Conversion Therapy Actually Helped Me

When I was 16, I started having sex with other guys at school and eventually realized I was gay. I ended up coming out to my extremely religious parents, and they took it horribly. A few months after I told them, they said they had found someone who specialized in conversion therapy and could help me overcome these "thoughts and feelings." At the time I had no idea what conversion therapy was, but I ended up agreeing just so I could attempt to keep some sort of relationship with my parents until I could move out after high school.

I ended up doing conversion therapy with this guy through our church for about six months. At first, everything seemed normal. We would just have regular therapy sessions and he would ask me about my feelings about men, my thoughts about religion or God, and if I had any past trauma that could've been triggering my "homosexual thoughts." But after a month or two of just therapy, it got more intense and invasive. This guy started to give me pornographic magazines and videos and told me to masturbate to them. At first he would have me just take it home and do it, then he started watching it with me in his house and having me masturbate in front of him, to ensure that I was ejaculating to the site of a man and a woman having sex. We also started doing some sort of hypnosis therapy, and I remember having vivid dreams about having sex with women and would wake up with my cum all over me. He also provided me with sex toys to use that he said "felt like vagina" and made me start using that when I would masturbate.

I know typical conversion therapy can be really harmful to some, but I actually found that this method worked for me. After the six months of therapy, he told me to try having sex with a girl from school. Eventually I did, and I ended up really enjoying it. I also continued to masturbate to heterosexual porn daily and to listen to my hypnosis tapes that he had recorded for me. Although this therapy didn't "turn me straight" I was able to stop having obsessive and invasive gay thoughts and now have sex with both men and women, but am currently in a long term relationship with a female. Has anyone else had any experiences similar to mine? I genuinely feel alone sometimes because a lot of conversion reparative therapy get a bad rep and is misconstrued, but what I went through really helped me come to terms with myself and the natural feeling of being with a woman.