Peter Gajdics

Peter Gajdics’ memoir documents his six-year journey through, and eventually out of, a particularly bizarre sort of therapy; the legal battle with his former psychiatrist; his complicated family history; and his attempts to reclaim his self-identity and his own story.

The story is intensely personal and written with an LGBTQ audience in mind, but Gajdics tells it with such honesty and forgiveness that its themes transcend gender and sexuality. The book could also appeal to anyone interested in family conflicts, trauma and recovery, psychology, cults, and even 20th Century European history.… (altro)

The Inheritance of Shame details the six years author Peter Gajdics spent in a bizarre form of conversion therapy that attempted to “cure” him of his homosexuality. Kept with other patients in a cult-like home in British Columbia, Canada, Gajdics was under the authority of a dominating, rogue psychiatrist who controlled his patients, in part, by creating and exploiting a false sense of family. Juxtaposed against his parents’ tormented past — his mother’s incarceration and escape from a communist concentration camp in post-World War II Yugoslavia, and his father’s upbringing as an orphan in war-torn Hungary — Gajdics’ story explores the universal themes of childhood trauma, oppression, and intergenerational pain. Told over a period of decades, the book shows us the damaging repercussions of conversion therapy and reminds us that resilience, compassion, and the courage to speak the truth exist within us all.… (altro)