren’t born with it. That means you can un-learn it. Anything that was learned through conditioning can be un-learned in the same way. That is exactly what ‘counter-conditioning’ is about. You are going to have new, different conditioning experiences so that instead of associating deviant sex with excitement, you will associate it with a lack of excitement and with the painful consequences it brings. In other words, you will be training yourself to have the same type of responses to deviant sex that most people do: lack of excitement, disgust, and instant recognition of the harm that it causes. The more thoroughly you train yourself, the more like the average person you will become. You will probably never be able to completely undo your deviant arousal, but the more you attack it and neutralize it the less it will trouble you and endanger you.” (page 81)

Pressing On

As the weeks went by and Winter of 2015 came around, I did notice some changes. My daily feelings of arousal when reading the start of my scenario had nearly disappeared. In early November, I was transferred from the introductory weekly group to a more permanent group, led by a different therapist. But it seemed that no matter how much I engaged in Minimal Arousal Conditioning, I could not fully separate the arousal and pleasure I had felt years ago from how I felt when recalling it for the exercise. I genuinely did not want to feel anything, but the mere act of reading the scenario and focusing on the memory created a low level of unwanted arousal. And per Kirkpatrick’s instructions, I was required to continue until I felt no arousal. He had emphasized when teaching the introductory group that, if done correctly, MAC would always work. So I pressed on with it. Like all other clients who used MAC, I kept a daily written log of how aroused I felt each time I completed a repetition of the procedure, rating it on a scale of 0–10. Each week when my therapy group met, the other clients and I took turns stating how much we had utilized MAC throughout the week and the highest we had “scored” each day we practiced it. Obviously, the goal was to consistently score 0.

In addition to MAC, CBI also required me to follow an exercise called “Covert Conditioning,” as described in The Road to Freedom (pages 89-96). This exercise involved writing a series of short fictional erotica scenarios depicting how I might plan and initiate future sexual crimes, followed by a separate description of the terrible consequences that would follow if I actually carried out such crimes. Having established this set of scripts, I was required to follow a daily meditation regimen: First, I was to read and vividly imagine the first erotica script. Then immediately read and imagine the consequence script. Back and forth, switching to a different erotica script and back to the consequences script with each repetition. Finally, this was followed by imagining myself fleeing and avoiding situations where I could be around children, and how much safer that would be. Both the therapists at CBI and The Road to Freedom emphasized that the fictional scenarios and the meditation sessions ought to be vivid and striking. I was to imagine the most horrifying aspects of the consequences, so that I could feel the effect in my body as if they were really happening. 

“When it comes to the awful consequences of sex offending, you should already have plenty of material to work with. No doubt you have very clear memories of some of the events that happened to you. Now is a time that you can actually make positive use of the worst things that have happened to you. Or you can imagine even worse things. You will write short but detailed descriptions of what it would be like for you if these events, or events like them, were to happen again… Each of these aversive scenes should be very detailed so that you can really picture the negative consequences and feel the feelings you would feel. Include details about what things look like, smell like, sound like, and especially what they feel like. The more detailed your scene, the more real it seems, the more powerful the picture will be in your mind. You are going to write at least five of these scenes.” (pages 90, 91)

This meditation exercise greatly intensified the fear and shame I was already feeling on an ongoing basis. Even simple tasks like going to a grocery store became deeply uncomfortable and stressful, as there were inevitably children there. I dreaded encountering boy or girl scouts selling things at store entrances—not because I wanted to abduct or ogle them, but because they terrified me, and I felt ashamed of myself. I became convinced that because of my deviant arousal and past criminal activity, I should consider virtually any child a potential victim. Much like the classic example of “Don’t think about an elephant”, the program counter-productively conditioned me to think about deviant arousal any time I even glimpsed a child, something I had never experienced before.

“A full commitment means making an effort every day to avoid contact with potential victims. You will avoid any situations that have put you at risk for offending in the past. You will avoid any persons or situations that produce deviant sexual arousal. You will also commit to immediately escaping situations which are unpredictable or unavoidable, but put you at risk for offending...
This means that if you have molested children you must completely avoid situations and places where you are likely to encounter children, such as parks, playgrounds, or schools. If you go to fast food restaurants, malls, swimming pools, beaches, or churches, you will always do so at the times when children are least likely to be present… Whatever your offenses have been, you will avoid all the things that remind you of them.” (page 36)

Losing Hope

I don’t remember that Winter very clearly, except for a few relevant details. The days seemed to drift by in a blur. Over the months I was a client at CBI, my perception of life became increasingly compartmentalized in a deeply pathological way. When I needed to interact with people, I put on the correct persona. I had employment which entailed various responsibilities, family and friends I talked to and saw regularly, and a few different hobbies I maintained. I occasionally attended an adults-only service at a church on the other side of town when I had the opportunity, but I didn’t get much out of it and struggled to form friendships there. When I was alone, I spent much of my time thinking about what I was learning in therapy, and the problems my deviant arousal had caused. Although my parents visited regularly, I was still lonely and terribly missed being with my whole family. However, the therapists at CBI rarely discussed reunification with my brother – even though he expressly wanted it. The few times I brought it up, they dismissed it out of hand and told me I had a long way to go before we could even talk about it.

Every day, I was reminded again of the worst things I had ever done – required to relive the memories and the guilt in vivid detail, with no hope of redemption. Told that this was how I must live from now on. But I could not bear to live with that unresolvable guilt and regret every day. The effect of all this was profound isolation from everyone around me. It was like trying to be two different people in parallel. If it seems confusing to my readers why I didn’t tell anyone what was happening, shame and psychological compartmentalization were the main reasons I was silent. I also don’t recall anyone at CBI making much effort to determine if clients were actually doing okay. 

I continued to act normally around people and even in my therapy group, but it was a facade. I was rapidly losing hope. Various things Kirkpatrick and the other therapists said made it evident that they would punish me by rescinding privileges and extending my time in the therapy program by months or years if I admitted that things were not going smoothly. I was also having frequent, terrible dreams about molesting other children, and not being able to stop myself. I usually woke up from them crying, or with the word “No!” screaming through my mind. I don’t remember exactly when I started planning how I might commit suicide, but for much of that winter, I fantasized about it daily. In particular, my thoughts turned to a bridge I crossed during my commute to work. I got to the point that every time I crossed it, I considered diving off, to land head-first on the rocky stream bank forty feet below. I thought about what to say in a goodbye note. By the end of the year, the only reason I didn’t jump was because I knew my family and friends still loved me, and I didn’t want to leave them with the terrible pain my death would cause. I also was just barely holding on to my faith in Jesus, and the knowledge that killing myself would betray that faith and love. But that faith had been under attack for months at CBI, where the idea that God could change a person’s life was highly suspect. Spiritually, I was a beaten wreck. I was desperate to end the pain I was feeling, and it truly seemed to me at the time that the world would be a better, safer place without me.

But in early 2016, something happened which nobody expected. Kirkpatrick abruptly left his position at CBI, and within two or three weeks, the program had closed its doors and shut down. This was also apparently a surprise for all the other therapists who worked there, and there was a great deal of confusion about what would happen next. But within a couple more weeks, a new sex-offender therapy program was formed to take in the clients CBI’s closing had left in the lurch. This was led and staffed by different therapists, and I never heard what happened to Kirkpatrick or any of the other therapists at CBI. The new program, called Generations, was noticeably different from CBI. They did not utilize Minimal Arousal Conditioning or Covert Conditioning as a standard practice (although a marginally more ethical version of MAC was available), and the atmosphere was more respectful of the clients. During this transition process, other clients I knew expressed for the first time how Kirkpatrick had bullied them. As I had already started to doubt the efficacy of MAC and desperately wanted relief from the horror it had brought to my life, I quietly stopped practicing it. In the weeks that followed, it felt as if a dark cloud lifted, and I began to realize that much of what CBI required me to think and do had always depended on Kirkpatrick’s iron-clad authority over my life. I remained a client at Generations until I successfully graduated from it, not long before I also completed the five-year term of probation. The day I finished probation, I burned all remaining documents from my time at CBI, as a final act of rejection and closure. To some degree I regret that, only because I now have less evidence of exactly what happened there.

In Retrospect

One year after I finished probation, I met with the therapist I had worked with at Enterprise. This was the first time I had talked to her since leaving her program four years earlier. One thing that stood out to me was how respectful she was. She took seriously both the harm I had experienced at CBI, and my ongoing desire to live with honesty and moral integrity. During the conversation, she informed me that even before 2015, most sex-offender therapy providers had already phased out the practice of aversion therapy in most cases, due to a lack of evidence supporting its effectiveness (not to mention ethical concerns). The only edge case for its continued use is for people who want an external means of halting obsessive and violent sexual thoughts. In other words, people who have relatively sociopathic tendencies. And when therapists do suggest it as a possible, voluntary intervention, they present it as a tool to help reduce the intensity and frequency of such thoughts – nothing more. Certainly not something imperative that can fundamentally alter one’s underlying sexual attraction patterns, as both Kirkpatrick and The Road to Freedom claimed it was. However, she added that there were some therapy providers here and there throughout the U.S. who still mandated it for most of their clients, in one form or another.

I also found out from her that my former probation officer had based his decision to transfer me from Enterprise to CBI on an unfortunate misunderstanding: Shortly before he made that decision, I had told him that I was struggling with unwanted feelings of attraction to children and wished Enterprise addressed the topic more openly. My difficulties primarily revolved around intense shame and uncertainty about how to handle situations where I noticed that a minor on public transit was attractive, which was the only situation where I sometimes could not avoid close proximity to minors. I also wanted to know if there was any hope of real change in my underlying sexuality, and what my options for that were. In essence, I was hoping for the same kind of encouragement and resources Christian Pedophile provides. However, my probation officer assumed that my difficulties were of a more impulsive and criminal nature, and that I was struggling to resist engaging in illegal behavior. Because he was an honest and level-headed Christian man, I believe he was likely misinformed about how things were actually run at CBI. I suspect he simply knew they specialized in working with clients who had strong aberrant sexual temptations. So, against my first therapist’s advice (she was somewhat aware of the backwards methodologies utilized at CBI), he transferred me to CBI. A simple misunderstanding radically altered my life.

Nine years after CBI, many things in my life have changed. I have a relationship with my brother again, and a wonderful church family. By most metrics, I’m living a relatively normal life. One of the most personally meaningful ways that my life is different is that, contrary to everything The Road to Freedom claimed and warned about, I can interact with children without fear of molesting them. I can talk to, hold, and play with my young nieces without any problems, and I hope to marry and start a family of my own one day. My sexual temptations do not define me, and they never did. I am not “a pedophile”; I am a man, and a son of God. I don’t need to live in fear of children or “deviant arousal”; I simply live in pursuit of the natural, constructive, life-giving love that should define all good men. Nevertheless, I am not foolish; I maintain careful boundaries and never volunteer in church or community activities that focus on children.

MAC did not meaningfully reduce my experience of pedophilia. The apparent reduction I experienced while a client at CBI was temporary and illusory; it only reflected my growing emotional detachment and numbness. I didn’t feel much of any sexual or romantic desires for either children or adults, because apart from self-hatred, fear, and isolation, I wasn’t feeling anything. Despite feelings of sexual attraction toward children being obviously undesirable, that emotionally numbed and repressed state was imminently self-destructive and unsustainable. For several years after stopping MAC, my level of arousal to children tended to be higher than before I ever did the exercise. Regrettably, it has also made the process of rebuilding a relationship with my brother more difficult. To this day, I feel alienated from him because of what CBI forced me to do.

As far as I am aware, no medical professionals oversaw CBI’s use of Minimal Arousal Conditioning. Certainly no physician would ever approve of the practice. Even at a standard 5% concentration, aqueous ammonia is a toxic and corrosive chemical. While it can be safely used as a household cleaning product in conditions of proper ventilation, intentionally inhaling the concentrated fumes in the manner MAC prescribes is dangerous. There are no legitimate medical procedures which involve doing so. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ toxicological profile for ammonia states:

“The most important injurious effects of exposure to excessive amounts of ammonia on humans are due to its irritative and corrosive properties. Exposures to ammonia gas cause chemical burns of the respiratory tract, skin, and eyes. Ammonia dissolves in the water present in skin, mucous membranes, and eyes and becomes ammonium hydroxide, which is a highly ionized weak base that causes necrosis of the tissues. Specifically, ammonium hydroxide causes saponification of cell membrane lipids resulting in cell disruption and death. Additionally, it extracts water from the cells, and initiates an inflammatory response, which further damages the surrounding tissues…
“Ammonia is an upper respiratory irritant in humans. Exposures to levels exceeding 50 ppm result in immediate irritation to the nose and throat; however, tolerance appears to develop with repeated exposure. Exposure to an air concentration of 250 ppm is bearable for most persons for 30–60 minutes. Acute exposure to higher levels (500 ppm) have been shown to increase respiratory minute volume. Accidental exposures to concentrated aerosols of ammonium salts or high concentrations of ammonia gas have resulted in nasopharyngeal and tracheal burns, airway obstruction and respiratory distress, and bronchiolar and alveolar edema. Ammonia vapor readily dissolves in the moisture present on the skin, eyes, oropharynx and lungs forming ammonium hydroxide which dissociates to yield hydroxyl ions.” (pages 15, 16)

The Road to Freedom includes no such information. The authors claim that there are no risks associated with inhaling ammonia fumes, and that many sex-offenders have successfully used it to reduce their deviant arousal (page 85). As I mentioned earlier, the authors instruct clients to “deeply inhale” the fumes. They even suggest that clients could use industrial-strength ammonia (typically a 10-20% concentration) because it will last longer, but they neglect to instruct clients to dilute it with water before using it (page 82). As a client at CBI, no one ever told me about the medical risks of inhaling ammonia fumes, nor did anyone instruct me on how to recognize and avoid over-exposure, apart from saying, “Don’t inhale it all the way into your lungs.” No one instructed me on what to do if I over-exposed myself by accident. On one occasion, I recall Kirkpatrick warning us not to ingest ammonia or inject it into our rectums, adding that previous clients of his had actually done so – hence the warning. I have no idea what concentrations I was exposed to, but it was far more than any medical professional would deem safe. While researching this article, I had difficulty finding relevant information about this method of ammonia exposure. Not surprisingly, it seems there have never been any controlled experiments or case studies to document the short and long-term effects of intentionally and repeatedly inhaling as much ammonia vapor as one can feasibly withstand.

Over the years, I have wrestled at times with feelings of hatred toward Kirkpatrick for what he forced me to do. I also struggle to articulate what CBI did to me, as my experience of Minimal Arousal Conditioning does not fit neatly into any category I know of. There is no way in Hell I would have willingly undergone MAC if an authority I trusted had not told me it was mandatory. CBI presented it as the only way I could eliminate my experience of pedophilia and avoid committing further sexual crimes. At no point did anyone offer me possible alternatives or give me the opportunity to express that writing child abuse erotica featuring my own brother would violate my conscience.

Writing that scenario was itself an intensely sexual activity, due to the nature of making it highly erotic and drawing on my own memories of previous sexual activities. While I did give assent to writing it, I only did so under duress of the explicit threat of prison. The only reason I cannot outright call it sexual assault is that no one at CBI physically forced themselves on me, or derived sexual pleasure from the knowledge of what I was doing. But whether or not it meets a textbook definition of sexual assault, it was unquestionably a sexual violation. It inflicted lasting harm, and severely compromised my ability to maintain a healthy life. It was an abusive and coerced sexual activity, on a level with the crimes many of the men at CBI had committed. The facts that it was done in an unconventional manner, that it was (ostensibly) legal, and that it was purportedly for my own good and for public safety did not in any way justify or excuse it. Over the years since finishing probation, I have spend thousands of dollars out of pocket on professional counseling to work through the harm this sexual violation inflicted. Yet in spite of all that, I know that I need to forgive Kirkpatrick, and pray for his salvation. It is an ongoing process God is guiding me through. I hope to learn someday that he has indeed become my brother in Christ.

Despite excellent healing and personal growth, I have not been able to fully undo the effects of the conditioning exercises I underwent all those years ago. I still feel alienated from most other people, although I act against this self-perception. Intense, intrusive memories of that time at CBI frequently plague me, along with lingering fears that I am a fundamentally and intractably dangerous person. This is explicitly what Kirkpatrick and the authors of The Road to Freedom intended their clients to believe about themselves, because they believed it too. Shortly after I completed probation, I fell into a pattern of self-destructive behaviors and reckless activities. Despite having no desire to commit any acts of sexual abuse, I still had “deviant arousal”, and I felt an overwhelming urge to feel pain and inflict harm on myself because of it. Thankfully, I was able to find healing through professional counseling, prayer, and spending consistent time with friends and family. My mental stability has improved over the years since then, although I still struggle with levels of anger and aggression I never used to feel. Thank God I have a naturally calm personality.

“Sexual assault victims often experience long-lasting emotional pain from their abuse. They feel hurt, angry, and helpless. Sometimes these feelings don’t surface until years have passed. Frequently victims blame themselves because they feel they should have done something to stop or prevent the assault. Some victims feel different from other people all their lives and never learn to have healthy relationships. Most victims struggle with liking and accepting themselves.” (page 145)

A Christian Perspective On MAC

CBI used Minimal Arousal Conditioning in ways that violated core teachings of Christianity. Chief among these is Jesus’ command in the Sermon on the Mount: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” (Matthew 5:27–28). The MAC procedure, by its design, required participants to deliberately and repeatedly focus on eroticized memories of real past abuse, for the purpose of arousing themselves. This was deliberate indulgence in deviant lust, not rejection of it. Despite the claimed therapeutic intent, the practice itself required committing sin. In Christian moral teaching, it is never acceptable to commit or encourage a lesser evil in order to prevent a greater one (Romans 3:8, Proverbs 17:15). Thus, even if MAC were somehow effective at reducing recidivism, it would still be immoral to engage in.

Beyond the misuse of erotic imagination, MAC also violated clear biblical prohibitions against cruelty and self-harm. The perpetual infliction of punishment – be it physical or psychological – for the sake of personal moral purification and atonement echoes the pagan practices that early Christians refused to imitate (Colossians 2:20-23). MAC was not corrective in a Christian sense; it was intentionally degrading. It was a method of self-inflicted vengeful torment, dressed in therapeutic language. In the Christian worldview, a person should not use their body as a tool against themselves, even in the pursuit of virtue (1 Corinthians 6:19–20). MAC is also a direct denial of the sufficiency of Jesus’ tortuous death on the cross to make atonement for us. Contrary to Morin and Levenson’s rhetorical assertion that clients had no right to resist the life-long painful consequences they sought to impose (page 34), the Apostle Paul says, “Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death.” (Romans 8:1-2). Christ bore on himself the weight and punishment of my guilt, so that I could be free from it. Even worthwhile goals like rehabilitation or reduced risk of future harm do not grant moral license to pursue any means that might help achieve them. God commands all people to uphold moral standards in regard to the means as well as the ends.

The Bible has much to say about believing what is right and true, yet my beliefs were forcibly torn and remade into what an unbeliever thought they should be.

“That a person who committed a crime – even a horrific one – failed to treat his or her victim as one made in the image of God does not mean that we are likewise entitled to treat the person who committed the crime as if he or she were not God’s image bearer. The criminal, in committing his offense, tells a lie about the victim’s dignity. We must not, in anger, respond with a similar lie about the criminal.”
–Matthew T. Martens, Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal[4]

Marshall Kirkpatrick was intentionally using the power entrusted to him to coerce his clients into plainly immoral and degrading acts. Would it have been an immoral violation of the law for me to refuse to participate in MAC? Well, as writer and commentator Maria Baer aptly put it, “Laws that attempt to defy the moral and natural order of the world demand to be broken.” For years, I have questioned whether I should have refused to participate, and accepted the consequences. Daniel chapter 3 generally comes to mind here, with the story of the three men who were willing to die rather than disobey God’s command against worshiping idols. If I had refused to participate and the court had punished me as a result, I would not have suffered as a criminal but endured persecution for the name of Christ. My only defense is that I was ignorant to the full scope of what MAC would entail, as well as its eventual inefficacy and harm. The abuse of my brother had been a severe act of disobedience, and I was attempting to change that behavioral pattern by obeying Kirkpatrick. I don’t have a good answer to my question, but I know that God’s grace, love, and forgiveness for me are still true.

Lastly, I would have preferred to not write this article, or have this part of my life shared publicly. I want to move on from it as best as I can and leave it in the past, only addressing it in private as much as seems necessary to undo the ways that CBI changed me. But I am choosing to share my experience – both to provide a resource for others who may have endured similar mistreatment, and to expose what happens when people abandon empirical truth and Christian ethics in favor of quack psychology and intentionally cruel retribution.

Photocopies of all quoted pages from The Road to Freedom are available upon email request.

(I could comfortably end this article here, but for any readers interested in delving into a detailed analysis of The Road to Freedom, I also wrote the following review after these end-notes. Consider it essentially a separate article, attached to this one as a natural follow-up.)

1.  The Road to Freedom, 3rd Edition 
© 2002 John W. Morin, Ph.D and Jill S. Levenson, MSW
Center for Offender Rehabilitation and Education (C.O.R.E.)
Oakbrook Counseling Center, P.A.
5950 West Oakland Park Boulevard, Suite 107
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 33313

2.  While researching this article, I found almost no professional information about Steve Jensen. Most of what I know about him and his work in the field of sex-offender therapy comes from what I overheard as a client at CBI, and what the therapist from Enterprise told me after I finished probation. It is accurate to the best of my knowledge.

3.  I have never been formally diagnosed with pedophilic disorder.

4.  Reforming Criminal Justice: A Christian Proposal (Kindle edition), page 182
© 2023 Matthew T. Martens
Published by Crossway 1300 Crescent Street 
Wheaton, Illinois 60187

Reviewing The Road To Freedom

A Mess of Contradictions

Reading through The Road to Freedom again after many years has been eye-opening, painful, and healing. Now older, better-informed, and no longer bound by legal constraints, I can analyze the book critically and understand why it affected me the way it did. With that in mind, I want to address some notable points here. This is not an easy undertaking, as the book spans 317 pages, and I want to avoid bogging the discussion down with too many lengthy quotations and details. While I have worked hard to present this without personal bias, I have not been entirely successful. I cannot deny that my terrible experiences with this book have made me negatively biased and somewhat hostile. It is also intimidating to go toe-to-toe with two educated clinical professionals and say “No, you are incorrect”.

Coming up with a good basic description of The Road to Freedom is difficult for me. Terms like “demanding”, “discouraging”, and “complex” come to mind. In some aspects, the authors do seem to have a good understanding of the field of sex-offender therapy and clients’ needs. They get a number of things right. With some caveats, I can say that they accurately describe the way sex-offenders tend to live in perpetual denial of the harm sexual abuse causes. But they also get critical things wrong, and it is extremely difficult to avoid the conclusion that they wrote this book with undisclosed and unprofessional beliefs and intentions. It is these things I want to address. 

From the start, one striking observation is that the authors never cite any sources or evidence for their many factual claims. Not once. Apart from briefly citing Steve Jensen as the creator of MAC itself, they cite no research, no external authorities, no historical documentation, no case studies, no philosophical or metaphysical grounding, and no other source of verifiable truth. Dubiously, they seem to expect readers to take everything they say on blind faith. Now, it is fair to point out that The Road to Freedom is a workbook, not a scholarly or academic work. While one would not expect them to cite their sources or evidence for the more mundane, commonly accepted claims they make in a workbook, it is certainly unreasonable and unprofessional of them to cite none at all. On top of that, several of the central claims they make are quite profound, and in some cases self-contradictory.

In the first two chapters, they explicitly describe pedophilia as a sexual orientation, just like being heterosexual, bisexual, or homosexual. They also mock the idea of clients attempting to change who they are attracted to, comparing it to the idea of a heterosexual man trying to stop being attracted to women. As the authors put it: 

“Having deviant attractions does not make you a bad person. No one chooses their sexual attractions. We simply find ourselves turned on by certain people and certain acts. What you can choose, and must choose, is what you do about your attractions. There are men who are sexually attracted to children but who choose never to act on that attraction.” (page 4). 

“But the hard truth is that deviant attractions don’t change any more than any other attractions change. Are you attracted to women? Is your attraction to women likely to change? Do you think telling yourself that it’s wrong to be attracted to women would get rid of your attraction? Are you attracted to men? If you are, you may have wished that you weren’t, may have even married a woman hoping to change. Did it work? Did you change your attraction?” (page 37)

“Some offenders have a great deal of confusion about their sexual orientation. Sexual orientation is another way of describing who you are attracted to. If you are attracted to adult females, you are called heterosexual. If you are attracted to adult males, you are called homosexual. If you are attracted to both, you are considered bi-sexual. If you are attracted primarily to children, you are called a pedophile… Sexual orientation seems to be in part pre-programmed before birth and then further shaped by experience. Some men say they were aware from a very young age that they were attracted to other males, and therefore homosexual. If you are attracted to adult females, you are probably primarily heterosexual. But sometimes sexual orientation becomes confused when early sexual experiences occur that are outside of one’s primary orientation.” (page 60)

However, throughout much of the rest of the book, Morin and Levenson vigorously deny all of this – at least in regard to pedophiles. They all but reject the possibility that anyone could be exclusively attracted to children, or that such attractions could arise organically, or that this kind of sexual attraction could be immutable in any way: 

“Even if you believe you are attracted only to children, you are probably denying your natural, preprogrammed sexual orientation out of fear that you can never fulfill it. By talking with others who share your feelings, you may find that they have rediscovered their own natural sexuality and are working toward connecting with other adults. Many people are paralyzed by their fears until they confront them. It will still create a loss to give up sex with children but until you open your mind to the possibility of sex with adults, you have no good reason to believe it can’t be exciting or satisfying.” (page 61)

“Right now, we are simply stating that somehow, deviant ideas become associated in your mind with sexual arousal. You learned this association, you weren’t born with it. That means you can un-learn it. Anything that was learned through conditioning can be un-learned in the same way.” (page 81)

“One of the central questions you will need to answer in this program is how you came to be a sex offender. How did it happen that children, or forced sex, or exposing yourself, or whatever your offenses have involved, came to be so exciting to you that you couldn’t resist offending? Through some experience, or experiences, an association between sexual excitement and your deviant attraction was created or conditioned in you.” (page 81)

There are numerous other examples of this contradiction, but the ones I’ve presented – along with my earlier descriptions of Minimal Arousal Conditioning – illustrate the issue clearly: Early in the book, when setting the overall tone and concepts, the authors claim that deviant attractions – specifically pedophilia – are sexual orientations that cannot change. However, they later contradict themselves by asserting that deviant attractions are not like sexual orientations and that people can, in fact, change them – but only by following the methods the authors prescribe. They emphasize that deviant arousal is a learned response, while they presume non-deviant arousal to be “natural”. This is a textbook example of special pleading. A major part of how they set this up is by using deliberate ambiguity to suggest a distinction which proves to be untenable. The authors repeatedly use shifting and ambiguous language to describe pedophilia, sometimes calling it a fixed sexual orientation, while other times referring to it as a learned “deviant attraction” or using vague terms like “sexual excitement”. A simple question about the previous few quotations from the book easily demonstrates this ambiguity: What are the differences between “sexual excitement”, “deviant attraction”, and “sexual orientation”? Judging by how the authors define and use these terms throughout the book, the answer is clearly “nothing”. This practice allows them to evade accountability, confuse readers, and conceal contradictions within their central arguments.

At first glance, it might seem like Morin and Levenson are simply making a poorly worded attempt at distinguishing between merely finding children attractive in a vague and general manner, and feeling intense arousal and longing at the thought of viewing child pornography or engaging in sexual activities with a child. However, this is an implausible explanation. This becomes clear in two ways – first, in how they define deviance: “The word ‘deviance’ means ‘not normal.’ All of the thoughts, fantasies, plans, feelings and behaviors that surround your sex offending are sexually deviant. Anyone who is aroused by sexual assault is a sexually deviant person. If you are sexually turned on by children or by any other form of sexual assault, you have a sexually deviant attraction.” (Page 4). Second, in how they describe the ideal outcome of MAC: the total elimination of sexual arousal toward anything “deviant”, not merely its pacification (page 85). To state the obvious, the idea of a pedophile who has no sexual arousal to children is an oxymoron. While I cannot read the authors’ minds, I believe the only justifiable conclusion is that they are trying to obfuscate a category conflation here, and throughout the book. When they want to emphasize clients’ need for specialized therapy, they describe deviant arousal as a powerful and immutable sexual orientation. When they want to justify the MAC exercise, they describe deviant arousal as merely a learned and unnatural thought pattern.

Who one tends to be attracted to (e.g. adults, children) does not equate with what actions one wants to engage in (e.g. rape, exhibitionism, or self-restraint) and what effects one wants to cause (e.g. harm, intimidation). The authors evidently intend for the reader to assume they are equatable, under the umbrella label of “deviant”. The ability to recognize, evaluate, and subordinate multiple competing desires to unchanging moral principles is a defining trait of human nature. It is the faculty that distinguishes rational agency from the instinctual behavior of animals. A man may find a specific woman sexually attractive, yet exercise self-restraint on an ongoing basis, because he prioritizes his desire to treat her honorably over his desire for sexual pleasure. To claim that such a man desires to violate the woman simply by virtue of feeling attracted to her is a ridiculous non sequitur, and a bad-faith attack on his moral character. The exact same is true of those who are predisposed to feeling attracted to children. The fact that a man could hypothetically have a consensual sexual relationship with another adult – but never with a child – is irrelevant to this distinction. It is through this category conflation that Morin and Levenson are setting the stage for a crippling double-standard.

Throughout the book, Morin and Levenson provide no argument or evidence that pedophilia or other sexual desires are “learned”, or that the MAC exercise will produce the psychological effects they claim. On top of that, their claim that “anything that was learned through conditioning can be un-learned in the same way” is a blatant non sequitur. (Technically, it does not even rise to the level of a non sequitur, as the entire paragraph it comes from makes no real argument, fallacious or otherwise. It’s just a bunch of unsubstantiated assertions formulated to sound convincing.) It is also a grossly reductionist misapplication of Behaviorism, a psychological theory that explains human behavior primarily as a result of environmental conditioning and reinforcement, rather than innate psychological traits or otherwise non-deterministic explanations. This claim the authors make about things learned through conditioning is an unscientific, unverifiable, ideological precommitment, dishonestly presented as fact. In practice, it is clinical fraud. Rather than even attempting to offer a coherent framework for human sexual development and psychology, the authors sweepingly declare that anything “deviant” must have been learned, and blithely move on. Recall that the only definition they give for deviance is “not normal”. The moment a reader asks “How do you know that deviance is a learned phenomenon, or that it can be unlearned ‘in the same way’?”, the foundational premises of the book collapse like a house of cards. Because they never cite any source or framework (such as Behaviorism) for their claims, it is reasonable to assume that the average reader would have difficulty identifying this unsound epistemology. The simple truth is, no one knows what exactly causes some people to develop sexual attraction to children in particular, and different people have different formative experiences. For my part, there is simply nothing in my childhood I can point to as a likely cause of pedophilia, nor did I develop it due to early pornography exposure or progressive addiction. Even if a singular definitive cause (such as early pornography use) could explain some people’s experience of pedophilia, it is implausible that sniffing ammonia while thinking about that cause would reverse the effect. In the heavily re-written 4th edition of The Road to Freedom[2] published in 2021, Morin and Levenson have this to say:

“Sex-offending treatment used to emphasize what was called aversion therapy to change someone’s attraction to kids. By using behavioral conditioning like bad smells, therapists tried to reduce the arousal to children by associating it with something distasteful, like a whiff of ammonia. A previous version of this book used odor aversion. But most research indicates that changing attraction isn’t really possible for most people, and so a more realistic goal is to accept the attraction (but not act on it).” (pages 53-54)

There are numerous other inconsistencies in the book as well:

• Sometimes the authors reassure clients that they will be respected in therapy (pages 2, 125), other times they paint clients as dishonest, sex-crazed brutes (pages 35-36). Page 53 begins with a line-graph to describe the spectrum of possible sexual attractions, with “Non-Offender” on one side, and “Pedophile” on the other.
• Much of the book incessantly warns clients to avoid anything that might even remind them of deviant arousal (most notably children), but chapter 6 spends considerable time advising and instructing clients on how to build a long-term sexual relationship with an adult partner – which could then presumably produce children. A consistent application of MAC would have a man writing multiple abuse-scenarios about his own children, in order to preemptively quench any possible deviant arousal to them. Morin and Levenson do not even attempt to address this obvious ethical quandary. Also, the suggestion that clients would even consider marriage is notably absent within all the talk of adult sexual relationships.
• Chapters 2 and 4 push a narrative that is unfalsifiable, suggesting that clients likely developed deviant arousal due to past neglect or abuse. And if clients don’t remember ever being abused? The authors simply claim they may have repressed the memory (pages 61, 108). This devolves into ham-handed post-hoc speculations about clients’ childhoods being the presumed source of deviant arousal. After all, clients must have learned to be deviant from some external source. While it is plausible that this could be true in some cases, the authors leave no room for questioning this presumed source of deviance. The one option that is not acceptable is that deviant arousal may have occurred organically. This sets the stage for clients to be blamed if they are unable to identify the source of their deviant arousal, or if identifying it does not lead to the improvements the authors are clearly expecting.
• The book opens and closes by reassuring clients that they are not bad people (pages 3, 305), yet contradicts this point by declaring, “Like all sexual attractions, deviant attractions are a part of who you are” (page 4). And the book is also very clear: Deviance is bad.
• The authors insist that clients have not and cannot find happiness or fulfillment through deviant sexual acts (pages 5-8, 42-43, 61). But if it is true that deviant arousal is a real conditioned response, then it logically follows that the happiness and fulfillment clients are seeking through deviant sex can also be conditioned and real.
• The authors acknowledge that attempting to control other people by overpowering them doesn’t work, and will only push them away (page 272). Yet their entire system of arousal reconditioning is a concerted effort to control and alter clients’ thoughts and self-perception through fear, guilt, and pain.
• Chapter 7 identifies several types of problematic distorted thinking patterns which inhibit rational thought and action: All-or-Nothing, Illegitimate Blame, Catastrophizing, Denial, “Should” Statements, Mind-Reading, and Over-Generalizing. Yet the authors engage in all of these, in the assumptions they make about clients they have never met and the commands they give.
• The authors acknowledge that seeing one’s self as only a sex-offender will lead to depression (page 174), but also instruct clients to live in perpetual fear of children, or women, or anything else related to their past crimes (pages 36, 89-96, etc), and warn that clients will always be sex-offenders if they don’t obey the authors’ instructions (page 52).

To Accept, or Reject?

There is also a deeper contradiction in all this which deserves further examination. The distinctions between different schools of philosophy and psychology matter, and some are fundamentally incompatible with others. Despite their focus on eradicating deviant desires through counter-conditioning, Morin and Levenson paradoxically claim that “our feelings are the most central and powerful part of what makes us who we are”, and “self-acceptance is the very foundation of mental health”. (pages 174, 176). And as I mentioned before, they insist that, “Like all sexual attractions, deviant attractions are a part of who you are.” (page 4). This points to a logical and ethical conclusion: If these three claims are true, then one’s sexual identity – be it straight, gay, bi, pedophile, or whatever else – truly defines one’s essence. To state the obvious, Minimal Arousal Conditioning is an explicit and violent rejection of particular emotions and desires. Yet the authors have no basis to justify selectively rejecting certain parts of personal identity while assuming most others to be foundational. They never bother to address this inconsistency, nor do they consider why the principle of self-acceptance would not equally apply to individuals whose sexual identities and desires they now label as “deviant”. This is an incredible double-standard.

Furthermore, Morin and Levenson’s categorization of “a pedophile” as a distinct category of personhood and sexual identity is at odds with the psychological theory and practices of the Behaviorist framework. Behaviorism rejects the idea that subjective perceptions and emotional states are essential, fixed categories of personhood. Instead, it understands labels such as “pedophile” or “homosexual” as merely convenient descriptions for patterns of learned behavior, reinforced by environmental factors and social interactions. From this perspective, emotions and sexual desires are not fixed essences permanently defining the self, nor do they have any moral value in themselves. Rather, morality and social acceptability are derived exclusively from observable behaviors and their consequences. If the authors were to apply this theory accurately, they would use negative reinforcement to target learned deviant behavior, not organic and amoral[3] feelings of sexual interest and arousal. This is where the category conflation I demonstrated earlier comes into play: Obviously, having clients commit a real sexual crime in order to repeatedly punish that behavior would be extremely unethical and illegal. Instead, they duplicitously treat patterns of “deviant” sexual attraction as though they are habitual actions one could control at will, such as biting one’s nails. In reality, the only thing MAC could reliably accomplish was conditioning clients to have a profound aversion to reading certain forms of erotica, which it arguably did. Erotica which only existed because Morin and Levenson required clients to write it. Despite the authors’ claims, there is no logical reason to expect a client’s psyche to somehow confer this aversion to feelings of “deviant arousal” in general, and in so doing organically reduce or eliminate the tendency to feel that arousal in the first place. (In anecdotal cases where this transference does seemingly occur, a much more straight-forward explanation would be that the client was temporarily repressing or dissociating from unwanted physical arousal in order to be permitted to stop doing the MAC exercise.) Thus, the authors’ approach is not merely self-contradictory as a clinical model, it is unethical in itself, because it imposes an ethically incoherent and scientifically untenable double-standard on potential clients. MAC is a solution coercively applied to the wrong problem, and clients are on the hook for its success.

So why do Morin and Levenson maintain this double-standard? The most likely reason is manipulation through rhetorical framing. By presenting deviant attraction as both learned and changeable (to justify extreme aversion therapy) and intrinsic and central to identity (to justify treating it as uniquely dangerous and in need of aggressive control), they trap clients between the horns of a serious dilemma. If a client resists MAC, they can be accused of clinging to their deviant identity and lifestyle (page 79). If they fail to fully eliminate deviant arousal, it reinforces the claim that deviant attraction is so deeply ingrained that it must be suppressed indefinitely through strict control and avoidance strategies. If deviant arousal ever returns, the authors can claim that some stimulus must have triggered it, ergo the need for further counter-conditioning (page 4, 85). The authors want it both ways – they want to claim that aversion therapy is powerful enough to fundamentally reshape attraction, while also arguing that deviant attraction is so essential to identity that those who have it cannot be trusted or left unchecked, even after extensive counter-conditioning. This contradiction allows them to justify extreme, coercive treatment methods while absolving themselves of responsibility if those methods fail to produce the stated goal, or even cause harm. The instructions for MAC are clear that the goal is total elimination of deviant arousal, including to any new sources of deviant arousal a client may encounter. Yet Morin and Levenson openly state that this goal is not realistic:

“It is painful to admit to yourself that you are different from other people. But the hard truth is that deviant attractions don’t change any more than any other attractions change.” (page 37)

“You will probably never be able to completely undo your deviant arousal, but the more you attack it and neutralize it the less it will trouble you and endanger you… Because you never know when you might find yourself becoming aroused by a deviant thought or opportunity to offend, the time to do the conditioning is right now.” (page 81)

“And accept that once a year, or more often if you are having deviant thoughts, you will have to refresh your counter-conditioning.” (page 85)

The inevitable conclusion is that clients should expect to be actively practicing MAC in perpetuity, possibly for decades, in a Sisyphean effort to protect the world from their deviant arousal.

“You’ll Do It, If You Know What’s Good For You…”

Beyond the self-contradictions, The Road to Freedom suffers from a second critical problem: Morin and Levenson neither respect therapy clients nor believe their own claim that these clients are good people. Instead, they insinuate that deviant arousal inherently makes one a uniquely bad person. This is inescapably evident throughout the book, not only by the degrading nature of Minimal Arousal Conditioning itself, but also in the authors’ pervasive use of manipulation and nauseatingly infantilizing rhetoric. They speak as though they have a god-like ability to know what clients have experienced, and command by fiat what clients should do; clients whom they have never met. They rely on caricatured stereotypes, and use ad hominem attacks, deception, baseless accusations, and Kafka Traps. The authors’ most frequent manipulative tactic is framing clients with leading questions and gaslighting. Throughout the book, they use these rhetorical strategies to paint any client who disagrees with them and their methodology as either a malevolent predator or a stubborn fool. Consider the following examples:

“You need as many people as possible to keep a watch on you, to alert you when your behavior seems to be entering an assault cycle, and to help you question your motives. Let’s face it, the more people who are watching you, the less able you will be to put yourself in risky situations, right?” (page 35)

“You will avoid all sources of deviant stimulation. Yes, this means a sacrifice on your part. And yes, you will make that sacrifice if you are at all serious about staying out of prison… When you understand what treatment offers you, you will become an open book in your group… These restrictions may seem like a lot to ask of yourself. They may mean you have to look for a different job or another place to live. As you fully accept the consequences you have brought on yourself, you will realize that these sacrifices are simply part of the price you must pay for your continued freedom. Preventing future sex crimes is your responsibility.” (pages 35-36)

“It is well known that most sex offenders have committed many offenses and most offenders have committed different types of deviant acts. When you first came into treatment you may have wanted to pretend that the crime you were arrested for was the only one you had committed, when in reality it wasn’t even the only type of sex offense you have committed. Many convicted exhibitionists, for example, have committed rapes, and many convicted rapists are child molesters.” (page 56)

“If you aren’t committed to protecting yourself from the power of your deviant fantasies you will find excuses not to use the techniques. You will convince yourself you don’t need them. You will deny that you have a dangerous weakness that can appear at any time. But if you have decided that nothing is more important than living a non-deviant lifestyle, you will value these tools and use them… The idea of aversive conditioning is to retrain your mind to associate unpleasant things with deviant thoughts and fantasies. You may find yourself wanting to avoid your aversive exercises, not only because they are no fun, but more importantly, because they work. No matter how committed you are in your mind to controlling your deviance, a part of you will want to resist giving up the pleasure you have gotten from offending. These tools are designed to prevent you from having that pleasure. It is normal for you to want to avoid giving up anything pleasurable. But by now you should recognize that it would be foolish of you not to do everything you can to protect yourself from your deviant desires.” (page 79)

“You should plan your schedule to avoid potential victims completely. At first this may seem inconvenient. Later, when you see how much more control you have over your life, you won’t think about inconvenience. If you are a child molester, you should do your grocery shopping at night, when you will be least likely to see children in the supermarket. If you are attracted to teens, you will do your shopping when they are in school. If you are a rapist, you should shop during daylight hours when lots of people are around.” (page 80)

“Minimal arousal conditioning is one of the best things you will ever do for yourself. Don’t cheat yourself. Don’t lie to yourself about how you don’t need it. Do this work. Do it now. And accept that once a year, or more often if you are having deviant thoughts, you will have to refresh your counter-conditioning. Go back through your scenarios and make sure you eliminate any arousal you feel. Later, it won’t be nearly as hard or take as long as the first time. You owe this to yourself.” (page 85)

“The simplest and most obvious ways to deal with high-risk situations are avoidance and escape. Of course, as you become familiar with stimuli and situations that trigger you, your best strategy by far will be to simply stay away from those temptations. It is much easier to avoid temptations than to resist them. We would suggest that there is nothing difficult about altering your lifestyle slightly to avoid these situations. Yet many men insist that there is... Why does it seem difficult? Because it involves sacrifices? You’ve made sacrifices in your life before when you thought there was a good reason. Does it seem difficult because you still don’t believe you can be tempted? Even if you don’t believe it, what would be a reason for putting yourself in a stimulating situation? To prove to yourself that you don’t have a problem? If you are still in denial of your problem then nothing has changed for you... Maybe you haven’t wanted to avoid external triggers for the exact reason that you should: they’re exciting and you like the excitement. In that case we’re not really talking about being tempted by external triggers, we’re talking about seeking them out. Your real goal from the start was to put yourself in a situation where you would be aroused and could then go through the steps to an offense, all the while pretending you weren’t. Who was fooled? The victim? The police? Who will be fooled in the future?” (page 291)

“Some men also need to use anti-depressant medications to lower their sex drive. There is nothing harmful about such medicines and no reason to resist them. Millions of people take them because they fight depression effectively.” (page 296)

I could have included many, many other similar quotes here, but the picture is clear. Of course desisting from sexual crimes and having careful boundaries is necessary. But what this book describes is ridiculous overkill for all but the most anti-social, hard-set, and sexually impulsive people. While it is appropriate for people on supervision for sexual crimes to be placed under various boundaries and restrictions, it is rare for them to be life-long. Children are a good and natural part of society, and demanding long-term and absolute avoidance is a delusional non-solution. Healthy, well-adjusted people don’t live that way, which is one of the reasons why society imprisons people who must be forcibly restricted. The belief that clients can become healthy, well-adjusted people is the central reason therapy for them exists in the first place, rather than simply imprisoning them for the rest of their lives, or euthanizing them. I am not a devious, sex-crazed brute, and with some exceptions, many of the men I encountered while at CBI were not, either. For the authors to so cavalierly insist that all clients, without caveat, would need such severe restrictions placed on them is bigoted and unprofessional. Therapists who work with sex-offenders are expected to have extensive training so that they can identify the unique needs of individual clients, and respond appropriately.

On that note, another glaring flaw in this book is that it never adequately addresses how clients can reintegrate into a normal life or function safely around children. Instead, the authors assume indefinite avoidance is the only solution, and structure the final chapter around this assumption. This is a confusingly inconsistent application of the Behaviorist theory they otherwise rely on. If, as they claim, deviant arousal is a learned association that can be unlearned through counter-conditioning, then the obvious next step should be to help clients develop new, positive behavioral patterns. This could be done through supervised practice, conditioning healthy affections, and learning to maintain these skills, as all well-adjusted adults have. If the theory and practice of psychological conditioning is valid enough to justify subjecting clients to daily, painful aversive exercises, then it should also be valid enough to explore positive behavioral retraining. But they say nothing about that, and instead systematically undermine the possibility of children being anything other than stimuli for deviant arousal. This suggests a fundamental lack of confidence in the very conditioning principles they promote. I don’t know exact statistics, but a significant majority of people convicted of sexual crimes who have been released will at some point be on their own, without the supervision of a therapist or parole officer. The idea that all such individuals will continue to totally avoid children for the rest of their lives is simply unrealistic and irresponsible. Not because clients are all untrustworthy predators at heart, but because, as I said, children are a natural part of society. Again, having wise boundaries is important, but self-imposed exile from society should not be the ideal for anyone. This is not rocket science. It is far from obvious what Morin and Levenson expect younger clients aspiring to future marriage and children to do. While some therapy programs may have added reintegration strategies of their own, doing so would have directly contradicted the rigid avoidance model prescribed by The Road to Freedom. The authors’ refusal to engage with the realities of reintegration, despite professing a commitment to public safety, is a critical blind spot in their practical application of therapy.

Rounding it out, even back in 2002 it was well-known within the medical and therapeutic professions that antidepressants could have negative and potentially harmful side-effects[4]. A reduction of sex-drive was itself a negative side-effect, albeit one which suited the authors’ desires here. Both then and now, people take antidepressants with the hope that the positive effects will outweigh the negative. Morin and Levenson bore a professional responsibility to verify the medical advice they gave, and it is unlikely that they missed this one. Thus, when they say that “there is nothing harmful about such medicines and no reason to resist them”, they are likely engaging in deliberate deception. Even if they were genuinely unaware, positively stating this as fact without verifying it first was a violation of professional ethics[5].

A Sad Picture

Although sometimes obscured, a simplistic ideological pattern emerges out of The Road to Freedom’s many prescriptions and explanations:
One’s psychological state and sexual desires are central to personal identity. ➜ Having healthy sexual desires makes a person’s identity good; having deviant sexual desires makes a person’s identity bad. ➜ People will naturally accept and express their identity, be it good or bad. ➜ People with deviant desires must be controlled, so as to repress the expression of their bad identity.

Whether Morin and Levenson thought it through in such clear terms or not, this is most likely the rationale behind why they emphasized the need to minimize clients’ deviant arousal, and why they believed they were justified in prescribing such extreme measures to do so. They are not novel in thinking this way, nor is their conclusion of imposed repression irrational, given this ideological pattern. As author and college professor Carl Trueman describes, “The notions that human flourishing is found primarily in an inner sense of well-being, that authenticity is found by being able to act outwardly as one feels inwardly, and that who we are is largely a matter of personal choice not external imposition, are intuitions we all share.” Narrowing in on common perceptions of sexuality, Trueman comments further, “[Freud’s] notion that the prototype of human happiness is sexual satisfaction had the effect of sexualizing that psychological inner space we find in Rousseau and the Romantics. It thereby made human flourishing in its ideal form identical with sexual satisfaction. It also—and most significantly—made sex a matter of identity and not primarily an activity. After Freud, sex is something you are, not merely something you do.”

As I have mentioned before, the idea that sexual desires are a special case of “my desires tell me who and what I am” is distinctly modern. The idea of someone “identifying” as gay has become commonplace over the past 40 years, even though it would have been incomprehensible a mere 100 years ago. Because we see sex as something you are, we expect straight people to have straight sex, and we expect gay people to have gay sex. We do not expect voluntary abstinence and chastity from anyone. We expect this primarily because they are straight or gay, and thus to do anything else would be to act against their own self-essence and nature. Within this framework, the statements “I’m gay” and “I’m going to engage in sexual activities with other men if I have the opportunity” are synonymous. Society has by no means grappled with the logical implications of this for pedophiles. Morin and Levenson ran smack into these implications, as the self-contradictions within their book sharply reveal. It is clear that they see little difference between having deviant arousal and being a sex-offender (page 4). They were merely being philosophically consistent when they directly compared pedophilia to heterosexuality and homosexuality early on. The generally unstated but widely assumed caveat that pedophilia is not a legitimate sexual orientation or identity because children cannot give voluntary informed consent to sexual activities is, within that over-arching framework, unfounded and indefensible. They had already accepted this framework of deterministic sexual identity, yet they still needed to convince clients to reject and repress that identity. A bastardized application of Behaviorism proved to be a convenient means to achieve that repression. Assurances that clients were good people were merely disarming platitudes, implicitly conditional upon clients’ ongoing cooperation.

Ultimately, even their concept of “deviance” functions as little more than an ambiguous and morally loaded scare-word. Throughout the book, they never provide any foundation for this moral condemnation they are smuggling in. Condemnation which the term “not normal” – the only definition they give for deviance – notably does not carry. Recall again that deviance is the sole arbiter they use to distinguish between “natural”, and “learned” or “conditioned” sexual desires. Of course, no honest thinker would accept the claim that anything abnormal must be the product of faulty conditioning, but “deviant” is an easier and intuitive sell. Appeal to moral intuition is undeniably a powerful and common form of persuasion in matters concerning sexual abuse (I openly use it throughout this double-essay), and the idea that sexual deviance could be organic runs afoul of the progressive metaphysical sensibilities Morin and Levenson are clearly influenced by. But even if we grant for the sake of argument that certain sexual desires are both abnormal and only learned through conditioning, that alone is still insufficient to further conclude that such desires are immoral in themselves (as the term “deviant” would suggest), or that they ought to be changed. This considerably weakens the book, as the authors fail to give any coherent moral framework for why deviance – or even outright sexual assault – is wrong. Sure, sexual assault and child abuse are illegal and non-consensual, but so what? Laws can be changed, and we compel children to do things they don’t like all the time. Morin and Levenson have no principled recourse against the uncooperative client who replies, “Actually, I’m pretty happy being a pedophile, and I want to stay this way. It is normal for me.” No recourse, that is, apart from manipulation, shaming, and pain. I rather doubt they had malicious intent behind this deception, and perhaps they outright failed to recognize the underlying flaws in their reasoning. Unconscious biases are a real phenomenon.

However, perhaps they do understand more clearly than it seems. They betray themselves early on in the book, with the following explanation:

“There are men who are sexually attracted to children but who choose never to act on that attraction. Does that seem like a heavy burden, to have attractions but not act on them? Well consider this: everyone finds themselves attracted to someone they shouldn’t have sex with. Every married person sooner or later runs into some other person they find attractive. If they value their marriage, they choose not to have sex with the other person. Is that asking too much of them, not to act on their attraction? Most people don’t feel that way. Most people control their sexual behavior. In the past you have chosen to act on your deviant attractions. You have hurt your victims in a criminal way, far beyond the hurt caused by cheating partners. In the future you will be faced with new choices. How you choose will determine the kind of person you are.” (page 4, emphasis added)

If the authors’ numerous claims about the dangerous and uncontrollable nature of deviant arousal are true, such law-abiding pedophiles should not exist. On the other hand, if the authors believe their own statement about some pedophiles choosing to exercise life-long self-control, then the only meaningful distinction they acknowledge between these men and therapy clients is not deviant arousal itself, but the act of committing a sexual crime. With that, I believe the final puzzle-piece falls into place: Morin and Levenson most likely never expected Minimal Arousal Conditioning to alter clients’ underlying arousal patterns, despite how they intentionally present it. They most likely intended it as punitive and indefinite retribution for men whom they believed deserved it, for giving in to that arousal. A retribution which no appointed judge or jury of peers authorized. A retribution which, were it accurately judged as such rather than as a means of rehabilitation, would likely be found in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, given that sex-offender treatment providers historically and presumably operate under state contract and authority.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself… The person you sexually assaulted will face lifelong consequences for YOUR behavior. Why shouldn’t you?” (page 34).

Even in the unlikely event that Morin and Levenson truly intended MAC to only be curative, they made such a muddle of it that there is scarcely a difference between cure and retribution. C.S. Lewis warned of this trend back in 1953, in his prescient essay The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment. I highly recommend reading it in full, as it is relevant to much more today than merely my personal experience in therapy:

“…A tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busy bodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience… Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image…
Even if the treatment is painful, even if it is lifelong, even if it is fatal, that will only be a regrettable accident; the intention was purely therapeutic. Even in ordinary medicine there were painful operations and fatal operations; so in this. But because they are ‘treatment’, not punishment, they can be criticized only by fellow experts and on technical grounds, never by men as men and on grounds of justice.”

No one, no matter their crimes, deserves to be coerced into sexual acts as a form of punishment, nor can such coercion cure any pathology. It is always and only unjust and harmful. It remains unjust, even if presented as a cure, for the truth of the Moral Order – the tau, as Lewis calls it in The Abolition of Man – will not be suppressed for long. The truth is, there is no separate category or class of person called “A Pedophile” or “A Sex-Offender”, such that what would otherwise be sexual assault becomes healthy and justified simply because it is being done to one.

The Road to Freedom, 3rd edition, was published in the U.S. in 2002, one year before the U.S. Supreme Court’s Lawrence v. Texas ruling in 2003, which would go on to nullify all laws nation-wide prohibiting certain homosexual acts between consenting adults. Thus at the time, in many jurisdictions – including the authors’ own clinical practice in Florida – anal sodomy was a criminal offense. Yet Morin and Levenson never describe being gay as “deviant”, despite it fitting their definition of deviance by being statistically abnormal, as well as the primary motive for illegal sodomy. It is unclear why they treat homosexuality as non-deviant. They never limit their definition of deviance to sexual desires (i.e. pedophilia) that would lead to non-consensual acts if acted on. If their reasoning is that unlike children, adults can give voluntary informed consent to homosexual activities, then it was negligent of the authors to fail to mention this. It would also be an explicit statement that their definition of deviance is metaphysical, rather than empirical, which in turn would mean that their distinction between organic and conditioned arousal patterns is also metaphysical, rather than empirical. In other words, it would have shed light on the fact that, sans empirical evidence to the contrary, the central practice of the book is irrational and fraudulent as a clinical procedure. Additionally, they may have been influenced by the American Psychological Association’s removal of homosexuality from the DSM as a diagnosable psychiatric condition in 1973. If this is the case, then it further implicates Morin and Levenson’s duplicity throughout the book. It would strongly suggest that the APA, not the law or any moral or scientific standard, is their highest authority for what constitutes deviance. If the APA also removed pedophilia as a diagnosis in the same manner, would Morin and Levenson still consider it deviant? Would they still claim that it is only a learned behavior? What would they think of someone attempting to use Minimal Arousal Conditioning to eliminate homosexual arousal? Sex-offender treatment providers have a professional responsibility to think and write clearly enough to avoid such an obvious oversight.

At the very end of their book, the authors recommend three other books[6] on building happy gay relationships, as further reading for gay clients (page 319). This is problematic, as both they and any therapists who used their book had a professional duty within clinical practice to uphold the laws of the jurisdiction they practiced in – especially in regard to sexual crimes[5]. This is true for all sex-offender treatment therapists, regardless of personal views on such topics, in light of the close working relationship they have with the criminal justice system. What Morin and Levenson are doing here is akin to the hypothetical scenario of a therapist aiding and abetting clients who are pursuing sexual relationships with prostitutes, or with minors one year below the legal age of sexual majority. Said therapist would further justify his actions solely by his opinion that prostitution ought to be legal, and that the age of majority ought to be one year younger. After all, the age of legal majority varies from one jurisdiction to another, just as the legality of homosexual relationships varied from state to state within the U.S. in 2002.

Ideas Have Consequences; Bad Ideas Have Victims

Between Morin and Levenson’s circumnavigation of the law and willingness to mislead and manipulate clients into undergoing sexually degrading and potentially harmful pseudo-medical practices, a final ethical problem emerges: The authors themselves undermine the only two moral foundations they rely on for condemning sexual relationships between adults and children: Obeying the law, and respecting voluntary informed consent. If we take what the authors say and do at face value, it implies that some people are exempt from the law simply because they disagree with it, and that certain circumstances and rationales can override the necessity for voluntary informed consent in sexual relationships. They cannot even consistently justify claiming that child sexual abuse is wrong because it can cause harm and pain, or because it is a violation of basic human dignity. MAC caused harm, pain, and shame, yet they insisted that was good and healthy because they deemed it necessary. They even insisted that clients were cheating themselves if they did not accept that MAC was healthy. The obvious comparison here is that arbitrarily redefining “harm” and “health” to facilitate whatever one desires is exactly what child abusers do to rationalize sexual activities with children. Convincing children to also believe this and to cooperate with the abuser is the epitome of abusive sexual grooming. I must regrettably conclude that Morin and Levenson were extremely negligent in assessing the ethical ramifications of their own work.

The way Minimal Arousal Conditioning was practiced at CBI was barbaric. The moral bind The Road to Freedom set up by pitting clients’ desires to minimize their own potential risks against their right to sexual and bodily integrity and psychological stability was an unconscionable violation of professional ethics[5]. Self-harm is bad, not good – even more so when it is coerced. Any well-raised child knows this. But Morin and Levenson apparently could not see the intrinsic dignity of prospective clients, nor had a coherent ethical framework to build on. It is impossible to know how many people they negatively impacted. To some degree, I feel scandalized on behalf of the criminal justice system in my state. This book was sold to them as a valuable and effective way to help sex-offenders, and to minimize their risk of committing future crimes. I also feel sorry for Morin and Levenson. I believe they did sincerely intend to prevent future sexual crimes, and that they did sincerely believe their techniques were going to be effective in that goal. But they started out with several false premises, which led them down a wrong-headed and cruel path. No matter how people rationalize it, cruelty remains unjustifiable and dishonorable.

During the process of writing this article, I reached out to Jill Levenson via email to tell her about my experiences in therapy. I also asked her about the research that went into writing The Road to Freedom 3rd edition, and how she views that book and aversion therapy in retrospect. I was careful to be polite, and to avoid any outright criticism or personal attacks against her. She briefly replied that she was sorry to hear about my negative experience in therapy. She also said that the arousal conditioning exercises were considered conventional at the time, and that they were never mandatory within The Road to Freedom program. However, she did not answer my questions about research. Apart from acknowledging that MAC was removed in the 4th edition, she did not say anything about her opinion of the 3rd edition or of MAC in retrospect.

I also contacted John Morin via a phone call, and as with Levenson, I was careful to be polite in everything I said to him. Like Levenson, he insisted that clients were supposed to use the arousal conditioning exercises only on a voluntary basis, depending on their individual needs and willingness. When I pressed him on the point that arousal conditioning was in fact mandatory at CBI, he continued to insist that it was not intended to be used that way. He did acknowledge that while arousal conditioning was a conventional therapeutic intervention during the 90s, it has since been phased out of practice within the field due to a lack of evidence to support its efficacy. He also mentioned that during the 90s there was great concern within the sex-offender therapist profession, due to several high-profile cases of “unstoppable” serial predators. This concern led to the adoption of new and, as he described it, “desperate” therapeutic interventions. Morin was unable to give me any information on the original research and formulation of Minimal Arousal Conditioning, but he advised me to contact Steve Jensen as a possible source of further information, as Jensen was the original creator of the procedure. I also asked him if there had been additional instructional material for therapists, separate from The Road to Freedom workbook, and he informed me that there had not been. Regrettably, I was not able to find any way to contact Steve Jensen, or any useful information about his professional history. For all I know, he may not even still be alive.

I cannot speak to the truthfulness of Morin’s and Levenson’s stated intentions, or to their accurate recollection of what exactly they wrote over twenty years ago. But in their own book, they are crystal-clear: The very act of committing a sexual crime is indicative of deviant arousal (page 4), and clients with any form of deviant arousal must participate in arousal re-conditioning. It was explicitly mandatory, despite their more recent claims to the contrary. If John Morin or Jill Levenson ever read this and disagree with my conclusions, I invite them to come forward with a more cohesive explanation of the evidence I have presented.

Photocopies of all quoted pages from both editions of The Road to Freedom are available upon email request.

Update: September 26, 2026

A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to talk directly with Jill Levenson over a video call. In the time since this essay was published, she has read it and thought deeply about it. During the call she apologized to me for what she agreed were unethical and factually inaccurate claims within The Road to Freedom, 3rd Edition. She expressed deep regret for that, as well as the harm I experienced as a result of being coerced into utilizing the MAC exercise. As she described it, arousal reconditioning in one form or another was commonly used within sex-offender therapy during the 1990s. She and Morin thus felt obliged to include it as a beneficial tool within their book, even though they did not have much personal experience guiding their clients in its use. Toward the end of the call I was able to express my forgiveness to Jill, and my interest in maintaining an open door of communication with her. I’m thankful for the opportunity to talk with her about all this. Healing is generally an ongoing process, but that conversation was a significant milestone of peace and closure.

I stand by my criticisms of MAC and The Road to Freedom, and I believe the conclusions I came to about the assumed motives of the authors are reasonable, from a straightforward reading. Nevertheless, I also believe it is right and reasonable to take Jill Levenson at her word that she and John Morin genuinely intended the MAC exercise to only be curative, and not retributive. I hope my readers will do the same. It would be naive to assume working the the field of sex-offender therapy, let alone writing a comprehensive workbook for use with individual clients, was an easy or clearly defined undertaking in the late 90s. During our conversation, Jill mentioned that a primary motive for writing The Road to Freedom in the first place was their concern at the lack of available written material of that nature. The entire field of sex-offender therapy has changed and matured dramatically since then, and I can commend Jill for spearheading some of that change.

1.  The Road to Freedom, 3rd Edition
© 2002 John W. Morin, Ph.D and Jill S. Levenson, MSW
Center for Offender Rehabilitation and Education (C.O.R.E.)
Oakbrook Counseling Center, P.A.
5950 West Oakland Park Boulevard, Suite 107
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 33313

2.  The Road to Freedom, 4th Edition
© 2021 Jill S. Levenson, Ph.D and John W. Morin, Ph.D
Oakbrook Counseling Center, P.A.
4804 W. Commercial Blvd.
Tamarac, Florida, 33319

3. I am speaking here from the perspective of Behaviorism; I do not actually believe the experience of pedophilia is amoral. See Trent Matthew’s blog post on the topic.

4.  “Even though SSRIs dominated the antidepressant market in the 1990s, not all expectations about these drugs were fulfilled. Although the adverse effects of the TCAs were worse, the SSRIs still caused side effects; for example, fluoxetine and SSRIs can interfere with sex and appetite, cause vomiting and nausea, irritability, anxiety, insomnia and headaches. To a lesser extent, it can also induce parkinsonism, agitation, spasms and tics.”
–Pereira VS, Hiroaki-Sato VA. A brief history of antidepressant drug development: from tricyclics to beyond ketamine. Acta Neuropsychiatrica. 2018;30(6):307-322. doi:10.1017/neu.2017.39

5.  “Members shall not engage in conduct that demonstrates a lack of good moral character. Conduct reflecting upon a lack of moral character shall include acts or conduct that reflect moral turpitude or acts or conduct which would cause a reasonable person to have substantial doubts about the individual’s honesty, fairness and respect for the rights of others and for the laws of the state and nation. The conduct or acts in question should be rationally connected to the member’s fitness to provide Professional Services or Tasks.”
–ATSA Professional Code of Ethics, Ethical Principles 2(c), © 2001

6.  Becoming Gay: The Journey To Self-Acceptance, by Richard A. Isay
My Guy: A Gay Man’s Guide to a Lasting Relationship, by Martin Kantor, M.D.
The Male Couple’s Guide: Finding a Man, Making a Home, Building a Life, by Eric Marcus