The purpose of this study applies positive autoethnography (PosAE) methodology to examine post-traumatic growth (PTG) following conversion therapy and religious disfellowshippment. Through three parallel case studies’ a gay man from a fundamentalist Christian church (Robert), a gay man from a fundamentalist Muslim Mosque (Omar) and a lesbian woman from a Pentecostal church (Sarah). The author explore how survivors navigate profound religious trauma towards growth. The research is explicitly purpose-driven: to make visible the journey from trauma to thriving, to challenge false neutrality in survivor scholarship and to validate experiential knowledge as epistemological resource.
The author use PosAE’s three foundational principles; purpose-driven inquiry, positive reflexivity and experiential focus to structure autoethnographic accounts. The methodology maintains scholarly rigor through accurate synthesis and critical analysis while adding reflexive documentation of the learning journey. The author apply Tedeschi and Calhoun’s (2004) PTG framework across five domains: relating to others, discovering new possibilities, recognising personal strengths, experiencing spiritual/philosophical change and appreciating life. Strategic voice shifting between third-person traditional content and first-person reflexive elements creates research that is both rigorous and revealing. The experiential growth literature review (EGLR) approach frames our engagement with conversion therapy literature, documenting how our lived experiences as survivors shaped interpretation productively.
All three participants demonstrated significant PTG across multiple domains, though the journey spanned decades. Universal patterns emerged: conversion therapy operates through similar mechanisms regardless of religious context, creating profound trauma through social exclusion, identity invalidation and abuse. However, gender-specific manifestations became visible for the lesbian woman face intersecting homophobia and patriarchal control, with unique pressures around femininity, marriage and motherhood. The research reveals that positioned inquiry with methodological rigor generates insights unavailable through assumed objectivity. Recovery required not just accepting sexual orientation but deconstructing entire worldviews, building chosen families and developing new spiritual frameworks. Time emerged as both ally and source of grief decades apart enabled growth but also represented years lost to shame and disconnection.
This research represents retrospective accounts from survivors who achieved significant growth, potentially not representative of all conversion therapy survivors. The three-case design limits generalisability, though it enables depth. Bracketing proved challenging separating current understanding from experience requires ongoing reflexivity. The decades elapsed since initial trauma means some details are reconstructed rather than directly recalled. Future research should examine conversion therapy experiences across broader sexual orientations, gender identities and religious traditions, particularly focusing on those who have not achieved growth, those still within religious communities and those in earlier recovery stages.
Health-care providers working with conversion therapy survivors should: assess for PTSD using appropriate measures; evaluate hopelessness and protective factors; use formulation-driven rather than diagnosis-driven approaches; attend to proximal stressors in language and presentation; recognise gender-specific trauma manifestations; understand that recovery timelines are measured in years or decades; and consider PTG writing exercises as therapeutic interventions. The research validates that survivors can maintain scholarly rigor while integrating experiential knowledge, offering methodology for others navigating this tension.
This research challenges assumptions about objectivity in survivor scholarship, validating experiential expertise as legitimate knowledge production. By documenting growth alongside trauma, the author have narratives that frame sexual minorities solely as victims, while not minimising the profound harm of conversion therapy. The work supports comprehensive conversion therapy bans across all religious contexts and ages, demonstrates the need for long-term support services and legitimises survivors as knowledge producers. PosAE methodology enables research that is both academically rigorous and socially transformative.
This study represents the second application (to the best of the author’s knowledge) of PosAE to conversion therapy research and the first comparative study examining gender differences in conversion therapy experiences across Christian and Muslim contexts. It demonstrates PosAE and EGLR methodologies in practice, showing how survivors can bridge lived experience and scholarly contribution while maintaining rigor. The inclusion of a lesbian woman’s experience addresses a significant gap in conversion therapy literature, which predominantly features gay male perspectives. The research operationalises PTG theory for religious trauma contexts and validates that decades-long recovery journeys can culminate in meaningful growth without minimising suffering.
