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A Personal Reflection on Negotiating Fear, Compassion and Self-Care in Research

With this paper, I discuss the unexpected, the corporeal and the emotional. I attend not only to the issues of fear and integrity in research of the ex-gay movement in North America, but also to related issues of compassion, self-care and violence. I explore my commitment to communicate empathically with and think compassionately about a group of people who are politically and ideologically quite different from me. In the process of shifting my approach, I began to doubt my ability to write critically about the topics at hand. I faced significant cognitive dissonance as I shared moments of celebration with people who had found relief in the movement. Finally, as I internalized the thousands of pages of ex-gay literature, the dozens of face-to-face interviews and the countless email and instant message exchanges, I began to seriously ponder the violence I had done to myself in the name of research.