For religious parents, hearing that their child is questioning their identity can feel like standing at the edge of an impossible choice: hold to your faith or hold on to your kid. Conversion Truth for Families was created specifically to tell those parents that this is a false choice—and the research backs that up completely.
Conversion Truth for Families describes itself as a resource organization for faith-guided parents. It provides honest information about what conversion therapy actually is and does, along with practical alternatives that don’t require parents to set aside their beliefs to protect their children. The organization is unambiguous: conversion therapy is not a faith-aligned path. It’s a harmful one.
The practices in question go by several names. “Reparative therapy,” “change efforts,” and “exploratory psychotherapy” are all terms used to describe programs that try to alter a person’s attractions or sense of self. Conversion Truth for Families is direct about the newer label: exploratory psychotherapy is conversion therapy under a different name, repackaged to mislead families during vulnerable moments.
What the research shows is not ambiguous. A study in JAMA Psychiatry found that conversion therapy recipients were more than twice as likely to have attempted suicide in their lifetime. Those who began these programs before age ten had four times the lifetime risk of a suicide attempt. The Trevor Project found similar results—youth who underwent conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to report attempting suicide and more than 2.5 times as likely to report multiple attempts in the span of a single year.
Parents share these findings not to frighten but to inform. Paulette Trimmer, a Pentecostal mother from Virginia, sent her son Adam to multiple expensive residential programs because she wanted to reconcile his faith with who he was. When Adam came home from the first program, the relationship she had known was gone. The programs had taught participants to blame their parents. He told his father he was “the worst father in the world.” Years passed before any real reconciliation was possible.
Linda Robertson and Joyce Calvo submitted sworn statements to the U.S. Supreme Court describing how conversion therapy took their children’s lives. Church counselors had reassured both that these programs would bring their children back to them. The children are gone.
The Family Acceptance Project at San Francisco State University found that youth whose parents actively tried to change their identity faced more than twice the likelihood of attempting suicide, significantly higher depression rates, and worse long-term outcomes, including lower earnings and greater substance abuse. Dr. Caitlin Ryan, the project’s director, notes that parents who attempt identity change are usually motivated by love—but that the behavior itself, however well-intentioned, undermines a child’s sense of worth.
Conversion Truth for Families offers something different: the Christian Family Companion, a free four-part guide that walks parents through the first 24 hours, the first week, the first month, and the first year after a child discloses. It was built with input from parents who have been there. It provides emotional regulation tools, realistic expectations, and guidance that stays rooted in faith without turning it into a weapon.
Brandon Boulware, a father whose testimony before Missouri legislators reached millions of people, described what happened when he and his wife stopped trying to change their daughter: “The moment we allowed my daughter to be who she is, to grow her hair, to wear the clothes she wanted to wear, she was a different child. And I mean, it was immediate.”
Conversion Truth for Families makes one thing plain: outside programs cannot replace a parent, and they will not bring a child closer to God. Healing, they say, starts at the kitchen table. In prayer. In love that listens.
