The Body Carries The Creed

By Tony Ortega

What happens when you're taught that the person you were born to be is also the person God cannot accept?

Raised in a devout Cuban Catholic family in Miami, Dr. Tony Ortega learned early on that love, belonging, and even salvation came with conditions. As the only son of immigrant parents, he was expected to uphold the family name and embody its values. But as Tony began to understand that he was gay, the faith meant to guide him became a source of guilt and fear. Desire felt like sin. Silence became survival. And his own body seemed to offer evidence of everything he'd been taught was wrong with him.

For decades, Tony tried to outrun that verdict through achievement, relationships, drugs, alcohol, and carefully constructed versions of himself. Even as he built a career helping others as a psychologist, he struggled privately with addiction, unresolved trauma, and the conviction that his authentic self remained fundamentally unworthy.

The Body Carries the Creed is Tony's deeply personal account of what it cost to grow up believing that his sexuality was a theological problem, and what it took to begin dismantling those beliefs. With candour, psychological insight, and unexpected humour, he traces his journey through Catholic guilt, sexual trauma, coming out, addiction, recovery, grief, and the search for a spirituality he could finally inhabit without denying himself.

For anyone who has struggled to reconcile who they are with what they were taught to believe, Tony's story offers something more honest than easy answers: the possibility of putting down the shame they were never meant to carry.

The Body Carries the Creed isn't a story of returning to the altar or exchanging one doctrine for another. It's the story of a man reclaiming his body, his voice, and his right to define the sacred for himself, and discovering that healing begins when we stop trying to become worthy of love and recognise that we already are.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HLTRH84Q
• ISBN13: 9798997323660
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: Ortega Psychology Pllc
• Length: 148 Pages
• Weight: 0.81 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"