Category: Purity Culture, Shame & Religious Trauma
Healing from purity culture, worthiness anxiety, wedding-night shame, and high-demand religious conditioning with Daniel A. Burgess, LMFT.
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You Can’t Just Switch It Off: Purity Culture and the Wedding Night
The message was consistent for twenty years: sexual feelings are dangerous. Guard your thoughts. Don’t touch, don’t linger, don’t want. Then came a wedding day, and the message flipped in an afternoon: now it’s sacred, now it’s expected, now enjoy it. Nobody’s nervous system works that way. Why the switch doesn’t flip Shame conditioning isn’t…
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Purity Culture Trauma: How Religious Sexual Shame Affects LDS Adults
Many LDS adults carry wounds they can’t quite name — a persistent shame about their bodies, deep anxiety around sexual intimacy in marriage, an inability to experience pleasure…
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Is Masturbation a Sin? Mike Frazier Asks the Hard Questions
Listen: Is Masturbation a Sin? Mike Frazier Asks the Hard Questions (Improving Intimacy podcast). Subscribe via RSS Full Transcript: 0:00:00.0 Narrator: Welcome to Improving Intimacy, a podcast to help single and married, Latter-Day Saints strengthen their family connections and marriages. Daniel A. Burgess is the host of Improving Intimacy, Daniel is a Marriage and Family…
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What is Scrupulosity? Author Kari Ferguson Goes Behind The Scenes of “The OCD Mormon.”
Kari Ferguson is the author of “The OCD Mormon” and “For and In Behalf Of” and creator of the blog, “Of Faith and Great Anxiety.” She is a current member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and has served as Primary and Relief Society President. Kari runs the bookstore Oh Hello Again (ohhelloagain.com)…
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Is Masturbation A Sin?
Is Masturbation A Sin? Quick answer: is masturbation a sin for Latter-day Saints? What current Church guidance says: The Church’s current youth guide, For the Strength of Youth: A Guide for Making Choices (2026 edition), does not mention masturbation by name. Its chapter “Your body is sacred” asks youth to “avoid anything that purposely arouses…
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“Don’t Touch” — Summary
Why This Article As an active Latter-day Saint marriage and family therapist, I have worked with many clients who have struggled for many years with pornography and masturbation. At the same time, most of my couples work involves a need to cultivate increasing desire. The current approaches of reading more scriptures, prayer, temple attendance, more…
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“Don’t Touch” — Addressing Sexual Taboos In The LDS Faith Part 7
Previous Chapter: 6. Purity, Modesty, And Moral Ambiguity Solution: Real Self-Mastery Cultivating Sexuality Masturbate. Yes, masturbate. Learn your body. Cultivate and master your God-given desires as early as possible. Rejection, suppression, and ignoring are not tools of self-mastery. We treat sexuality as an exception to the concept of self-mastery. We have convinced ourselves that it’s…
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“Don’t Touch” — Addressing Sexual Taboos In The LDS Faith Part 6
Previous Chapter: 5. A New Culture Is Born: “Doctrine And Addiction” And Returning To The 1700s Purity, Modesty And Moral Ambiguity A quick word on purity and modesty and how it’s negatively feeding into our perception/paradigm and preventing healthy solutions. These are probably two of the most ambiguous terms I hear in the context of…
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“Don’t Touch” — Addressing Sexual Taboos In The LDS Faith Part 5
Previous Chapter: 4. What Went Wrong? A New Culture Is Born: “Doctrine And Addiction” And Returning To The 1700s In my book, I explore in detail the historical development of how we’ve come to culturally believe masturbation is such a serious sin. Even in this brief summary you can see how the leadership appears to…
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“Don’t Touch” — Addressing Sexual Taboos in the LDS Faith Part 4
Previous Chapter: 3. Cultivating Versus Condemning What Went Wrong? The Depression, WWII and Kinsey. The Church leadership noticeably changed their approach to sexuality in the ‘30s and ’40s, which was culturally reinforced in the ‘50s and ’60s. In the 1942 April Conference, which was a time of great upheaval in the world with much uncertainty,…
Where this conversation continues
The blog is what I can say publicly. Inside the Inner Circle there are members-only essays and five private forums where the taboo questions get honest, clinically accurate answers — from $19 a month. Or work through Improving Intimacy: The Course at your own pace, $197 once. Open to anyone, anywhere; you don’t need to live in a state where I’m licensed.
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