Rebekah Dawn Simpson Clark | What does it take to change people’s hearts on LGBTQ topics? How can I persuade a person who believes that gay marriage and/or gender transition are sinful to support those things?

These are questions that are very important to me, as my heart has been vastly changed. One of my greatest missions in life is to help change other’s hearts so as to help my LGBTQ siblings.

It hurts to admit that up until seven years ago, I thought that being gay was about sex, that it was a sexual deviance. I thought it was a “trial,” a condition of mortality that would be taken away in the next life. I also thought that transgender people were just confused. I had never really gotten to know an LGBTQ person and I simply believed what I had been taught.

Today, I not only support my LGBTQ friends, I celebrate them! I believe God made them uniquely them and that He loves them just the way He made them. I wholeheartedly support them in seeking and receiving personal revelation for their own life journeys, including marriage to someone to whom they are attracted and living as their authentic selves. I believe them. I respect them and I love to learn from them! Some of the people I most admire are LGBTQ. So I ponder what changed my heart. The fact that I have had such a massive shift in belief, gives me hope that helping to shift the beliefs of others is in fact possible.

But it’s not easy. As I learned in a video I watched the other day, our brains are built to forcefully expel anything that does not fit our tight narrative. We seek out information that confirms what we already believe and, if information that goes against what we believe, threatens to counteract our mental fortress, we forcefully shut it out or shut it down.

I believe the process that allowed me to change my mind about what it meant to be gay and to ultimately come to support gay marriage and gender transition, all in contrast to my tightly held beliefs, had two essential steps.

• I HAD TO FEEL SAFE

I had to go into a situation believing that no one was trying to change my mind. I had to trust the person presenting information to me. I hate to admit it, but if the first I had heard of Josh Weed was that he was in a same-sex relationship, I wouldn’t have read his blog. Back then I was so entrenched in my worldview that opening up just a little to someone living outside the doctrine of the church would have terrified me and I would have blocked it out.

As humans, when we feel our worldviews threatened, we go into defense mode. In defense mode, we cannot learn anything new. All of our energy is focused on defending our mental foundations. So it was key to me at that time that Josh Weed felt like a safe person. He was living the “righteous” way. I remember having a great respect for him for that. It was a lesser respect than the respect I have for him now, now that I have witnessed his integrity in many different circumstances, but it was a respect that made me trust him enough to read his words. And not just to read them but to open my heart to them. I didn’t have to worry about defending my beliefs. So I was able to learn.

• I HAD TO BECOME EMOTIONALLY INVESTED

This is why so many of the Mormons who have a change of heart on this do so after having a loved one, often their own child, come out. When your child, or someone else you are close to, is walking this path it pulls at your heartstrings. Your heart is invested in listening, truly listening to another’s heart. And only in truly listening and getting to intimately know another’s heart can a person come to understand.

My situation was unique.

I didn’t know Josh Weed in real life. But he is an extremely gifted writer, and, perhaps most importantly, he was extremely vulnerable in his sharing, willing to talk about his incredibly deep feelings, to the point where I felt like I really got to know him, and to love him. I believe this is key. To have such a drastic shift in paradigms, on such an important issue, requires more than logic. It requires feeling.

Getting to “know” Josh, I came to understand that being gay had no more to do with sex than did being straight! My relationship with my husband is so much deeper than sex, and the faithful committed relationships of many of my gay friends are just as deep and just as pure: just as Godly.

I also came to understand that being gay was a big part of who he is, not a trial or a condition of mortality, but an integral part of his soul, of what made him…HIM. Because of both of these deep paradigm shifts, I now support gay marriage wholeheartedly. But I was only able to have those huge shifts because of the two things I listed above.

There are, of course, some people whose hearts may never change, at least in this lifetime. But I believe there are many, many people just like me, who are naive to what it means to be LGBTQ and, given the right circumstances, would likely have a change of heart. If they truly felt safe to not need to defend their beliefs and if they were emotionally invested.

So, I’ve been thinking… Is my experience universal? Those of you who have had a similar paradigm shift, do you feel like your experience was similar to mine? Please share.

AND, if this is a universal experience, how can we help more people to have similar experiences, and thus similar paradigm shifts? Please share your thoughts on that too.